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The biggest locomotive in the world: built by the Santa Fe Railroad at its Topeka shops

For the general manager is really king of the entire situation. Just now his reign is threatened from a new quarter, and you find him receiving the opposition with both distrust and anger. This is the fine figure of a fine man. He has come up the ladder, rung by rung—station assistant, telegraph operator, despatcher, train-master, assistant superintendent, superintendent, general superintendent, general manager; he knows railroading, stick and wheel. His own railroad he knows as he might know the fingers of his hand.

When we come into his office, the last of a committee of well-dressed citizens is slipping out of his door; they are citizens from a prosperous town in an adjoining State, and he may tell us of their errand.

“K—— is a good town,” he will say, “and gives us a good and growing traffic. We’ve a lot of nasty grade-crossings there, for the two of our big lines that right-angle into there seem to get over about every street in the place at level. They want us to elevate or depress our tracks through there, and it should be done. This road wants it as much as K—— wants it; for it’s one of the worst bottle-necks on our main line, and Lord only knows how many thousands of dollars it’s cost us in delayed traffic.”

This king of the railroad points to a sheaf of blueprints upon his desk.

“That tells the story,” he says simply, “and the end of the chapter is a bill for nine millions of dollars to get rid of those crossings. According to law, K—— will have to stand about half of the cost of the work, and K——, like most progressive American towns, has been running pretty close to her debt limit. She is staggered at the thought of having to dig out three or four millions of perfectly good dollars, and so her mayor has made the naive suggestion that we advance the money and let them pay back their share in the shape of refunded taxes and annual payments.“We advance that money—and the big boss has to slip over to France and try to sell our securities for mere necessities. The truth of the matter is that we haven’t the money to advance. We’re grubbing to get enough cash to buy locomotives and cars to keep pace with our business, not running a loan business for upstart towns that have run through their capital.”

In comes a second delegation, this one another group of commuters. They have been asking for an additional train in on the Valley branch. The general manager has said that the road cannot afford it, for the train would have to be operated at a loss. He proves his statement.

“But,” urges the spokesman of the party, “you will make traffic by it, and eventually the train will pay.”

“Eventually isn’t to-day,” said the G. M. stanchly, “and it is on to-day that we are being judged. You gentlemen come here and ask me to place a train in service that is a sure loser; and then you will go down to your office, and when the difference between my net and gross comes to you upon your ticket sheets, you will damn me as being a rank incompetent.”

“But this one train?” protests the spokesman.

“Violates that very principle,” replies the general manager. “Not another car that does not pay its way.”

And as that little group files its way out of the big office, uttering sundry threats about going to the commission, the general manager stretches his leg over his big desk. Under the glass top of that desk is a big map, in colors, of his system—miles and miles and miles of first-class railroad.

“They come to me—towns like K—— and tell me of their troubles,” he says, “as if I already did not know of them. I’ve a reconstruction plan for every ten miles of our main-line.” His finger traces upon the map to a great division point. “Take Somerset here, and Somerset yard. That is some yard, as the boys say. We have 110 miles of track in it, enough for a good-sized side-line division, and that yardmaster has to be the equal of a superintendent.

“You would take a good look at that yard, with its roundhouses and its shops, its gravity-humps and its classification sections, and you would think it big enough to handle every freight car that goes between here and Chicago. It isn’t. It isn’t really big enough to handle our decent share of that traffic to-day. We’re trying to pour the business through it to-day, and are succeeding only by the narrowest measure. It’s a weak valve in our biggest artery, and some day it’s going to clog.

“It won’t be five years before Somerset has me throttled again. Five years ago it was as bad. It took us three to four weeks to put a carload of freight through it in winter, and the shippers were howling bloody murder. They got mad enough then to scare our directors and I got separate east-bound and west-bound classifications yards, relief that I’d been fairly down on my knees for, three years at least. I was the goat in that thing. I always am; that’s part of the job of general manager.

