The Modern Railroad

The historic gray Union Station, which still stands at Cleveland, housed what was destined to be the very first systematic effort of the railroad to get in touch and keep in touch with its men. In that building, once new and splendid, but now old and grimy, George Meyers, the depot master, gathered a group of railroaders on a Sunday away back in 1870. The man came again on a second Sunday, still again on a third; after a little while those Sunday afternoon gatherings became habitual, and a new kink in all the intricacy of railroading was established. The meetings were partly religious and partly social, and eventually they led to a distinct innovation in that depot.

This little conference of Meyers was, in 1872, developed into the first organized branch of the railroad Young Men’s Christian Association. General John H. Devereux, the general manager of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway; Reuben F. Smith, of the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad, and Oscar Townsend of the Big Four Railroad were chosen directors of the branch. Henry W. Stage, a train-despatcher on the Lake Shore, was earnestly and intensely enthusiastic in this work; and because of his zeal and enthusiasm, together with that of George Meyers, this branch was successful from the outset.

The Lake Shore Railroad, whose headquarters were in that same Union Depot at Cleveland then was and still is a pet property of the Vanderbilt family, also owners of the great New York Central system. The heads of that family began watching the Cleveland experiment with unusual interest. The reports that came from them were unusual. That scheme of the depot master’s seemed to be making a better grade of railroader in and around Cleveland, and any institution that bettered the type of railroaders interested the Vanderbilts. So the thing that Meyers had founded soon had wealthy patrons and strong friends.

The Vanderbilts kept their shoulders to the wheels of the railroad Y. M. C. A., kept it out of the ruts and from falling. They saw it introduced here and introduced there on their group of railroads; saw it spread to other lines; and finally, Cornelius Vanderbilt himself built a splendid club-house for railroad men at the great terminal of his road in New York City and turned it over to the management of the railroad Y. M. C. A. That house, standing almost in the shade of the Grand Central Station, after a quarter of a century, still ranks as one of the distinctly fine club-homes of a city that is opulent in club-houses. It is still dedicated to simplicity, to democracy, to decency, and to good fellowship.

There is not a railroader coming into the big passenger terminal—from either the New York Central or the New Haven system—who is not welcome to it, day or night. Engineers, firemen, conductors, trainmen all come into its hospitable door after a long hard run to find the clean comfort of good meals, bath, comfortable beds, good fellowship awaiting them. There is the peculiar and the successful field of the railroad Y. M. C. A.; perhaps as much as any, the real reason for its pronounced success.

Few railroaders in train service can leave their homes in the morning, “double their runs,” and be home at night. The hard part of the business is that in most cases a man will have to spend one night, occasionally two nights, out on the run. The difficulties of this are not readily understood without a slight examination. In a large city the railroader finds that it is a shabby sort of a hotel or lodging-house that can come regularly within his scheme of economy. When he strikes the little town, or frequently the big terminal or division freight-yard around which is no town at all, the problem only multiplies. J. M. Burwick, a veteran conductor of the Duluth & Iron Range Railroad, told that problem in his own sincere way last year at a big dinner of railroad men in St. Louis.

“I left home a beautiful morning in ’72,” said Mr. Burwick. “I went down to Lafayette and to my first boarding-house; and up to that time I don’t think any railroad man ever found a boarding-house except it was tied up to a saloon. I was in a place like that. Another place I was running into was where they made a division point in a corn-field. The company built a large building for the benefit of the men, and then they rented it to be run as a hotel. But the man in charge ran it to make money, and the steak he cut with his razor. I know he did, because it was so thin. At other places we had to sleep in a hot yard, in a hot caboose not fit for a man to try and sleep in; and then we had to stay awake on the road that night.”

That was Burwick’s testimony as to the conditions just before the coming of the railroad Y. M. C. A. An engineer from the New York Central, a man who had slept many nights in that comfortable club-house at the Grand Central, went up into Canada a few years ago and took an engine on a division running out of Kenora. The only place that a railroad man could find board and lodging in that town at that time was a boarding-house with the saloon attachment, and he was welcome there for but a limited time, unless he was a reasonably liberal patron of the saloon. The engineer—his name is McCrea—changed that order of things and established a branch of the railroad Y. M. C. A., which in four years gained 300 members and threatened to close the saloons of the place.

This is what New York Central McCrea did for
the men of the Canadian Pacific up at Kenora

A clubhouse built by the Southern Pacific for its men at Roseville, California

The B. & O. boys enjoying the Railroad Y. M. C. A., Chicago Junction

“The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company has organized a brass band for its employees”

Now you get the reason for the welcome that the railroad-owners gave this work of the Y. M. C. A. It was not the religious idea alone—men differ in their views of that sort of thing—but one of the most stringent of all railroad rules is that prohibiting the use of liquor by the men, or their frequenting bar-rooms. The necessity of that rule appears upon the face of it. But the Canadian railroad could do little toward enforcing it in a place like Kenora, before McCrea, of the New York Central, arrived there. The railroad Y. M. C. A., with its comfortable housing facilities, its vigorous stand for better morals and better men, has made that rule one of the easiest in the book to be strictly observed. That is why the railroad-owners and the railroad heads, whose religious views have sometimes been at variance with those of the Y. M. C. A., have given hearty endorsement to its work along their lines. They like the sort of man it finishes.

So the railroad Y. M. C. A. has grown. It now has some 240 branches reaching from Hawaii, in the West, to some important division points in Eastern Maine. None of these have houses that can be compared, of course, with the comfortable home at the Grand Central Station in New York. In fact, some of them are still housed in crude fashion, in an abandoned shed or depot that some railroad has fitted up as a start in the work, over some store or freight-house perhaps; but each year sees these replaced by neat homes, such as those at Harrisburgh, on the Pennsylvania; at Collinwood, O., on the Lake Shore; at Baltimore, on the B. & O.; at the St. Louis Union Station, and the Williamson, W. Va., on the Norfolk and Western Railway. On a single system—the New York Central—there are 38 associations, with 27 buildings built for the purpose and valued at $700,000, and a very active membership of 12,799 railroaders. In the national organization membership there are more than 85,000 men, representing every department of the railroad service. An average of 15,500 meals—and mighty good reasonably priced meals they are, too—is served daily, while more than 50,000 railroaders come to the club-houses each twenty-four hours.

