The Modern Railroad :: CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XV

THE FELLOWS OUT UPON THE LINE

Men who Run the Trains must have Brain as well as Muscle—Their Training—From Farmer’s Boy to Engineer—The Brakeman’s Dangerous Work—Baggageman and Mail Clerks—Hand-switchmen—The Multifarious Duties of Country Station-agents.

One man in every twelve in the United States is on the pay-roll of a railroad. No wonder that that great organism comes so close to human life throughout the nation, that we seem to touch it at every turn.

This one out of twelve is the great army of industrial America. Composed of nearly 1,500,000 men, it is an army that inspires loyalty and coÖperation within its own ranks, and confidence and admiration from without. To a nation whose creed is work, it stands as the uniformed host stands to a fighting nation like England or France or Germany. The army of industrial America inspires not one whit less affection than those great crops of paid fighters in Europe.

Ninety-six per cent of this army of railroaders are engaged in the business of maintaining and operating the great avenues of transportation, an overwhelming proportion in the last phase of the business. The operating department is, to the average mind, the railroad. Its members are the men with whom the public come oftenest in contact; they are the men who are oftenest called upon to hazard life and limb in the pursuit of their callings. The romance of the railroad—a romance that is told in unending prose and verse—hovers over the men who operate it. The men who labor in the shops and keep engines and cars safe and fit for the most efficient service have no small responsibilities. Moreover, their work, forging and finishing great masses of metal, is not without its own hazards. The men who give their time and talents to the maintenance of the track and the structure of the railroad have equal responsibilities. It is not doubted for an instant that both of these are important functions in the conduct of railroad transportation, and each in turn will have full attention given to it.

In a previous chapter we have considered the men who control the actual operation of the railroad, the safe conduct of its trains up and down the line. How about the privates in the ranks of this industrial army, the men, who by their loyalty and ability form the very foundations of successful operation, who also form the material from which executives are chosen every day?

There are no common laborers in this phase of railroad work. A man with stout muscles and less than the average amount of brains can ofttimes shovel ballast out with the track-gangs; there are many, many opportunities for crude labor in the heavy metal work of the railroad’s shops; there are none within the scientific activity that gives itself to the running of the trains. The humblest of these folk must have a particular talent, a talent so peculiar that it might almost be described as “latent Americanism.” The lowest-priced man in the train-service must understand the entire complicated theories of railroad operation to a T. He may be the man on whom responsibility—the responsibility for the safety of not one but many human lives—may suddenly be thrust. A gate-tender at a highway crossing has not ordinarily a place of gravest responsibility; yet in some least expected hour this humblest employee of the operating department may hold the fate of human life in the balancing of his steady hands.

Americans run the American railroads. For this great service men must possess not only the mental capacity for understanding the technique of operation, but the physical strength to meet the stress of hard labor, and of every sort of weather, and of long hours spent upon moving trains. Moreover, there is a requirement of morals—that a man must fully know and quite as fully accept the responsibility for human life that is placed in his hands. These things combined make that “latent Americanism” of which we have just spoken; and the railroad that digs deep into this mine of “latent Americanism” finds its material, not in the great cities with their vast colonies of foreigners, but on the farms of a broad, broad land. The boy standing in the pasture sees the express train go skimming past him from an unknown great world into another unknown great world, and straightway he has the railroad fever. He drives to the depot with the milk cans, and there he comes in contact with the personnel of that link of steel that stretches across the farm where he was born. It is only a little time after that before he is applying for work as a railroad man.

So it is that the railroad finds fine timber for its service. It picks and chooses. For its choice it has the pick of American timber, the ironwood of our national forests of humanity. It gathers its army of men, inspects them carefully for physical, mental and moral requirements and then it impresses upon them the necessity of good living, the absolute necessity of deference to an established and rigid system of discipline as a requirement in the successful handling of the different transportation business.

Thus we have the railroad men as the best workers of the nation. If you want proof of that, ask any of the great mail-order concerns which class of business they prefer and they will tell you without hesitation that it is the railroad man. Come closer home and ask the merchants of any community the same question. Their answer will be the same. Rigid conditions, out-of-door life, sober habits make desirable citizens out of this class of workers. There are none better anywhere.

In the train service, the ordinary route of promotion is through the freight service to the passenger. Thus, for the farmer’s boy who hankers to sit in the cab of the locomotive that hauls the Limited there is a long hard path. Chances are that at the beginning the road foreman of engines will start him at odd chores, calling crews, wiping engines, and the like, around some one of the big roundhouses. He will work hard, but here he will begin to absorb the romance of the line, the romance that, like fog and engine smoke, lies around the engine house, thick enough to cut. Perhaps after a while they will give him a little authority and make him a hostler. The “hostler” and the “stalls” in the roundhouses are quaint survivals of the most primitive railroad days, when horses were really motive power.

