The fireman has a hard job and a steady one

That did not satisfy the man who complained. He was of the sort that are supposed to have a “pull,” and he threatened to use his pull if the ticket-examiner were not discharged. He refused to accept apologies or explanations. He said he was hot. So was the superintendent. He keenly resented anything that approached interference with his discipline, and he refused to discharge his employee. Pressure was exerted, the pull was doing its fine work. The superintendent was—like every other railroad superintendent in this land—a fine diplomat. He took the man from the train gate in the terminal and gave him an equally good job in a city a hundred miles distant from Boston. He flattered himself that he had seen the last of the man with the pull.

Not a bit of it. That brisk soul chanced to pass through the distant town, and gasped at sight of the former ticket-examiner still drawing pay from the railroad. He hastened into the superintendent’s office in Boston and demanded that the subterfuge end—that the man be actually discharged from the road’s employ. The superintendent looked at him coolly, not speaking. The man again threatened his pull. The railroad boss looked at him through slitted eyes. It was a real crisis for him. His diplomatic smile was ready. He pointed with his lean forefinger toward the door.

“The case is closed. Good-morning,” was all he said.

After that he began wondering what road would have him after that pull was exerted. He wondered for a day, for a week, then a month. Then he forgot the occurrence. The pull, like many other sorts of threats, was thin air.

Of a different sort was the problem that confronted a superintendent in Chicago. On a certain suburban train for many years the conductor had remained with an unchanged run. Gossip had come into the super’s office that this conductor was systematically stealing from the company. The boss started a quiet investigation. The conductor with apparently no other income than his $3 a day, had purchased a neat home in the suburbs, had sent his boy to Yale, his girl to Vassar. That was Thrift, with a capital T. The superintendent took the case sharply in hand and summoned the conductor before him. He was one of the older sort, gray-haired, kind-faced.

“Johnson,” said the boss, “you’ve been with the road a long time and never had a vacation. I want you to lay off a month and run over to either coast. I’ll get the transportation for you.”

Johnson protested. He belonged to a generation of railroaders that was not educated to vacations. The superintendent insisted and had his way, as superintendents generally do. Johnson started on his vacation, and a substitute, knowing nothing of the real situation, replaced him. The returns from that daily run doubled, and the superintendent knew that he was right.

Nowadays when a railroad finds that a conductor is stealing, it invokes the majesty of the Interstate Commerce Law and prepares to hurry him off toward a Federal prison. In that day they were content to fire Johnson; that was sufficient disgrace to the old man. The railroad could not begin to get back the money that had been trickling out throughout the long years.

But Johnson showed fight. His was an important train in the Chicago suburban service, and his passengers were important merchants and manufacturers—big shippers. They got together, under Johnson’s supervision, and made the hair on the heads of the traffic men turn gray. Those fellows were Johnson’s friends, and they were not going to see the N—— turn out a faithful employee. Johnson said that he had not stolen, and Johnson was not the sort to lie. It might do the N—— good to send some tonnage over to the M——. The traffic department and the operating locked horns, as ofttimes they do on roads, both big and little. Traffic won. The superintendent lost, Johnson went back to his job, and the road put on a checking system that made its conductors wonder if they had held convict records.That case was an exception. There are not many superintendents who are compelled to back water, mighty few Johnsons among the thousands of conductors across the land.

We are still in that superintendent’s office in Jersey City. The boss’s smile is gone. A big railroader just in from the line, his jeans covered with engine grease, shuffles into the place and stands before the super, hat in hand, like a naughty boy ready to be whipped. The superintendent speaks in a few low sentences to him, makes a notation on an envelope. The big man trembles in front of the little. A bit of a smile comes to the lips of the boss.

“You think of the wife and the kiddies first next time,” he says. “Good-bye and good luck to you. I’m not much for lecturings,” he adds, after the man has gone. A little later he begins to explain. “That big fellow had to be disciplined. There was no two ways about it for either of us. He’s an engine-man, got a good train, too; but he’s been running signals. We’ve caught him twice on test. We can’t stand for that. Suppose we have a nasty smash and the coroner’s jury begins to ask nosey questions? I had to put black on his envelope.”