Beyond the necessity for maintaining the moral fibre of the railroader (and it is astonishing how little maintenance such a corps needs) is the decent necessity of taking care of him in case of illness. Railroading, with all the safety devices that have multiplied in its service within the past quarter of a century, is still a hazardous occupation to the men who are out upon the line. The list of cripples, and the death-list of a twelvemonth, are still appalling things—appalling in the aggregate, fearful in any single concrete case, a case where there may be a helpless wife and little children to be brought into the reckoning.

The railroads have begun to shoulder their responsibility in this matter. Legislation has helped in the matter but to-day big carriers are preparing to do even more—to pay premiums and carry some form of casualty insurance on each of their employees, who may be engaged in a hazardous part of the work. That thing is going to do more than any other one thing possibly could do. When a big railroad realizes that its bill for premiums is going to be reduced by the addition of many simple protective devices, those devices are going to be instantly adopted. That is the way of railroads, and of business, although it is not to be charged for a single moment that the American railroads have not done much within the past 25 years toward raising the margin of safety for their employees.

Of course, the railroaders have long since had their insurance, although the regular life companies look upon them with distrust as risks. They have been forced either to pay high premiums in the regular companies or else to organize insurance of their own. Their brotherhoods have carried forth this work with interest and with skill. These brotherhoods, or unions, of the locomotive engineers, the firemen, the conductors, the trainmen, and several other branches of the service, have been mighty agents, too, in the development of the moral fibre of the American railroader. Lack of space prevents a consideration of each in detail. To do them but simple justice, to sing the epic of the mighty Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, for instance (which has only recently finished a great building of its own in Cleveland), would require a volume for itself.

But the railroads have not been negligent in this matter. For instance, a man on the Baltimore & Ohio can pay $1.00 a month out of his pay envelope and have $1,000.00 life insurance. He can likewise pay $3.00 a month, and $3,000.00 will be paid his heirs upon his death. The railroad company stands back of this fund and guarantees the insurance. It makes good from its own treasury any deficit or shortage that might be incurred in its operation.

For twenty years the Pennsylvania has conducted a similar work, under the title of the Voluntary Relief Department. Membership in this is, as the name indicates, purely voluntary, the road’s employees being admitted, after favorable physical examination, up to the age of 45 years and 6 months. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company in this instance also stands as guarantor of the insurance fund.

A close examination of it in some detail may interest. The following table shows the detail—the five classes into which employees may enter:

An employee, however, who is under forty-five years of age, who has been five years in the service and a member of the relief fund for one year, may enter any higher class than that determined by his pay, upon passing satisfactory physical examination.

Payments from the fund vary from forty cents per day for sickness and fifty cents for accident in the service, for members in the first class, to $2.00 per day for sickness and $2.50 for accident with a death benefit of from $250.00 to $2,500.00, according to class of membership and death benefit held.

Since the fund has been in operation, the following payments have been made, to December 31, 1909, inclusive:—

During the same period, the Pennsylvania has contributed to the fund in operating expenses, gratuities, etc., exclusive of interest, the following:

In addition to what the Pennsylvania is doing in the payment of the pensions and contributions for the maintenance of the relief fund, the relief and pension departments have the use of the telegraph and the train service free of charge; and in case of accident in the service to employees, free surgical and hospital attendance is furnished, and, where necessary, artificial limbs or other appliances, without cost to the employee. No figures are available as to the cost of surgical attendance, or the furnishing of artificial limbs, but it is conservatively estimated by the Pennsylvania officers as equalling the amount paid for the operation of the relief department.

The modern railroad does not wait, however, for a man to become injured or to die before assuming any responsibility for his care. There may come a day when the burden of years makes him a little less fit for the strenuous service of railroading. It is Nature’s way of telling man that he has labored well and that he is entitled to a rest. In other days, the railroad recognized this in a rather informal way. It took its veteran employees, retired them into a comfortable ease, and had the paymaster send them checks each month for a part of their old wages. Out of that custom the railroad pension system was born, only with this sharp distinction: In the old way the man was taught to believe his monthly check a favor or gratuity on the part of the railroad; under the pension system he comes to know it, not as an act of charity but as his right, a right earned by long hard years of faithful service.

This idea has begun to be recognized as fundamental by railroad managers. Directors and officers now realize that the pension fund and some of these other features that we have just considered, are causes directly contributing to the efficiency of the railroad. The policy is merely one of good management. Again, let us see the way the Pennsylvania handles this matter, not because the Pennsylvania is alone in this thing, but rather because it is one of the largest and most distinctive of American railroads, and almost a pioneer in this work. Before it began paying pensions to retired employees, the Pennsylvania had already long conducted a relief fund and a savings fund, and had contributed to libraries and railroad branches of the Y. M. C. A.

The pensions are paid entirely by the company. In the year 1909, for instance, $594,000 was paid out to the men who had retired between the ages of 65 and 70. From the time the fund was established until the end of 1909, appropriations for it amounted to more than $4,000,000, now paid to some 2,300 men annually.

Employees may retire for age at 70, or for physical incapacitation between 65 and 69. If they have been in the service as long as 30 years, they are granted an allowance based on one per cent of the monthly wages for each year of service. The percentage is based on the wages received for the ten years preceding retirement.

Thus, if an engineer, or a brakeman, or a fireman, has served the Pennsylvania 30 years, he may retire between 65 and 70 and receive not less than 30 per cent of his monthly wages during the last 10 years of work.

The other railroads using the pension scheme have followed these general outlines for their work. It has become an established feature of railroad operation, and recently a second vice-president was created on the Baltimore & Ohio for the express purpose of handling the company’s relief work. Sometimes the railroad organizes savings-funds for employees, paying from three and one-half to as high as five per cent on their deposits, limiting these to something like a hundred dollars a month, and making every agent on the system a depositary of the fund.

