The Railroad Problem :: CHAPTER III

CHAPTER III

ORGANIZED LABOR—THE ENGINEER

So much then for the physical condition of the railroad as it exists today—the condition that constantly is being reflected in its inability to handle the supertides of traffic that, in this memorable winter that ushers in 1917, are coming to its sidings and to the doors of its freight houses. Consider now the condition of its great human factor—its relations with its employees. I am sure that you will find this, in many ways, in quite as deplorable a condition as the track and physical equipment. It is a condition that steadily has grown worse, instead of better—and this despite a constant improvement in the quality of the individual men in railroad service.

There is not an honest-speaking railroad executive all the way across the land who cannot tell you that he would a dozen times rather deal with the average individual railroader of today than with the average individual railroader of, let us say, a quarter of a century ago. With the railroader’s boss—his grand chief and any of the smaller chiefs—well, here is a far different matter. But there has been a steady improvement in the quality of railroaders—of every sort and degree.

If you have traveled upon our steel pathways for twenty years or more you must have noticed that yourself. The transition of the rough-looking, rough-speaking, rough-thinking brakeman into the courteous trainman comes first to my mind. And if the old-time conductor with lantern on his arm has disappeared, there has appeared a diplomat in his stead, a gentleman with whom we are soon to become a little better acquainted. We still have railroad wrecks, some of them admittedly the fault of the engineer. But apparently we have ceased to have railroad wrecks due to the fact that there was a drunken man in the engine cab. The last serious wreck where this accusation was made was near Corning, New York, on the night of the Fourth of July, 1912. More than forty persons lost their lives in a rear-end collision and the railroad which paid the damages, both in money and in reputation, did its very best to follow up a suspicion in its mind that the engineer of the second train was drunk when he climbed into its engine cab. It was never able to prove that charge. And one of the best things that you may say about that extraordinarily well-organized union—the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers—has been its unceasing efforts to drive out drinking among its members. Its record along these lines is of unspotted cleanliness.

Do you happen to know of Rule G, that stringent regulation in the standard rule books of the operating departments of the railroads of America, which is written not alone against the use of liquor by employees when on or off duty but also against their frequenting the places where liquor is sold? Time was when the abuse of Rule G sometimes was winked at, upon certain roads. That time has passed. Today it is perhaps the most stringently observed of all the manifold commandments in American railroading. And the influence of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers has done much toward consummating that very end.

A little while ago an engineer running on one of the soft-coal roads of West Virginia suspected one of his fellows in the engine cab of drinking. It disturbed him more than a little. Finally he went to the man.

“Jim,” said he, in the course of their heart-to-heart talk, “you’ve simply got to cut out the stuff or—”

“If I don’t, what?”

“If you don’t I’m a-goin’ to take it up at the lodge. You know the Brotherhood’s against that sort of thing.”

Jim laid his hand upon the other’s arm.

“Don’t do that,” he protested. “I’d a whole sight rather you’d report me, if you feel that you’ve got to report me, to the superintendent.”

There was no doubt in that engineer’s mind as to the stand of the biggest of the brotherhoods on Rule G. Nor is that stand based entirely on sentiment. The men who stand at the head of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers never lose sight of the responsibility that rests upon the man in the engine cab. It is one of the strongest arguments which they may use in their appeals for increased wages. It is an argument which meets with ready and popular approval in the minds of the public which rides back and forth upon the railroad trains of America. And no stronger support can be offered by the strongest of their organizations than an adherence to Rule G that is practical as well as theoretical.

Responsibility in the engine cab! Who is going to deny that the engineer has a superb responsibility—from the moment when he arrives at the roundhouse and signs for and receives his engine to the moment when he “checks out” at the terminal at the far end of his run? To the better appreciate the fullness of such responsibility, one would do well to climb into the cab of one of our fast trains and watch the man there at his task. So, if you would know something of the man in the engine cab, come and ride a little way with him. It is not easily arranged. The railroaders have grown very strict in the enforcement of the rule which forbids strangers in the engine cabs. It is one of the ways in which they have been tightening their safety precautions. Yet in this one instance it can be arranged. You sign tremendously portentous legal “releases,” whose verbiage, freely translated, gives you the distinct impression that you are going to your sure doom. But you are not. You are going to ride with Jimmie Freeman, crack passenger engineer of one of the best and the biggest of our eastern railroads. You are going to have a close look at the man in the engine cab.