He goes into further detail. In other days he would have been forced, in order to uphold his discipline, to suspend the engineer for from five days to two weeks—the punishment preceding discharge. There was a possibility—disagreeable to the superintendent—that the engineer’s family might have been crowded for sufficient food for a fortnight. Some of those fellows live pretty close to the proposition all the while. Nowadays the offender is demerited—once again like the schoolboy. That is what the superintendent meant by that reference to the envelope, the road’s record of the man’s service with it.

Sixty demerits—dismissed. That’s the rule of one big road. But the record does not always continue to be negative. Its positive side rests in the fact that for every month a man keeps his envelope clear five demerits are taken from the black side of his envelope. A trainman might have forty-five demerits against him, be on the narrow edge of discharge, and in eleven months, after turning the new leaf, have as clean a sheet as the best man on the division. This is as it should be. The demerit plan—often called the “Brown system”—represents the triumph of modern railroad operation over the old.

The superintendent may have all the advantages of a time-tried disciple and a modern record system; have the prestige and the reputation that come from the operation of 500 miles of railroad, and still have a hard row to hoe. Out in the Middle West there was, until recently, a stretch of what was known as “booze railroad.” It was a division where reputations and records alike counted for naught, where discipline was a mockery. Train-crews went from their runs direct to saloons and, what was a deal worse, began their day’s work within them. The wreck record of that division that went forward to the State Commission was appalling—and half the wrecks were not reported. Yardmasters were busy day after day stowing away damaged equipment far from the curious eyes of passengers—the wrecking crews were hammering for big over-time pay. It was a thoroughly demoralized stretch of railroad.

The distressed president of the system sent East for a superintendent who had a reputation. He thought he had his man. The new broom was a book-of-rules man. He had a quarter of his operating force laid off all the time, to go before him. He was a man fond of words, and he lectured those old fellows as if they had been school children. He might have done quite as well with his division if he had been operating it from Kamchatka. The men began to call their rule-books the “Joe Millers.”

The superintendent got mad and was lost—hopelessly. He began discharging right and left, and the wrath of the gods and of the brotherhoods (the great labor unions of the railroads), was upon him. The road was threatened with a big strike at the very time that it could least afford it. He avoided that strike only by acceding to the demand of the brotherhood chiefs that the superintendent’s head be given to them on a silver platter. After that the “Man Without a Country” was in a more enviable position. There was not a railroad in the country that dared employ him, despite his excellent technical training. He drifted up into Canada, got a job running a state-operated line. He held that job less than a year. He was murdered of a winter’s night in a shadowy railroad yard, shot down by a discharged train hand.

The grim situation on the “booze division” grew much worse. The president of that system gave the matter his keen personal attention; he began scouring the entire width of the land for material, without much success. When he was thoroughly discouraged, a raw-boned trainmaster from a far corner of the demoralized division applied for the job of superintendent; he reckoned he could handle the situation. He had caught the president unawares standing outside of his private car. The president told him that he was superintendent.

“There was something in Matt’s eye that took me,” he confessed afterwards. “You do see something in a man’s eye now and then that beats a whole barrel of references.”

So Matt Jones (that is nothing like his real name), took up the nastiest operating proposition in the country. He did not lecture nor discharge, not he; but the men knew that there was a boss behind the super’s desk. The fellows who began trifling with the new broom were down in his office the next morning. Jones selected the leading spirit; he had the advantage of knowing him.

“Pete,” he said in a quiet way, “you’ve been drinking. It doesn’t go. I’m not going to discharge you,”—he gave grim thought to the fate of his predecessor—“but in thirty days you are going to send in your resignation voluntarily and leave our service.”