“I know just what the steady increase in traffic is going to bring me to, at this point and at that. Here’s where a couple of our biggest feeders from the north come into our main-line; here are a couple of friendly haulers dumping down into us from Canada; here, in the mountains, is where we pick up our stuff from the south and the southwest. Every yard on our system is beginning to stagger under the traffic that shows no let up, and we’ve got to spend millions to keep ourselves from getting throttled. Don’t think I don’t know every bit of that. I can see necessary improvements all the way up our main line; but every one of them takes money, and just now the big boss has to hustle to sell his securities and raise the money. But when we know and can’t improve—that’s railroading.”

A secretary tiptoes in. This railroad king looks up and smiles quite frankly at us.“Committee from the Chamber of Commerce at Zanesburgh,” he announces. “They want a new depot in Zanesburgh, and they’re entitled to a new one, costing at a fair ratio about $40,000. A $40,000-depot would give them every comfort and convenience but they demand that we spend $100,000 because Great Midland has spent $80,000 in an architectural wonder in Stenton; and the old time town rivalry makes Zanesburgh want to go Stenton one better.”

“You’ve got a lot of these delegations?” we venture.

“I lose track of them,” says the general manager. “It’s all a part of the day’s work; it’s railroading.”

We know. Last night, this general manager was at a big freight terminal there in the headquarters city, seeing with his own eyes until midnight the fast freight and the express traffic under handling. The night before he was there, and the night before that he was also there, and three days before that he was out pounding over the line in his car, working eighteen hours a day. That’s railroading, too.

The freight house in this terminal city is one of his biggest problems. His biggest local freight yard is in a narrow valley between high hills; and these, together with fearful realty values, absolutely circumscribe its area. The traffic is growing all the while, and all the local freight for his road—running in strongly competitive territory—comes to this terminal. Three hundred and fifty cars must be despatched every night for different points, and yet a dray coming into the yard must be able to find any one of those cars without an instant’s delay. And still the narrow physical limitations of that yard prevail. There is a big problem for a big man.

And sometimes the big man must stoop to examine carefully into the little things. When McCrea, the present president of the Pennsylvania, was a general manager off on the western end of that system, his car was halted in the middle of the night by a bad wreck on a single-track side-line. He might have remained in his comfortable bed, but that would not have been McCrea. He got up and dressed, went outside and offered his services to the wrecking-boss. The wrecking-boss was competent and he knew it.

“There’s nothing you can do, boss,” he said.

“Do you mean to tell me that there is nothing that I can do—with a road blocked on both sides with wreckage and stalled trains and track to be laid?” said McCrea. “Well, let me tell you that there are ties down there in the ditch that will have to be placed before another train goes over here, and we might as well be beginning.”

And with that General Manager McCrea suited action to word. He went down into the ditch, picked up a heavy tie, put it over his shoulder, and brought it up into position. In an instant he was in the ranks, working to bring order out of chaos. That was the way a big man could do a little thing in a big way.

It takes a really big man for that very sort of thing. And the big man, general manager of several thousand miles of railroad, must understand the smaller men beneath him—any one of whom is apt in some future day to supersede him. Here is a man who has been known as one of the best general managers in the whole land. Soon after he was made operating head of a really big road, a certain train on which he was travelling was much delayed. The new G. M. inquired the exact reason for the trouble. He was not so much concerned for his own convenience as he was curious to know why one of the road’s best through trains should have halted until assistance should come from the nearest roundhouse.

“The fireman lost his rake,” was the somewhat perfunctory report that the G. M.’s secretary returned to him. But if that young man thought that his boss was going to be satisfied with that report, he was mistaken, decidedly.

“Bring the fireman to me,” commanded the chief.That fireman was not of the sort that is easily feazed. He stood stockily and in a low voice gave a very circumstantial explanation of the whole occurrence. It seemed that he had missed the rake that morning when they had started out from the yard roundhouse to take the Limited down over the division. He was just going back for another, when they were called to lend a hand at a small yard wreck. When they were done shoving and bunting there, they had no time to run back to the roundhouse and get a rake. They had barely enough time to get to the passenger station for the engine change. That was a good story, with a deal of explanation, and the fireman thought that the G. M. must be impressed with it.