The street railroad systems in the large cities, together with a few of the larger interurban systems, have recently begun to adopt systematic methods of keeping in touch with their employees. The Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, operating a great system in a part of metropolitan New York, and employing more than 15,000 men, was a pioneer in this work. It found that while the railroad Y. M. C. A. was efficient for the club-house work on steam railroads, there were local conditions in Brooklyn that made it best for the company to build and operate its own club-houses.

The first of these was remodelled from an old car-barn. It became a very interesting club, with reading-rooms, baths, a barber-shop, a gymnasium, class-rooms for evening study, and a theatre, seating some 1,200 folk. For the theatre the railroad hires vaudeville actors, and gives its great semi-official family free entertainments—followed by dancing and refreshments. On very especial nights the talent is furnished entirely by the trolley-men and very effective talent it is, too. On all nights the music is furnished by the Brooklyn Rapid Transit band, made up entirely of street-car men and men from the elevated roads of the system. The railroad company has furnished the music, the uniforms, the instruments, and the directors—all that the men have had to furnish is their time and interest, and these they have furnished in such good measure that there is a waiting-list now large enough to equip a second full brass band.

The Brooklyn system has also begun to establish model restaurants in its outlying barns, where clean and good food is furnished to the men at cost. The street railroad is, in some such cases as these, confronted with a steam railroad problem. Many of the big car-barns are in sparsely settled suburbs of the city where the only eating-places have been saloons or their adjuncts. The street railroad can no more afford to have its men in saloons, than its bigger brother. To take from them the one decent excuse for being in such places it is establishing its restaurants, where the men can have cleaner and better food than in the saloons, and without the risk to the railroad.

The Brooklyn road and the other large systems have adopted the relief and pension funds; the idea seems to spread as rapidly among the electric as it did among the steam railroads. Some of them have added odd and efficient “kinks” of their own. For instance, the Boston Elevated Railway makes presents of gold at New Year’s Day, ranging from $20 to $35 each, to each of its men who has a clean record for courtesy to patrons, and Boston gains a reputation through that for the uniform courtesy of her trolley-men. The Boston Elevated has also inaugurated a policy of giving free legal advice to each of its employees who may need it. It has always been a perquisite of high railroad officers to avail themselves of the road’s legal department for their personal needs. Under the Boston plan this perquisite is extended to every man on the road—the young motorman who had foolishly gone to a loan shark, and who is now being harried by him; the old conductor who wishes to convey a house or draw a will. The road’s legal department will advise him sincerely, in his own best interest. It will draw up his legal papers, do anything for him except take his case into court, and even then it will advise an honest and capable attorney for him. As for that motorman who went to the loan shark when he found an immediate need of fifty dollars, the road stands ready to advance him the money upon good cause, and will charge him only a nominal rate of interest until it has gradually repaid itself from his wages. His division superintendent is empowered to hear his story with sympathetic ear, and to arrange for the loan.

Employees’ magazines have been decided factors in both bringing and keeping the railroad in touch with its army of men. The Erie was a pioneer in this work five years ago; the plan has since been adopted with signal success by the Northwestern, the Illinois Central, the Santa Fe, the Pere Marquette, and some other lines. These little magazines, made interesting enough in a general way to catch and hold the attention of their readers, are sent out each month to every man on the system with his pay-check.

They spread railroad interest and railroad enthusiasm among their readers. On one page they tell of styles for the engineer’s wife, and on the next they show an economical use of coal for the engineer; and so they may help to pay their way. They tell of errors and mistakes among the railroad’s employees, without mentioning names, so that men may profit by them and act differently. But they print the names of the railroaders who do the good things, the novel things, the practical things, the economical things, the heroic things, out along the line. And this roll of honor is a long one.

But it is not always in the big things that a railroad keeps in touch with its men, sometimes it is in very small things. Some time ago, a division superintendent on the Erie Railroad decided that for each of his engineers who kept his engine in particularly good order for a given length of time, he would have the number plate on the front of the boiler painted in red. “We will have the Order of the Red Spot,” laughed Superintendent Parsons, of the Susquehanna Division, as he signed a bulletin announcing the thing. Now that was a little thing. The cost of painting that red spot on the breast of some proud locomotive was but nominal; but listen to the result!

A big Erie officer was up the line a few months later, and was loafing in a junction-town on the Susquehanna Division, waiting for a through train. He walked down to the end of the station platform and there stood a passenger locomotive waiting to take a train in the other direction. It belonged to the proud Order of the Red Spot, an order of which this particular officer had not heard; and the engineer was already about it with his long-handled oil-can. The officer did not reveal his identity, but said:

“Waiting to take out a special?”

The engineer did not look up, but said:

“We carry forty-six over the division.”

“I didn’t think that forty-six was due for two hours yet,” said the railroad officer.

“She is not,” answered the engineer, “but I’ve been down here an hour and a half already fussing with this baby to have her in shape. You may notice that she belongs to the Order of the Red Spot.”

Then that particular man came to know about the Red Spots. All the way back to Jersey City he kept looking for Red Spots, and every time he saw one, he saw an engine slick and clean, as if she had just come from the shops. That set him to thinking; and after he was done thinking, Parsons was promoted in service, and the Order of the Red Spot was established for the system. There has been an exalted division made of that order recently. When a man can be assigned to one engine and he brings her into the Red-Spot class and keeps her there, the railroad dedicates that engine to him for the rest of his lifetime upon the system. His name, in gilt letters, goes upon the cab-panel of the engine, whereas in other days you used to see those of statesmen and of railroad-owners; and there it stays until the engine goes to the scrap-heap. The other day the first of these engines, drawing a Waldwick local, pulled into the Jersey City passenger terminal; on its cab was “Harvey Springstead” so large and clear that you could read it across the yard; in the cab-window was Harvey Springstead, prouder for that moment than any earthly prince or potentate.