The man protested. He had not been drinking; and Matt Jones had better not try that game anyway. The superintendent wished him a pleasant good-morning and bowed him out of the office.

In five days the engineer was back, uncalled. The superintendent saw him, even though he had no more to say than he had not been drinking; that is, he had quit drinking long ago. In ten days he was back again. This time he admitted that he had been drinking up to the day that Matt Jones took office. The superintendent said nothing. He bowed the engineer out again. A month is a short thing at the best. At the end of the twenty-second day, the engineer again found his way to the superintendent’s office. He seemed like a man who had been through a sickness. Big human that he was, he began crying at the sight of the man who was a real boss.

“For God’s sake, Matt, don’t forget the old days up on the branch. I can’t get out from the old road,” he said.

“I gave you thirty days’ chance to get on another road,” was all the satisfaction that he got.

But on the thirtieth day the engineer went to work with a clean envelope and the new superintendent had an ally of no mean strength. The patient grinding won; complete victory was only a question of time; the president five hundred miles away began to notice. You may say what you want, railroad executives are born, not made. This reads like romance, but it is truth. Matt Jones is to-day general manager of that system, and a little while ago a New York paper said he was going to take charge of one of the big transcontinental that needs a firm hand at its reins.This superintendent has his division 400 miles away from New York, a clean stretch of busy railroad, making a link in one of the stoutest of the transcontinental chains, 300 miles of line, making traffic and handling it. The superintendent is a personage in the little inland city where headquarters are located; his opinion is eagerly sought by the local reporters each time a new civic problem is tackled. If he were in the metropolitan district he would be unknown except to a little coterie of railroaders; up here he is the voice of the railroad. He is far more real to the folk of half a dozen populous counties than is the president of the road, a stuffy gentleman who comes up in a private car once in a dozen years to the dinner of the local Chamber of Commerce and tells the townspeople to thank God that they have the main line of the K. & M. running through their “lovely little city.”

You may listen for the clatter of the telegraph key in his house and be entirely disappointed.

“I would have poor system if I had to listen to all the gossip of the wire,” he tells you quietly. “We’ve organization on this stretch of line.” He says this with a bit of pride. “We have men and we have system. My train-masters are in effect assistant superintendents: they are expected to organize beneath them.”

Watch this sort of man. He is the kind that American railroading is hungry for to-day. Of him the big executives are being made each year. He enters his office in the morning and gets a few brief reports of the situation on the line: first weather, then congestion conditions in the big yards. After that he talks over the long-distance ’phone with the G. M., four hundred miles away. He gives a summary of the situation to headquarters, just as the summaries came in to him from his train-masters at junctions and at terminals. He holds the telephone receiver for a minute: the ’phone is rapidly coming into general railroad use since the telegraphers made Congress pass a bill limiting their working hours to eight each day. That bill promises to make trouble yet for the men who were supposed to benefit by it.

The telephone speaks to him a moment. He hangs up the receiver and speaks to his chief clerk.

“W. H. T. is coming up the line this afternoon. Tell the boys not to get rattled,” he says.

That is all. The passage of the President of the United States over his three hundred miles of well-ordered track makes no flutter in this superintendent’s heart. If it were Europe—the troops would be drawn out, all other trains brought to a standstill, pilot engines run in advance of the royal train, in infinite pow-wow over the railroading of nobility. But it is not Europe, it is this blessed United States, partly blessed because it so excessively differs from Europe.

Only the military aides of the President lament upon the informality of his travel. Some time since a great executive was making the familiar loop throughout the West. The superintendent of a division of line the far side of the Missouri was a worrier, and was personally watching the progress. In order to facilitate rear platform oratory the President’s cars were placed at the rear of a train that hardly ranked as express. Between towns the delays grew frequent and a stuffy little aide in uniform protested to the superintendent.

“Look a’ here, sir,” he said stiffly, “why don’t you let these other trains up the line wait?” The division was single-track. “You know this is the President’s train.”

A twinkle came into the super’s eye.