Forty minutes before the leaving time of Freeman’s train her big K-I engine backs into the terminal from the roundhouse and is quietly fastened to the long string of heavy cars. The engineer went over the big, clean, lusterless mechanism before it left the inspection-pit at the roundhouse. It is part of his routine; part of his pride as well. And even though it cuts him out of a Sunday dinner with his folks in the little house at the edge of the town, he prefers that it be so. In his simple, direct way he tells you that he has the same satisfaction in speeding a locomotive on which, by personal inspection, he knows that every bolt and nut is in the proper position, that a crack chauffeur has in speeding a good car up the boulevard knowing that it, too, is in condition—engine, driver, axles, all the hundred and one friction parts that must work truly, even at high speed and under the great heat that high speed generates in a bearing.

For remember that Freeman’s limited is a crack train—its name a household word at least halfway across the land. He came to it five years ago—a prize for an engine-runner who had judgment, who had kept a good “on time” record for eight years with a less important passenger train; a man who knew the complications of a locomotive as you and I know the fingers of our two hands. It was not a “seniority” appointment. The “seniority” jobs come to the very oldest of the passenger engineers who, because of the very length of their service, are permitted to pick and choose the runs that would suit them best. These rarely are the very fast runs. They are more apt to be some modest local train making its way up a branch line and back, where there is little congestion of traffic and a throttle-man’s nerves are not kept on edge every blessed moment that he is on the job.

THE ENGINEER

Oiling is too important a matter to be deputed, so he attends to it himself.

Jimmie Freeman did not pick his job. It picked him. It picked him because he had nerve, a steady head, good physique, a knowledge of the locomotive and of all of its whims and vagaries. And if his is one of the hardest jobs on the big road for which he works, he is perhaps only one of a half-thousand passenger engineers it might pick from its ranks and find fully able to measure to it.

An air signal over the engineer’s head rasps twice; a starting signal. He pulls out the throttle ever and ever so little a way—a distance to be measured in inches and fractions of inches—and the limited is in motion.

“We’re sixty seconds late in getting off,” says Freeman as he replaces his watch and settles down for the forty-mile pull up to B——, the first stop and scheduled to be reached in forty-three minutes. That means, with “slow orders” through station yards, as well as one or two sharp curves and a steep grade midway, that Jimmie will have no time to loaf on the straight-aways—he calls them “tangents.”

“Green on the high,” says the fireman, as the big K-I ducks her head under a signal bridge and her pilot trucks find their way to the long crossover that brings her from the platform track in the tangle of the terminal yard over to a “lead-track,” which in turn gives to the “main,” stretching out over the sunshiny open country to distant B——.

“Yellow on the low,” calls the fireman again as the engine slips under still another signal bridge and finds her way to the long, unbroken sweep of the beginning of the “main.” Freeman repeats the signals. For his part he is supposed to read them all the way to P——, where his run ends and the limited goes, bag and baggage, upon the rails of a connecting road. He is supposed to read, the fireman to repeat. As a practical thing it is sometimes out of the question. The cab of the big passenger puller is far from a quiet place. There is the dull pound of the drivers over the smooth rails, the roar of the great fire between them, the deafening racket of the forced draft that pours into it. The cab does not lend itself to conversation. But if Freeman does not repeat the signal indications audibly he does it mentally. It is part of his job. And the mere repeating of the signal does not assure safety.

Once, a number of years ago and upon another railroad, I rode in the cab of a fast passenger train. The road ran straight for many miles and across a level country. Each mile of its path was marked by a clock signal, gleaming against the night. The engineer shouted each of those signals, and his fireman echoed them back.

“White,” he would call—for white was then the safety color, not the green that has been almost universally adopted now.

“White it is,” would come the reply. And in another mile:

“White,” and “White she is.”

And once my heart all but leaped into my mouth. The block showed red—red, the changeless signal for danger. But our engineer did not close his throttle or reach for the handle of his air brake.“Red,” he chanted in his emotionless fashion; but the fireman altering his echo to “Red she is,” looked up for a moment into his chief’s face. The chief never moved a muscle. Sixty seconds later he shouted again.

“White.”

“White she is,” repeated the fireman, and grinned as he thrust another shovelful of coal into the fire box.

After the run was over and we sat at the comfortable eating counter of the Railroad Y.M.C.A., I asked the engineer why he had run by that red signal. He hesitated a moment.