Sometimes the competitive idea is the best to foster to accomplish results from the men, and to bind them and the road a bit closer together. We have seen how a fortnight of “T. B. M. F.” repairs to a locomotive has been quickened down under contest to 13 hours and 34 minutes. Many of the more successful railroads began some years ago to institute annual contests between their section-bosses. The section-boss who kept his stretch of the right-of-way in cleanest, trimmest shape for a twelvemonth got a black and gold sign at his hand-car house, so big that folk who rode in the fast expresses could read the honor that it conferred upon him. Sometimes he gets more—a trip pass for his wife and himself to some distant point, or even a cash prize. Annually the superintendent of maintenance may run a special train, with a specially devised observation grandstand at its rear or pushed ahead of the engine. On that grandstand sit all the section bosses and other track maintenance experts. They see the other fellow’s sections—and their own; and some time on that trip there is a little dinner and the awarding of the prizes.

Do not even dare to think that these things count for little upon the railroad. They are mighty factors in the maintenance of one of its very greatest factors, the human one.

CHAPTER XXVII

As soon as the electric railroad had begun to reach out into the country from the sharp confines of the towns, the steam railroad men began to take interest. It would have been even better for them if some of them had taken sharper interest at the beginning. But the few men who were long-sighted enough a dozen years ago to see the development possibilities of a form of traction that was comparatively inexpensive to install and to operate have been repaid for their sagacity. These men began a dozen years ago to wonder if electricity could not be brought to the service of the long-established steam railroad.

In most cases the short suburban steam roads outside of large cities, which were as apt to be operated by “dummy engines” as by standard locomotives, were the first to be electrified, and in these cases they usually became extensions of the then novel trolley lines. Folk no longer had to come in upon a poky little “dummy train” of uncertain schedule and decidedly uncertain habits, and then transfer at the edge of the crowded portion of the city to horse-cars. They could go flying from outer country to the heart of the town in half an hour, and upon frequent schedule, and the business of building and booming suburbs was born. After these roads had been developed, other steam lines began to study the situation. A little steam road that had wandered off into the hills of Columbia County from Hudson, N. Y., and had led a precarious existence, extended its rails a few more miles and became the third-rail electric line from Albany to Hudson, and a powerful competitor for passenger traffic of a large trunk-line railroad. The New York, New Haven, & Hartford found the electric third-rail of good service between two adjacent Connecticut cities, Hartford and New Britain; the overhead trolley a good substitute for the locomotive on a small branch that ran a few miles north from Stamford, Conn.

But the problems of electric traction for regular railroads were somewhat complicated, and the big steam roads rather avoided them until they were forced upon their attention. The interurban roads had spread too rapidly in many, many cases, where they were made the opportunities for such precarious financing as once distinguished the history of steam roads—and they had in most of these cases made havoc with thickly settled stretches of branch lines and main lines. In a great many cases the steam roads have had to dig deep into their pockets and buy at good stiff prices the very roads the building of which they might have anticipated with just a little forethought.

The New York Central & Hudson River took such forethought after some of its profitable branches in western New York had been paralleled by high-speed trolleys, and a very few years ago installed the electric third-rail on its West Shore property from Utica to Syracuse, 44 miles. The West Shore is one of the great tragedies in American railroading. Built in the early eighties from Weehawken (opposite New York City) to Buffalo, it had apparently no greater object than to parallel closely the New York Central and to attempt to take away from the older road some of the fine business it had held for many years. After bitter rate-war, the New York Central, with all the resources and the ability of the Vanderbilts behind it, won decisively, and bought its new rival for a song. But a property so closely paralleling its own tracks has been practically useless to it all the way from Albany to Buffalo, save as a relief line for the overflow of through freight.

So the West Shore tracks for high-class high-speed through electric service from Utica to Syracuse was a happy thought. Under steam conditions only two passenger trains were run over that somewhat moribund property in each direction daily, while the two trains of sleeping-cars passing over the tracks at night were of practically no use to the residents of those two cities. Under electric conditions, there is a fast limited service of third-rail cars or trains, leaving each terminal hourly; making but two stops and the run of over 44 miles in an hour and twenty minutes. There is also high-speed local service, and the line has become immensely popular. By laying stretches of third and fourth tracks at various points, the movement of the New York Central’s overflow through freight has not been seriously incommoded. The electric passenger service is not operated by the New York Central, but by the Oneida Railways Company, in which the controlling interests of the steam road have large blocks of stock.

A high-speed electric locomotive on the Pennsylvania bringing a through train out
of the tunnel underneath the Hudson River and into the New York City terminal

High-speed direct-current locomotive built by the Westinghouse Company
for the terminal service of the Pennsylvania Railroad, in New York

Two triple-phase locomotives of the Great Northern Railway helping
a double-header steam train up the grade into the Cascade Tunnel

The outer shell of the New Haven’s freight locomotive
removed, showing the working parts of the machine

Similarly, the Erie Railroad disposed of a decaying branch of its system, running from North Tonawanda to Lockport, to the Buffalo street railroad system, although reserving for itself the freight traffic in and out of Lockport. The Buffalo road installed the overhead trolley system, and now operates an efficient and profitable trolley service upon that branch.

Perhaps it was because the Erie saw the application of these ideas, and decided that it was better to take its own profits from electric passenger service than to rent its branches again to an outside company; and perhaps because it also foresaw the coming electrification of its network of suburban lines around New York, and wished to test electric traction to its own satisfaction; but five years ago it changed the suburban service of its lines from the south up into Rochester from steam to electric.

It is now preparing to continue this work further. The Pennsylvania, while its great new station in New York was still a matter of engineer’s blue prints, began practical experiments with electric traction in the flat southern portion of New Jersey. It owned a section of line ideally situated in every respect for such experiments, its original and rather indirect route from Canada to Atlantic City, which had since been more or less superseded by a shorter “air line” route. The third-rail was installed, and the new line became at once popular for suburban traffic in and out of Philadelphia and for the great press of local traffic between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Of the success of that move on the part of the Pennsylvania there has never been the slightest question. Regular trains have been operated for several years over this route at 60 miles an hour, and not the slightest difficulty has been found in maintaining the schedules.