At odd times, night times perhaps, the boy will ride in engine cabs and gradually acquire a knowledge of one of these great machines such as no text-book would ever give him. Then comes his first big opportunity. There is a vacancy among the engine crews; the road foreman of engines gives him a good report, and he begins to have dealing with the train-master. He is made a fireman, and he travels the division end to end, day in and day out.

Now he knows why the railroad requires physical tests as well as tests of eyesight and of hearing. Even after he has taken another step in advance and been promoted to the passenger service (we will assume that ours is a bright, ambitious boy), he will only find that his labors in the engine-cab have been increased. It is no slight task, firing a heavy locomotive over 100 or more miles of grade-climbing, curve-rounding railroad. It is a task that fairly calls for human arms of steel; for some firemen handle some 17 tons of coal in a single run. The appetite of that firebox is seemingly insatiable. There is hardly a moment during the run that it is not clamoring to be fed, and that the fireman is not hard at it there on the rocking floor of the swaying tender, reaching from tender coal to firebox door.

But the day does come, if he sticks hard at it, when he becomes an engineer. He has learned the line well, during his countless trips over it as fireman. He has come to know every signal, every bridge, every station, every curve, every grade, every place for slow, careful running, every place for speeding, as thoroughly as ever river pilot learned his course. There have been many times when he has had to assume temporary charge of the engine. He is a qualified man at least to sit in the right hand of the cab, to have command over reverse lever and over throttle.

His work is of a different sort already. The hard physical labor is a thing of the past, most of the time he sits at his work. But responsibility replaces physical stress, and the farmer boy now realizes which of the two is more wearing. Upon his judgment—instant judgment time and time and time again—the fate of that heavy train depends. After he has been promoted from freight engineer to passenger engineer he has a train filled with humanity, and he knows the difference. By day the inclination of a single blade, by night the friendly welcome or the harsh command of changeable lights must never escape him. One slip, and after that—

The engineer prefers not to think of that. He prefers to think of a safe trip, terminal to terminal, to think of the long line covered, once again in safety, to think of the station at the far end of the division, where a relief engine and engineer will be in waiting to take the train another stage in its long journey across the land, to think of the home and family awaiting him. He is a big passenger man now. When he gets to the end of the run, there will be a crew to take his locomotive away to the roundhouse. He will have a bit of a wash and in a few minutes he will be bound through the station waiting-room, well dressed, smoking a good fifteen-cent cigar, quite as fine a type of American citizen as you might wish to see anywhere. You would hardly recognize in this well-dressed man of affairs, the keen-eyed, sound-bodied man in blue jeans who stood beside his engine, oil-can in hand, at the far end of the division.

The same type holds true through the man in care of the other parts of the trains. Take the brakeman—they call him trainman nowadays in the passenger service. In the old days this was a slouchy, somewhat slovenly dressed individual of a self-acknowledged independence. Time has changed him in thirty years. An increased respect for the service has taken away from him his slouchiness; a feeling that good work and hard work will take him through the ranks, through a service as conductor, perhaps to train-master, to superintendent, goodness knows how much further, has replaced that bumptious independence.

He began as brakeman on a freight. There were two, possibly three, of these men to the train, under command of the conductor, back there in the caboose, and they were supposed to distribute themselves pretty equally over the top of the train. The forward brakeman would work from the cab backward, the rear brakeman from the caboose (he also probably calls it a “hack”), forward, the remaining man when a third was assigned to the train, having the middle. It was thought and confidently predicted that with the universal use of the air-brake to freight equipment the days of clambering over the tops of the cars to man the brakes were over. Brakemen twenty years ago were dreaming of the day when they might sit in a cab or caboose and have the difficult work of slacking or the stopping of a 1,500-ton train accomplished, through the genius of mechanism, by a hand-turn of the engineer upon an air-brake throttle. But what looked so well in theory has not worked quite so well in practice. The railroads have found the wear and tear on the air-brake equipment, particularly with the steep grade lines and heavy equipment, a tremendous expense. For the sake of that and for the sake of still greater safety—following the railroad rule to use each possible safety measure, one upon the other—the brakemen are still compelled to keep to the top of the cars.

“When the train comes to a water station the fireman gets out and fills the tank”

A freight-crew and its “hack”

A view through the span of a modern truss bridge
gives an idea of its strength and solidity

The New York Central is adopting the
new form of “upper quadrant” signal

On a pleasant day this is a task that can give the average brakeman a sort of supreme contempt for the man whose work houses him within four walls. If the road lies through a lovely country, if it pierces mountain ranges, or follows the twisting course of a broad river, he may feel a contempt, too, for the passenger who observes the lovely scenes only through the narrow confines of a car window. To him there is a broad horizon, and he would be a poor sort of man indeed if he did not rise to the inspiration of this environment.