“Man alive,” said he, “do you suppose I can afford to bring my train to a full stop every time one of those pesky blocks gives me the bloody eye? I could get the next two blocks and saw they were safe. I know every inch of the line, and knew that there was not an interlocking”—meaning switches and crossing tracks—“within ten miles of us. The block was out of order and I knew it. And I was right.”

“Suppose there was a broken rail in that block,” I suggested, “wouldn’t that break the current and automatically send the signal to danger?”

The engineer did not answer that quickly. He knew the point was well taken. Finally, pressed, he said that his was a “penalty train,” which meant that it carried the mail and excess-fare passengers and that it would cost his railroad dollars and cents if it were more than thirty minutes late at its final terminal. To have stopped this train flat at the red signal, when he felt morally certain and could practically see that the line was clear and open, would have cost fifteen minutes or more. If the practice was repeated and even his detention sheets showed that the time lost was due to stopping at a signal that was out of order, he would not be censured. Oh, no! But sooner or later there would be a new man on that run—a man who had the reputation of bringing his train in on time over his division. That was what the engineer told me that night as we munched our crullers and sipped our coffee.

Freeman tells another story. Freeman says that he never ran past a red signal in his life and that he could not have held his run on the limited for five long years if he had not been in the habit of bringing her in “in her time.” Freeman speaks a good word for the signals. You take note of it. Then you remember that in one of the innumerable cases that came up before the Interstate Commerce Commission down in Washington, the engineer of the Congressional Limited testified that in the five-hour run from the national capital up to the outskirts of New York he had to read and understand and observe exactly 550 signals. It was one of the things that he said made his job difficult.

Yet when this run today is over and we are standing with Freeman by the side of the turntable in the big and smoky roundhouse, as his big long-boned black baby is edging gently into her bunk for a few hours of well-earned rest, he will tell you frankly that he has a genuine affection for the 162 signals that stand to beckon him on or to halt him in his run of 135 miles up the main line.“I just let myself think of another fairly fast run I had once—up on a side line, single-track at that, where there wasn’t but two interlockings the whole distance or a single block protection from one end to the other.” Then he adds, “I’d hate without the signals to pull Twenty-four at a sixty-mile-an-hour clip. To my mind they’re like watchmen, with flags or lanterns every mile up the main line. Only a watchman couldn’t see a mile and know of a break in the rail, the way that electric block knows it. Talk about a thing being human. That toy’s better than human. It has a test record of less than one per cent of failures, and in that small failure record, ninety-eight per cent of the actual failures turned the signal automatically to danger.”

On Freeman’s road they do not penalize a man for failing to make his time, by finding some other excuse and then quietly removing him from his run. On the contrary, there are maximum speed limits for every mile of the main line and its branches—ways by which the road knows that the maximums are not being exceeded. And Freeman likes to quote the big boss of one of the big roads—Daniel Willard, come from an engine cab to be president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Once, when discussing this very question, Willard said:

“If there is a rule on our railroad that delays an engineman and tends to prevent his making his schedule time we want to know it—at once. If we believe the rule is wrong we will remove it. If not, and it delays the trains, we will lengthen their running time.”In fact, the steady tendency of all American roads during the past ten years has been toward lengthening schedules rather than shortening them. The two whirlwind trains between New York and Chicago now take twenty hours for the trip, instead of eighteen, as was the case when they were first installed. The famous run of the Jarrett and Palmer special in 1876, from Jersey City to Oakland on San Francisco Bay, in four days flat, still stands almost as a transcontinental record, while the fastest running time ever accredited to a locomotive—112½ miles an hour by a New York Central locomotive with four cars, for a short distance between Rochester and Buffalo—was accomplished more than twenty years ago.

The railroads are playing fairer with their Jimmie Freemans. The men who sit on the right-hand side of the engine cabs appreciate that. They know the responsibility that sits unseen, but not unnoticed, at the side of the man who guides the locomotive.

“We’ve passed the sixty mark,” shouts Freeman’s fireman into your ear. Above the din of the engine you catch his words as the faintest of whispers. And you look ahead at the curving track. Curving? Forever curving, and each time it swerves and the path that we are eating up at the rate of eighty-eight feet to the second is lost behind the brow of a hill or through a clump of trees, your heart rises to your mouth and you wonder if all is well just over there beyond. And then you remember that the friendly raised arm of the block semaphore has said “yes.”The engineer’s figure is immobile but his mind is alert. His touch upon the throttle is as light as that of a child. His face, half hidden behind his great goggles, is expressionless. Yet behind those same protecting glasses the windows of his soul are open—and watching, watching, forever watching the curving track. Sometimes the track curves away from his side of the cab, and then the fireman climbs up on his seat behind and picks up the lookout. But he does not pick up Freeman’s responsibility.