But nowhere has the substitution of electric locomotive for the steam worked greater comfort for the railroad passenger—to say nothing, of the raising of that somewhat intangible factor of safety—than in long tunnels. The Baltimore & Ohio, which was a pioneer among the steam railroads in the use of electric locomotives, began to use them in 1896 in its great tunnel that pierces the very foundations of the city of Baltimore. That system, once adopted, became permanent. What was at one time a fearful summer experience between Camden Station and Mount Royal Station in that city has become merely a pleasant novelty upon the trip.

What could be done at Baltimore has been done under the Detroit River, twice. The Grand Trunk pierced underneath that stream in 1890, by a single-track tunnel 6,000 feet in length, in which for seventeen years both freight and passenger trains were hauled by special locomotives, fitted for the burning of anthracite coal. Although these engines rendered rather satisfactory service, it was found desirable to substitute electric locomotives for them in order to remove the limitations of haulage capacity in the tunnel; for it is a known fact that electric trains can be operated much more rapidly and also more closely together than steam. The change obviated the danger and inconvenience due to locomotive gases in the tunnel. The electric locomotives first went into service in February, 1908. The tunnel is now clean, well-lighted, and safe to work in; and trains of much greater length than before can be hauled, thus relieving the congestion in the freight-yards on both sides of the river.

Similarly, electric locomotives have become the tractive power in the great new tunnel which the Michigan Central has just completed across the Detroit River at Detroit, and upon the Cascade Tunnel where the Great Northern Railroad pierces one of the great ranges of the Western Divide. The Cascade Tunnel is interesting from the fact that it is entirely built upon a heavy grade of 1.7 per cent for its length of more than three miles. The steam locomotives are cut out from the service, while on the heavy up-grade of the tunnels an electric locomotive, of tremendous pulling power, will carry even the heaviest freights through the bore at an average speed of fifteen miles an hour. These Cascade Tunnel locomotives are the only ones in the country taking alternating current at triple phase and at the tremendous voltage of 6,600 directly from an overhead trolley wire. And that will bring us in a moment to another consideration of this question of the development and the delivery of power.

The most recent of tunnel installations has just been completed in the greatest of all American mountain bores—the Hoosac Tunnel. This famous tube, four and three-quarters miles in length, gave itself very readily to the skill of the electric engineer, with the result that the Boston & Maine system, its present owner, finds the greatest impediment to the operation of its main line from Boston to the west entirely removed.

The earlier installations were all what is known as direct current; that is, the power is brought directly from the dynamos in the power-houses and by means of third-rail or overhead trolley it is delivered to the motors of the locomotives of the cars. But some years ago the larger of the distinctively electric railroads found that for great current demands over a large distributing district, this system was expensive and impracticable; that, for the chief thing, it required copper cables for carrying long-distance current so large as to be of very great cost. So some of these, with the aid of the electrical manufacturers, experimented and developed the alternating current of high voltage and low amperage, which is capable of being carried to distant transforming or sub-stations and there reduced to low voltage and high amperage. This alternating current system, because of its great operating economies, is rapidly becoming the standard for the city railroad systems of metropolitan communities, as well as for the great trunk-line interurban electric roads that are beginning to gridiron the country. The New Haven Railroad, when it first began to electrify its extensive suburban service into New York City, was the first to bring it to the service of a standard steam road, and by a clever adaptation of its locomotives was able to bring a single-phase alternating-current directly to them at the enormously high voltage of 11,000, without the use of transforming stations or direct-current transmission. After some fearfully disappointing experiments at the outset, the New Haven system has finally proved the worth of its alternating-current, and the road is now engaged in erecting its overhead transmission construction all the way from Stamford (the present terminal of the electrical service) to New Haven, 72 miles distant from New York. Within ten years its heavy New York and Boston traffic will probably be entirely handled by electricity, and the run of 232 miles will be made without difficulty in four hours or even less.

At present the steam locomotives of these trains and the other trains that serve almost all of New England are detached from the inbound movement at Stamford, and the remaining 33 miles of the run into the Grand Central Station is made behind a powerful electric locomotive. The process is, of course, reversed on outbound trains. For the 12 miles from Woodlawn into the Grand Central the run is made over the tracks of the Harlem division of the New York Central Railroad which uses direct current at a voltage of 650, and third-rail instead of overhead transmission. The wonderful adaptability of the alternating current is shown, not in the fact that a change must be made from overhead trolley to third-rail alone, for that is merely a slight mechanical problem, but in the fact that a locomotive hauling a heavy train can, without a great slacking of speed, change from receiving an alternating current of 11,000 volts to a direct current of 650 volts. Outbound, it reverses the process.

The necessity of clearing out the smoke-filled Park Avenue Tunnel approach to the Grand Central Station brought both the New York Central, its owner, and the New Haven, its tenant, to electric traction for terminal and suburban service at New York. The New York Central’s system, as has already been stated, is direct-current and it is supplied from two great power-houses in the suburban district. Through trains are hauled in and out of the station by electric locomotives, while suburban trains, which make their round-trip runs entirely within the 25 or 30 miles of electric zone, are run without locomotives, the steel suburban coaches having motors set within their trucks, after the ordinary fashion of electric cars across the land. The change from steam to electricity at the Grand Central Station did more, however, than merely clear the long-approach tunnel of smoke and foul gases, so that nowadays a man can ride on the observation-platform over its entire length. The traffic in that wonderfully busy station has for many years had sharp limitations because of the four tracks in that tunnel, two tracks being used for the train movement in each direction. The limited station-yard capacity at the terminal has necessitated many trains being stored at Mott Haven yards; and the drilling of these empty trains in and out of the station, combined with the normally heavy movement of regular and special trains, has only added to the great congestion. The minimum three-minute headway between trains operated by steam through the tunnel, and its four-tracked viaduct approach, fixed the maximum traffic at 40 trains an hour in each direction. The capacity of the terminal with this limitation of service was taxed to its utmost, and some relief for the constantly increasing traffic was imperative. Now, owing to the improved conditions of electric operation, trains may be run on a two-minute headway, or less—this one measure thus increasing the station capacity by 50 per cent at the least.