The G. M. was not in the least impressed. He looked the coal shover up and down, from head to feet, then said:

“How about those seven freights that you passed laid out on sidings? You could have forced any one of those engineers to lend you his rake rather than lay out this train.”

The effect of that slight observation from the G. M.’s car was not lost on a man on the system. The new man made good. From that time forward word went out to the far corners of his road that the “new boss” knew railroading; that he had four eyes in his head and that you had to be pretty careful what sort of a story you put up to him. Calculate, if you can, in dollars and cents the moral effect of such a stand upon the rank and file of the king’s army. The general manager, as we have already said, must know men.

You are back with your first general manager again. He is tired of all these problems, and yet he is now turning to another. This is formally entitled the Situation. It is placed upon his big desk every morning. It is a morning paper, if you please, prepared for a single reader. The general manager is “Old Subscriber,” in good measure; and if the paper lacks both editorials and advertising, it is none the less interesting to its star reader. Its news is as exclusive as its reader, and exclusively the news of his system.

By it he knows first of the traffic that has been handled in twenty-four hours, by cars and by trains. He knows by it the reserve forces of the railroad, in cars and in locomotives, and just where they are located. By the Situation, he can discover the over-massing of equipment upon one division, the shortage upon another. After that he can begin to give orders to his general superintendents and his superintendents of transportation—these last the men who are directly responsible for car movement—toward bringing a better balance between traffic and equipment. The Situation is on his desk at ten o’clock in the morning. By eleven, whole brigades of locomotives may be under way, moving from their stalls in some giant roundhouse out toward another division whose superintendent is fairly shrieking for power.

But the Situation tells more than merely this. It goes into history, and in its own cold-blooded fashion tells what the road is doing by comparison. It gives weather conditions and traffic for the corresponding day, one year, two years, three years, five years before; and the general manager will do well if he avoids giving mere cursory examination of such tables. The Situation not only notes weather conditions, it brings to the eyes of the man whom we have called king in railroad operation the more important train delays and the reasons that have caused them. Every fact or incident that may affect the traffic or the operation of the road is noted in its fine-filled pages. It is in every way a guide and a barometer of the condition of a great property up to the very hour that the general manager comes to his desk.

But the Situation does not tell the entire story. Out in the nearest passenger yard is a big private-car, almost as handsome and as well equipped as that of the president of the road, and that car is in service as many days as it stands idle there upon the siding. This man has 4,000 miles of railroad empire in his domain; there are nearly 70,000 faithful privates for his army. To cover that territory means constant travel. There are side-lines of less importance that sometimes do not see him for six months at a time.

Of less importance, did we say? We had better not let him hear us breathe that, for there are men in his employ who remember the first council of the operating department staff after this G. M. came to the road. They were gathered there for the time-table meeting—a general superintendent, a whole round dozen of division superintendents, serious traffic-minded folk from the passenger department, an auxiliary corps of chief clerks and stenographers. Division by division, the passenger time-table problem was adjusted. This superintendent asked a little more running time, for they were putting in a cluster of new bridges, which made slow orders necessary; another was thereupon forced to shorten his schedule, for the total running time between main-line terminals of a road in hot competitive territory could not be increased a single sixty seconds. Finally, after a vast amount of argument, the main-line divisions were settled, and attention was given to the side-lines. The first of these ran through a section purely rural, but there was not a busier 500 miles of single track in the East.

The general superintendent called attention to it, with a laugh.

“We’ll now tackle the hoejack,” said he.

It was an old joke, and the division heads began to laugh. They stopped laughing the next instant. The new general manager was on his feet and pounding thunderously upon his table top. His face was crimson, as he demanded attention.

“Gentlemen,” said he, scathingly, “the great railroad from which I have had the honor to come has prided itself upon being a standard railroad. Its standard is universal wherever its cars and engines run, and its jurisdiction extends. Some of its lines are the busiest traffic-haulers in the land. The four and even six tracks to each of them are hardly enough for the great volume of high-class freight and passenger traffic that press upon their rails. There are some side-lines, with but two or three trains a day—side-lines that reach the main-line only through other branches. But there are no hoejacks, nor peanut branches, nor jerkwaters upon that system. Hereafter there are to be none upon this. The man who is hauling a train on the most remote corner of this railroad is doing its work quite as much as the biggest trainmaster here at the terminal. I trust you follow me?”