There is quite another side of this in the winter. Let wind and rain and then freezing weather come, and that icy footpath over the top of the snaky train becomes the most dangerous way in all Christendom. It consists of only three narrow planks laid lengthwise of the train, and between the cars there is a two-foot interval to be jumped. Hand-rails of any sort are an impossibility, and the brakeman now and then will receive a sharp slap in the face that is not the slap of wind or of sleet, and he will fall flat upon the car-roof or dodge to the ladders that run up between the cars. That slap was the slap of the “tickler,” that gallows-like affair that stands guard before tunnels and low bridges and gives crude warning to the man working upon the train roofs of a worse slap yet to come.

There are other dangers, not the least of these the possibility of open battle at any time of day or night with one or more “hobos,” tramps, or “yeggmen,” who seem to regard freight trains as complimentary transportation extended to them as a right, and train-crews as their natural enemies. The list of railroad men who have lost their lives because of these thugs is not a short one. It is one of the many records of railroad heroism.

Still the brakeman has a far easier time of it than his prototype of a generation or more back. The air-brake is a big help. When a train breaks in two or three parts on a grade, the pulling out of the air-couplings automatically sets the brakes on every part, and if you do not know what that means ask one of the old-timers. In the old days of the hand-brakes the very worst of all freight accidents came when a section of a freight train without any one aboard to set its brakes, broke loose and came crashing down a hill into some helpless train. Ask the old-timer about the hand-couplings and the terrific record of maimed arms and bodies that they left. The modern automatic couplings have been worth far more than their cost to the railroads.

In the course of time and advancement the brakeman leaves the freight and enters the passenger service. Now he is called a trainman and is attired in a natty uniform. He has to shave, to keep his hands clean, wear gloves perhaps, and be a little more of a Chesterfield. He must announce the stations in fairly intelligible tones, and be prepared to answer pleasantly and accurately the thousand and one foolish questions put to him by passengers.

As a conductor he will probably begin as Collins began, in the freight service. When he comes to the passenger-service there will be still more book-keeping to confront him, and he will have to be a man of good mental attainments to handle all the many, many varieties of local and through tickets, mileage-books, passes, and other forms of transportation contracts that come to him, to detect the good from the bad, to throw out the counterfeits that are constantly being offered to him. He will have to carry quite a money account for cash affairs, and he knows that mistakes will have to be paid out of his own pocket.

All this is only a phase of his business. He is responsible for the care and safe conduct of his train, equally responsible in this last respect with the engineer. He also receives and signs for the train orders, and he is required to keep in mind every detail of the train’s progress over the line. He will have his own assortment of questions to answer at every stage of the journey, and he will be expected to maintain the discipline of the railroad upon its trains. That may mean in one instance the ejectment of a passenger who refuses to pay his fare, and still he must not involve the road in any big damage suit; or in another, the subjugation of some gang of drunken loafers. The real wonder of it is that so many conductors come as near as they do to the Chesterfieldian standards.

In the forward part of the train are still other members of its crew, some of them possibly who are not paid by the railroad, but who are indirectly of its service. Among these last may be classed the mail clerks, who are distinctly employees of the Federal Government, and the messengers of the various express companies. If the road is small and the train unimportant, these workers may be grouped with the baggagemen in the baggage-car. If the train is still less important the baggageman may assume part of the functions of mail clerk and express messenger. If so, he is apt to have his own hands full. The mere manual exercise of stacking a 60-foot baggage-car from floor to ceiling with heavy trunks (and the commercial travellers and theatrical folk do carry heavy trunks) is no slight matter. But that is not all. The trunk put off at the wrong place or the trunk that is not put off at all is apt to make the railroad an enemy for life and the baggageman is another one of the many in the service who are permitted to make no mistakes.

When he has United States mail-sacks and a stack of express packages to handle, his troubles only multiply. His book-keeping increases prodigiously, and his temper undergoes a sharper strain. Give him all these, then a couple of fighting Boston terriers, which must, because of one of the many minor regulations of railroad passenger traffic, ride in the baggage-car—a cold and draughty car—and you will no longer wonder why the baggageman has a streak of ill-temper at times. His office is certainly no sinecure, neither is he in the direct path of advancement like his co-workers, the fireman and the brakeman.

These train-workers who are so little seen by the travelling public—baggagemen, mail clerks and express messengers alike, ride in the most hazardous part of the equipment, the extreme forward cars of the train. Read the list of train accidents, involving loss of life, and in nine cases out of ten you will find that these have headed the list of killed or injured. There work is hard, their hours long, their pay modest. They form a silent brigade of the industrial army that is always close to the firing line.