The New Haven road has also adopted the practice of running some of its suburban trains without locomotives, but by means of motors underneath each coach—the multiple-unit system, as electrical engineers have come to know it. This is the system, with some slight variations, upon which the elevated and subway lines of New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago are operated; and it is quickly applicable, as we have just seen, to some phases of terminal operation for the standard steam railroads. But the steam locomotive is to hold its own for many years, in many, many phases of railroad operation; electric traction is practical and economical only when there are fairly congested traffic conditions. The coaches that are standard for it, and which it must haul for many miles across the land, must be handled in the electrically equipped terminals by electric locomotives of one type or another. These locomotives are generally equipped with coal-heaters for maintaining the steam in the heating-pipes of the through equipment; and in these days, when the electric lighting of through trains is all but universal, they may supply current for this purpose also.

Electric locomotives have been completely successful where they have been used, both alone and in connection with multiple-unit suburban trains, in the Grand Central Station and the Pennsylvania Station in New York City as the first complete installations. But what has been so successfully done in New York will soon be repeated in other big cities in the land; Boston is already insisting that the network of suburban lines that spreads over her environs be electrified; Philadelphia is preparing for the electrification of the Pennsylvania’s fan-work of lines into Broad Street Station; Baltimore is demanding that what has been done in one great tunnel underneath her foundation hills be repeated in two others. Chicago will see great installations of this service within the next few years.

Nor is the use of electricity upon the standard steam railroad to stop bluntly with these terminal changes and improvements; many and many a decaying branch is yet to be fanned into new life, new strength, new activity, through a skilful transformation of its tractive powers. What has been done at the Detroit River and the Cascade tunnels is to be done elsewhere across the land—through the dozens of points where railroads pierce the mountains and go under the rivers by tunnels. Electric tunnels are yet to bring the Pennsylvania at lower grade at Gallitzin and the Southern Pacific through the high crest of the Sierras. Electric traction for the big steam roads is still in its infancy. Only 1,000 miles out of a total of 220,000 miles of steam railroad in the land are as yet operated by electricity. The other day a big traffic-man sat in his Chicago office and said:

“The first railroad that electrifies for the thousand or less miles between this town and New York is going to get all the rich passenger business. Not a big portion of it, mind you, but every single blessed bit of it!”

Consider for a final moment, in passing, the mono-rail, the gyroscope. If you are a practical railroader you may laugh and say: “A toy.” Perhaps it is a toy to-day. But just remember history and you will recall that the toy of to-day becomes the tool of to-morrow, and then give the mono-rail a moment of sober thought. Less than 2,000 feet of this construction formed a most interesting exhibit at the Jamestown Exposition of 1907. A railroad man who rode on that experimental track said:

“If you had built more than 300 feet of track you could have given a better demonstration of your system.” To this the inventor smilingly replied:

“You have gone over 1,800 feet.”

The investigator had ridden faster than 45 miles an hour and had not realized the speed. You never do in the mono-rail car. It rides more gently over the roughest bit of track than the finest Limited moves over heavy rail and stone ballast, the best track that men can maintain.

An actual railroad of the mono-rail type has been built and is being developed in the suburbs of New York City. It supersedes a railroad of the oldest type—horse-cars—from Bartow to City Island, in the Bronx. Balance is kept for its cars by means of a light overhead metal construction, hardly more conspicuous than that of the overhead trolley-work used in city streets. This overhead work, like the trolley-wire, supplies electric power to the cars; only in emergencies will it come into play to hold the one-legged car erect. On this stretch of line speed and balance tests will be made when passenger traffic is at low-tide. Upon the result of these tests will be drawn the construction plans for a four-track rapid transit railroad from New York to Newark, ten miles. This last plan has already been financed by New York men who have made transportation their chief problem for many years. It may be developed upon the rails of a double-track railroad, more than doubling its capacity, without increasing the width of the right-of-way.

All of these mono-rail roads will become applicable to the gyroscope when that wondrous man-toy becomes a man-tool. And the gyroscope demands no overhead construction of any sort. It simply asks a single rail upon which to find a path and offers no objections either to the steepest of grades or to the sharpest of curves. The first model of gyroscope car showed its ability to navigate easily the full length of a piece of crooked gas-pipe, laid in rough semblance of a track.

For there is a gyroscope car already—in fact, several of them. On May 8, 1907, Louis Brennan, a brilliant Irish inventor, living in England, exhibited the first model of the gyroscope car, and the news was flashed in detail all the way around the world. The little car he then showed was enough to interest the keenest of scientists. It traversed every sort of mono-rail track that could be devised, at varying rates of speed, it stood still at the inventor’s command and retained its balance perfectly. When a man’s hand was pushed against it as if to throw the car off its seemingly slight balance, it pushed back, stanchly held that balance, and Brennan laughingly said that there was something that compared with the velocity of the wind. When he spoiled the even trim of his ship (it did look like a boat as it sped around the lawn upon its narrow, guiding thread) and placed the weights upon one side of the car, that side rose up to receive them. The car still held its balance perfectly, and Brennan said that his act represented forty or fifty persons moving suddenly across a full-sized passenger coach. Finally, he placed his little daughter in the car and sent it out over a deep gully where a single stout steel cable served as a suspension bridge. The inventor’s assistant swung that bridge like a hammock but the car laughed at the old-fashioned domineering laws of gravity, and the little girl waved her hand at her daddy.