They followed implicitly; and to that general manager has been finally accorded the credit for bringing an operating department, torn by inefficiencies and by jealousies, into one of the first rank among the railroads of the land.

But he admits that he is going out upon side-line; and that particular side-line brings a story to the mind of his chief clerk. When he has us quite aside he tells it to us:

“The next to the last time the boss went up the Upper River Division, they got his goat. We halted at the depot up at West Lyndonbrook, to fill the tanks. The boss thinks that he will get out and stir his feet for a minute on the right-of-way. Up comes a villager. ‘Are you the general manager of this ’ere road?’ he says to the boss. Boss thinks he was some gentle bucolic soul, and he says ‘yes,’ and offers him a real cigar. But the gentle bucolic doesn’t smoke anything cleaner than a pipe, and he just up and says, ‘Well, General, here’s somethin’ fer ye,’ and shoves a paper with a big red seal into the boss’s hand.

“It seems that up in that neck o’ woods they get grade crossings removed as a last resort by going to the county court and the paper that the constable served was one for the boss to come down there in a fortnight for a hearing on an order to put a flagman and gates at our crossing in West Lyndonbrook. The boss was mighty mad, and almost discharged the agent for letting that constable hang around the depot. There isn’t enough traffic over that line to do more than keep the rust off the rails, and we never had an accident in the sixty odd years that crossing has been in use. And at that the boss might have fallen for a flagman. But the way they rubbed it into him riled him. They might have gone at the thing in a decent way—first sent a committee down to the division superintendent to request that flagman.

“He went down on the appointed night to the old Town Hall. Before he got there he started a guessing contest in that smart-aleck burg. The crossing was right ‘in the heart of the community,’ as they put it themselves, and the big citizens’ houses were all within an eighth of a mile of our right-of-way. Three days before the big flight of oratory down at the Town Hall, the boss starts something. They hardly get away from their houses in the morning before there is a bunch of those bright tech-school boys with their rods and sextants and steel tapes measuring lines over the front lawns. And the next thing they were planting bright new stakes in all the flower-beds. There hadn’t been so much excitement in West Lyndonbrook since the last time Theodore Roosevelt talked there, and the townfolk hustled down to the depot. The agent didn’t ease their minds. The boss wasn’t working hand in glove with him.

“When the night came for the big time at the Town Hall, it was a regular ‘standing-room only’ business. The boss kept in the background while the great minds of the township did their best. When it came his turn he clamped across the platform like an avenging angel. He is a big fellow, and that night he looked seven-foot-six, as he stuck his long fingers out over that intelligent body politic and asked what it meant by trying to cow the only first-class railroad that had ever had enough energy to put its rails down in that township. Then he calls up an engineer from our construction department.

“‘Mr. Blinkins,’ he says, in a voice that you could have heard across the public square, ‘this railroad has decided to temporize no longer in this highway crossing situation on its lines. How much will it cost to put a subway under our track at this crossing?’

“The engineer dove into his drawings and said: ‘It’ll be quite a big job, and we’ll have to cut quite a way into some of the front yards to get the foundations for our abutments. My estimate of the cost of the proposed improvement is $160,000.’

“Then it was the boss’s turn again. ‘Under the state law, work on abolishing a grade crossing begins by the railroad expressing its willingness,’ he told them. ‘The cost is divided—half being borne by the railroad, the other half being divided between the township and the State. West Lyndonbrook’s share will reach $40,000.’ Forty thousand dollars—why $40,000 would have built either the new union school or the waterworks that that burg had been hankering for and thought it couldn’t afford. When the boss breathed about that $40,000 it started the old feuds between the waterworks crowd and the school crowd. They forgot all about the crossing and our sin-filled railroad, and got to hammering anew on the old issue. We slinked out while they were still at it—had the car hooked on to the rear of thirty-eight and got started while the oratory was taking a fresh turn.

“The boss? The boss is a diplomat. That’s how he keeps his job.”