Freeman has a high regard for signals. He never permits them to become monotonous.

“If ever I get that way, I’ll know it myself,” says he, “and it will be high time for me to get out.”

After all, his service on this extra-fast train may not exceed ten years. A man whose nerve was not iron and his physique steel could not last one-third of that time. According to the insurance figures of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, to which Freeman and most of his fellows belong, eleven years and seven days is the average length of service for an engineer upon an American railroad. The railroad managers figure it a little differently and place the average at something over twelve years. And out in the West, where the railroads span the mountains and thread the canyons, the man in the engine cab will rarely last more than six years.

Of course the situation varies on different railroads. Before me lies the report of the Boston and Albany Railroad—impressive because of the length of the service of the engineers of that staunch property. It is the habit of that railroad to give annual passes to the employees who have been in its service more than fifteen years. More than half of its engineers receive such passes. And early in the present year it retired from active service Engineer James W. Chamberlain, who had been in its employ more than fifty-three years. And for a dozen years past Chamberlain had been piloting two of the road’s fastest trains between Boston and Springfield. You cannot always rely upon averages.

We are within five miles of B——, where our ride in the engine cab ends. Around us is the typical vicinage of a growing American town already almost great—gas tanks, factories, truck gardens, encroaching upon these the neat pattern of new streets upon which small houses are rearing their heads—close round about us the railroad yards, vast in their ramifications and peopled with a seemingly infinite number of red and blue and yellow freight cars. There is a trail of them close beside Freeman’s arm. The trail culminates in a caboose which shows flags and we know that it is a freight that has just come scampering down the line into the yard—a bare five or six minutes leeway to get out of our way—out of the way of the trains whose delays mean personal reports and excuses to the “old man,” a practical, hard-headed railroader who has a fine contempt for excuses of every sort.

“You writer fellows like to talk about the heroes of the engine cab,” says the fireman; “the boy who is pulling that greasy old Baldwin comes nearer being a hero than Jimmie or any of the rest of the passenger bunch.”

There is nothing cryptic in his meaning. He means that the freight engineer, pulling a less carefully maintained piece of motive power, to which had been added not only its full working capacity of cars, but as many extra as an energetic and hard-pressed trainmaster may add, up to the risk point of an engine-failure and consequent complete breakdown out upon the main line, must keep out of the way of the gleaming green and gold and brass contraption that has the right of way from the very moment that she starts out from the terminal. Yet it is the freight-puller and his train that are earning the money that must be used to pay the deficit on the limited that whirls by him so contemptuously. For that proud and showy thing of green and gold and brass has never been a money-earner—and never will be. Everyone with the road says that of her. They call her a parasite and say things about Solomon in all his glory when they look at the gay flowers in her dining cars and the rampant luxury in her lounging cars—but how they do love her! It is the parasite of which they brag, and not the dull and dusty freight.

It is forty minutes since we first pulled out of the terminal and our journey with Freeman began. And now, a few blocks away and around a sharp curve to the left, is the big and sprawling passenger station at B——, with the twilight shadows gathering beneath the roof of its expansive train shed. And Freeman has already put on the air brakes, the big engine is feeling its way cautiously through the maze of tracks and switches while once again you hear the fireman call the signals. Three minutes later the train is halted—beside the long platform under that great and smoky shed, folk are getting on and off the cars—there is all the gay confusion that marks the arrival and the departure of an important train. But there is no confusion about Freeman. With his long-nosed oil can in hand he is around the front of “his baby,” making sure that she is attuned for her next long leap up the line. Freeman takes no chances. Instead, he takes each and every opportunity for renewed inspections of his locomotive.

Responsibility in the engine cab!

One cannot deny that it exists there. One finds it hard to confound the hard fact that the engineer is worthy of a good wage—how good a wage is the only point to be determined. For responsibility must be well paid—whether it is responsibility at the dispatcher’s desk, in the lonely signal tower, in the track-foreman’s shanty, in any of the many, many forms of railroad operation where the human factor in safety can never be eliminated—where danger ever lurks, just around the corner and within easy reach of the outstretched hand. The engineer has his full share of responsibility. But he has no monopoly of it.

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