Well might she wave her hand at him. His achievement was a real triumph. From a top revolving in a frame at any angle he had evolved the gyroscope car, the one thing required for the successful development of the mono-rail. From that car he has been steadily developing better ones. On the tenth of November, 1909, he built a full-sized car upon which twenty men and boys rode in glee. On that self-same day, by strange coincidence, a German inventor, August Scherl, exhibited in a large hall in Dresden, a mono-rail car, held at perfect equilibrium by a gyroscope which he had quietly built and perfected. The car was 18 feet long and 4 feet wide, and mounted on two trucks. The net weight was 2½ tons, while the gyroscope itself, turning in a vacuum at the fearful rate of 8,000 revolutions a minute, weighed but 5½ per cent of the total weight of the car. It carried eight persons, and when first shown in Berlin it caused a tremendous sensation, 60,000 persons witnessing the trial during a period of five days. Even royalty took its turn at riding in the novel conveyance.

The first question that the average man asks when he sees a gyroscope is:

“Well, this thing may be all right when it is in motion, but how the deuce is it going to support itself when it is standing still?”

But it does support itself. The gyroscope wheels continue to revolve at something close to 8,000 revolutions a minute, and they hold the car, so that the fluctuation in the weight it carries, due to loading or unloading, does not affect it, even in slight degree. The average man remains unconvinced.

“Suppose the electric power that spins the gyroscope goes back on you?” he demands. The inventor tells him that that is easy enough. The gyroscope, revolving in a vacuum, will keep on turning at sufficient speed to balance the car for nearly an hour. Long before that the side-stays, that make the car a three-pronged structure while out of service, can be dropped.

When To-morrow finally comes and the gyroscope car is in its own, provision will be made on all through mono-rail routes against just such an emergency. At various points sidings will be constructed with low walls, just high enough to receive the cars when their gyroscope equilibrium ceases. These will be just as much a part of the equipment of the mono-rail trunk line as wharves are a part of steamship service. It will be a part that will receive less and less attention as folk begin to realize how little dependent the gyroscope car is upon the old laws of gravity.

“We will have billiard cars in our fastest trains,” says Brennan. “A man will be able to play that delicate game on a railroad train all the way from New York to San Francisco, if he chooses.”

Contemplate that, you railroaders and travelled folk of to-day. Those cars will make the cars of to-day seem like pygmies. Each will be 200 feet in length and 30 feet in width. No wonder that people can talk of billiard tables. A train of six of these cars will be longer than the longest of our transcontinental expresses of to-day. They will be fastened together with vestibule connections, and the forward end of the first car will have a sharp beak. The blunt front of an ordinary train begins to be a speed obstacle at more than 50 miles an hour.

Speed? Do you think that 50 miles an hour is speed? Our locomotives do far better than that every day in the United States. A train on a standard railroad and hauled by steam as a motive power has gone faster than the rate of 135 miles an hour. With the mono-rail and the gyroscope, with the countless mountain brooks and rivers harnessed and grinding out electricity, the inventors say calmly that they will begin at 200 miles an hour.

Do you realize what 200 miles an hour means? It means that your grandson or your grandson’s son can leave New York in the morning, do half a dozen errands in Cincinnati, and be back in his home in West Four Hundred and Thirty-eighth Street in time for a late supper. It means that he can lunch in Chicago, span half a dozen mighty States, threading the mountains, through the towns and over the cities, skimming the broad expanses of fat farms, and dine in New York the same night. It means that he can go from one ocean across the continent to the other in twenty-four hours.

But To-morrow is not yet here. Yesterday was just here. In Yesterday men were boasting of their ability to go from New York to Philadelphia by coach in two nights and two days and were asking:

“What next?”

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

EFFICIENCY THROUGH ORGANIZATION

In a local freight-house in an inland manufacturing city of thirty thousand inhabitants between forty and fifty freight-handlers had been employed for a term running from twelve to fifteen years. The freight-house boss was of the old school. When he thought that he needed more help, he made a fearful noise, scared headquarters, and more help was given him. The strong-armed gang reported at seven o’clock in the morning and then held a two-hour conversazione, while the book-keeping force in the dingy office at the end of the freight-shed arranged the way-bills and the bills-of-lading for the day’s work. Before ten o’clock, if all went well, the freight-house gang was generally at work pushing its way through a seeming chaos of less-than-carload freight.

After a time the old freight-agent died and a new one came in his place. The new man was on his job less then three months before he arranged a new schedule in that freight-house—and dropped twenty-five men from its pay-roll. First he summoned the bookkeeping force together, and announced that it would report at five o’clock in the morning, instead of seven; of course, leaving two hours earlier each afternoon. The bookkeeping force demurred. It was not pleasant getting up before daybreak in the winter darkness of a chill northern town, and such a scheme interfered with the social plans of one or two of the bookkeepers. But the new boss only smiled and said, “Try it.”

And after they had tried it, the way-bills and the bills-of-lading were ready at seven o’clock when the handlers reported for work, and the freight-house got to work upon the shriek of the roundhouse whistle. After that, the pay-list was cut—you may be sure that a house-boss who could scheme out such a plan could weed out the shirkers and the idlers among his staff—and, better still, the consignees began to get their freight sooner than ever before in the history of that town.

Eventually—and a wonderfully short “eventually” it really was—the freight-agent climbed the ladder to the superintendent of that division and under his bailiwick came a railroad which had recently become attached to the parent system through the process of benevolent assimilation. The ordinary less-than-carload business was moved out of the freight-house of the smaller road and it was given over entirely to carriage and automobile shipments—the inland city makes a specialty of manufacturing vehicles of every sort. The division superintendent went over to the carriage freight-house and saw that it took a dozen men to man it, although it was not more than a six-car stand. Carriage bodies and automobile bodies crated are both heavy and awkward, and the boss of that house was asking for more help.

The superintendent went straight from that freight-house to a local foundry, sat there for fifteen minutes with its draughtsman and then and there evolved an overhead trolley-arrangement, very much the same as the big packing-houses use for handling heavy carcasses. A requisition for the thing went through a-flying, and now the carriage-house in that city is handled with two trained men. The scheme is fast becoming standard in the newer freight-houses and in St. Louis, the M. K. & T. has just adopted it for its splendid new terminal, whole fleets of platforms hung close to the floor and suspended from an overhead “trolley arrangement” entirely supersede the brigades of hand trucks formerly in use.