“You’re wrong,” he said, in the positive tones of a real executive. “This is not the President’s special. This is train number 67 of the B—— main line, and she hasn’t many more rights on the time-card than a gravel limited. Now if you were snitching along on our cracker-jack Nippon Limited—there’s some train, sir. They wouldn’t lay her out. She’s double-extra first-class all the way through to the coast.”

The point of that was not lost.

An instance of a different sort occurred some years ago, when Mr. Roosevelt went up into Northern New York to make a speech. The superintendent of the old Black River road was pretty proud of his stretch of line, and invited the then Governor to ride in his neat inspection engine.

“Dee-lighted,” said he of the gleaming teeth, and he climbed up into the big cab. The superintendent wondered what he’d think of that nifty stretch of track just north of Lewville. Col. Roosevelt never thought. As soon as he was settled in the cab he picked a well-thumbed copy of Carlyle’s “French Revolution” out of his pocket and read it every inch of the way from Utica to Watertown. The Republican party had to worry along thereafter without that superintendent’s vote.

All the superintendents cannot become general managers or railroad presidents; there is not room at the top for even a decent proportion of the best of them. The real tragedy on the division comes when a Prince grows old and for the first time realizes that he is never to be King. When such tragedy shows its head it is time for the stove committee—the men who gossip in roundhouse corners and the yardmaster’s office—to talk in whispers.

Buffalo is no mean principality in the railroad world—it is near kingdom in itself—miles and miles and still more miles of congested freight yards, tonnage in breath-taking volume rolling in from the wonderful lakes eight months out of the twelve, a nervous traffic that never ceases. For years there reigned in Buffalo, in calm command of the situation for a great railroad system, a man who was entitled by every virtue of the word to be called superintendent. They called him “the lion” and did not misuse that word either. He was a lion, guardian of a great railroad gate, a stern old lion whose word and whose law were unquestioned.

But time aged the man, and the day came when the clerks in his outer office began to talk in whispers; they were having the audacity to wonder who the new Prince would be. Two men thought that they were capable—one an assistant superintendent in the great yard at East Buffalo, the other holding similar rank over at Rochester. Each of these men was prepared to assume greater honor, to sit in command at the lion’s great desk.

That old fellow sat aloof. His ears were not too deaf to hear the whisperings of his clerks in the outer office, and sometimes when one of them would creep in upon him unawares they would find him sitting alone there, head in hands, holding the fort. The two assistant superintendents gained courage; they went to the picayune business of pulling wires. At other times they locked horns.

They locked horns over one great question. It was not operation that set them at odds, not a vexing practical question of how some congested yard might be lanced so that traffic should flow the more freely, or a main line section be aided to give a greater daily tonnage. Nothing of that sort for the two ambitious assistants.

A new pony inspection engine, with an observation room built forward over the boiler—just the sort that Col. Roosevelt had once used as a reading-room—was to be built for the division, and each assistant thought that he needed that engine for the dignity of his job. Each in turn went before the lion and stated his claims for the possession of the pretty toy. The old man listened with grave dignity. A week later he sent down to the master mechanic at the big Depew shops and had him deliver a brand new hand-car, with his compliments, to each.

The pony-engine went into the roundhouse until the real Prince should come. Then he sat long hours alone at his desk once more.

Finally they brought a man to him, a fine, upstanding man. The lion rose from his comfy old chair and gave greeting to the newcomer.

“I’m glad to see you,” was all he said; but to the general manager, who had come up from New York, his eyes seemed to ask: “You’ve brought the right man here at last?” He turned to the stranger.

“Would you like a pony engine to get over the division?” was his question.

“I’m willing to go to hell, and go in a caboose,” laughed the stranger.

The old superintendent grasped him by the hand.

“Thank God, they’ve sent a real man to be superintendent at Buffalo,” was all he said. That was the only recognition that he gave to one who since has become one of the master railroaders of America, but in that moment the act of succession had been consummated.