There remains in the operating service a great branch of the army that does not scurry up and down the line. Some of these men are at lonely outposts, forlorn towers hidden at the edge of the forest or set out upon the plain, where a desolate man guards a cluster of switch levers and hardly knows of the outer world, save through the clicking of his telegraph key or the rush of the trains passing below his perch. He knows each of these. If his is a junction tower or a point where two busy lines of track intersect or cross one another, it is his duty to set the proper switches and their governing signals.

It seems a simple enough thing, and it is. But even the simple things in railroading must be executed with extreme care. If the towerman set those switches and signals 319 times in the course of a day, they must be set absolutely correct 319 times. There can be no slurring in this work.

Those men in the towers have their own records of bravery. They are the sentinels of the railroad, and faithful sentinels they are. The lonely tower, like so many other scenes of railroad activity, gives long opportunity for thought and meditation; and so it is not so strange, after all, that one of them has recently given the country a most distinguished essayist upon national railroad conditions.

There are even humbler positions in the operating service, each of them demanding a fine loyalty and a fair measure of ability. Even the young boy who draws a baggage-truck knows that the path of advancement starts at his very feet; and the humble track-walker feels that a good part of the railroad safety and the railroad responsibility rests upon his broad shoulders. His is also a forlorn task, as he trudges back and forth over a section of line, hammer and wrench in hand, looking for the broken rail or other defect, slight in itself, but capable of infinite harm.

By day his task is dreary and arduous enough. By night it is far more so. With his lantern in hand he must patrol the line faithfully, even if the wind howl about him and the snow come to block his progress. The passengers in the fast express trains that whirl past him and who see, if they see anything at all without, only a blotch of a tiny spark of light, do not know that it is a part of their protection. There is a deal of “behind the scenes” in railroad operation.

And so it goes. There are hundreds of hand-switchmen who make the safe path for the train and upon each of them hangs responsibility. It is a trite saying that each of them knows that, and that each lives up to the full measure of his responsibility.

The station-agent, even in the smallest towns, has a less lonely time. He comes in contact with the outside world, and ofttimes his life goes quite to the other extreme. A local train may be due within three minutes, and here comes Aunt Mary Clark, delayed until the train is already whistling the station stop. Aunt Mary is deaf and it takes her some time to buy her ticket and to ask endless questions which must bring an endless string of answers. At that very moment the agent’s telegraph sounder begins to call him. A message, upon which the safety of the operation of that train depends, is being poured into his ear, and he cannot afford to miss a single click of that instrument; the responsibility will be his if anything goes wrong in its delivery. On top of all this some commercial traveller may be clamoring for the checking of his trunk. The representative of the railroad in the small town has to keep his wits about him in such times.

Of course, if the town is of considerable size he may have a staff about him. In such a case, he may have a baggage-room with baggageman and baggage-handlers installed; he may have assistants to mind the telegraph instrument and to sell tickets, other assistants to look after the freight. He may even attain to the dignity of a station master in uniform or else have such a dignitary reporting to him.

But in the majority of railroad stations throughout the United States the station-agent is the staff; he is lucky if he has a man to “spell” him in his “off” hours. He probably is the agent of the express company in addition, and probably the agent of the telegraph company, too, which, by arrangement with the railroad, transacts a general commercial business over its wires. There are frequent instances when the local post-office is situated within the depot and the agent proves the versatility of his profession by acting as postmaster, too. He serves many masters, as you can see, and not all of these are outside of the railroad. He is not only answerable to the superintendent, in almost every case he is freight-agent, too, making out the bills of lading and figuring the complicated rate sheet. For this part of his work he is under the control of the general freight-agent. The general passenger-agent is also his superior officer. To him he must account accurately for his ticket sales, and that is not always a very easy matter. The question of passenger rates is a fairly complicated one.Still, the agent must not only be able to figure the rate to South Paris, Me., or to Oshkosh, Wis., within two minutes, but he must make out a long and correct ticket within that time, while the railroad’s patron demands information about some branch line connection on another system a thousand miles away. The country station-agent earns every cent of his humble salary. He works long hours; and then occasionally one of the railroad’s travelling representatives will drop in upon him and casually suggest that in his leisure time he might get out and solicit a little business for the company!

There is not much loafing at the little yellow depot in the country. Sometimes a group of trainmen from some freight awaiting orders will gather there to swap stories and the keen wit of the railroad. These are the exceptions. The most times are the times of long, hard grind, work, work, work like the men out upon the trains. This railroad army is truly the army of hard work. It was gathered for labor.

Yet the station-agent leaning over his telegraph instrument in the bay of his office, and watching the Limited scurry by the little depot, and seeing the president’s big and gay private car hitched on behind, knows that that very executive in charge of many miles of railroad and thousands of men, came from another little country depot like this. The time may yet come when he himself will have a private car and a deal of authority. There is a great goal for every man in the railroad service.

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