That is the point of it. There must be dozens of other cities of thirty thousand population, of sixty thousand, of ninety, of one or two or three, of five hundred thousand, where a little such method would produce similar results. In that first house, a saving of about $350 a week was made, when the young freight-agent brought some system into the dusty place. A dozen such savings or even greater, would be quite a help on the railroad’s balance sheet. At least that is the gospel which Louis Brandeis, of Boston, preached, and which attracted world-wide attention when he made the exact statement that he could save the railroads of the country a million dollars a day in the operation of their lines.

The railroads made a perfectly good legal case before the Interstate Commerce Commission—or let us assume that, at any rate, in the present instance. But one such clarifying statement as that of Brandeis’ produced more effect both upon the land and the Commissioners than all the legal briefs that together were filed in advocacy of the raises in the freight tariffs. At no time did the railroads successfully controvert Brandeis’ sweeping statement, and so they lost their fight.

And yet the railroads are accomplishing some remarkable improvements in their internal affairs—for which they are being given not an iota of credit. And one of the most interesting of these is the promotion of efficiency through organization, or better yet, through reorganization.

Along in the fifties, Herman Haupt, who was afterwards a brigadier-general of the United States army and brevetted major-general, devised the wonderful organization scheme of the Pennsylvania system, which is still in use to-day on that well-managed property. The scheme has been adopted since then by practically all the large railroads in the country. Before General Haupt evolved it, there was no real organization among the great railroads. Like Topsy, they “just growed” from the little individual horse and steam lines from which they were formed and they were even more like Topsy in some other details. But Haupt’s plan brought dignity to a great business that needed dignity—and system. For fifty years it has been accomplishing something more than merely serving its purpose. But railroad terminals and railroad equipment of fifty years ago are long since obsolete, and so within recent years the larger railroads have found their organization schemes not up with the times. The growing complexity of their work, the intricacy of their relations with the various city, state, and national governing boards, the constant tendency to enlarge and to consolidate these, have all proved fearful taxes upon the Haupt plan. Great masses of correspondence have accumulated, the whole business of conducting the railroad has been enmeshed in whole miles of red-tape—and men like Brandeis, of Boston, have been permitted to make their challenges and stand uncorrected.

Go back into the sixties for this last time, and pause for a moment at the fighting of the American Rebellion. Men in the North were beginning to hear that the Confederate army had something different, something better, in its organization than the Union army. It was an intangible something, but it seemed to make for efficiency, and, after all, that was the main thing. So after the war was history, there were far-sighted Northerners who said that it would be well to bring that intangible something into the United States army. At such a time that thing was, however, tacitly impossible, and it was dropped for more than thirty years.

But Von Moltke picked up the idea, and incorporated it in the intensely modern army of modern Germany. It helped to win the great Franco-Prussian War, and when the other nations of Europe began to examine it it had a name; it was beginning to be a tangible something. Military men called it the “staff idea,” and when you asked them to explain it they told you that officers who handled men were known as “line officers,” and those who handled things as “staff officers.” In other words, men could be lifted—as it were, in an aëroplane of scientific organization—away from their commands and their narrow environments, up to a point where they could have perspective, where they could handle men, regiments, small arms, heavy ordnance on a large scale. The staff officers work in things in the abstract, just as the line officers mould men in the concrete.

There then is the rough theory of staff organization which was picked up and adapted to its use by the United States army at about the time of the Spanish-American War. Of its value there can be no doubt; of its efficiency no question.

A young man—Major Charles Hine—who had seen the operation of modern staff in the regular army, decided that it was a good thing for the great railroad systems of the country. Hine knew railroads. In order that he might know them thoroughly, he one day packed his uniforms and his saddle away in his trunk and went quietly out and got a job as brakeman on a freight train. He did not stay on the car roofs very long; he has served in about every conceivable post in railroad divisional organization, and he has had a good chance to study the weaknesses of those very organizations.

“We have got to eliminate government by chief clerks,” said Major Hine at the very beginning. “We are growing too rapidly for the men higher up. We are forced to delegate official authority to clerks and foremen, and then we build up an autocracy around some person of official rank. It is pernicious feudalism, this permitting the chief clerk, and a good many times some other clerks, to sign the name of the officer whom they attempt to represent.”

A railroad is really so spread out that its officers live a double official life; a part of the time they are at their desks, and another part out upon the line. Yet the average railroad officer, be he of high or low degree, flatters himself that by some subtle method of personal superiority, he is enabled to act intelligently in two places at the same time.

Major Hine saw how that worked at the very beginning of a special service with the Southern Pacific Railroad. He was down in the Yaqui River country in Mexico, where heavy construction work was under way. In company with the division engineer, he was riding the line mule-back. The division engineer had several parties under him, each in charge of a resident engineer, and all engaged in laying out and checking the contractor’s work. The headquarters of the division engineer were presided over by a ninety-dollar-a-month chief clerk, who was dealing in the absence of his superior with one hundred and twenty-five dollar resident engineers. The division engineer assured his guest that the telephone permitted close personal contact with headquarters, that every hour questions were referred to him. The vice-president of the company, desiring to change the assembling point for luncheon, sought for two hours from engineering headquarters to locate the division engineer, who was on the grade all the time.

The condition mentioned necessitates the chief clerk’s signing the name of his superior to heads of departments lower down, which heads are receiving lower salaries, and are presumably of wider experience than the chief clerk who essays to be their monitor. This is done in the name of routine business. Unfortunately no two men often agree upon what constitutes routine business. Almost every railroad officer will tell you that “my chief clerk handles only routine business and never assumes too much authority.” When closely questioned, the same officer will reveal in the utmost confidence the fact that the same condition does not obtain with the chief clerk of the officer who is over the informant. Strangely enough, if the complaining witness is promoted to his boss’s job, the same condition still exists, showing that the system is at fault, rather than its individual members. Worst of all, the chief clerk has to break in all the new bosses and thus has only limited promotion himself.