ORGANIZED LABOR—THE CONDUCTOR

Here is another of the well-organized and protected forms of the railroad’s labor—the conductor. He will tell you that a goodly measure of responsibility rests upon his own broad shoulders. Yet your veteran railroad executive does not regard his conductor so much as a responsibility man as a diplomat. This last, after all, is his chief rÔle.

You gather your brow. You do not understand.

“I thought,” you begin slowly, for you have made some sort of a study of this big game of railroading, “I thought that the traveling freight and passenger agents, all that solicitous company which travels through the highways and byways of the land, the big towns and the small, seeking out traffic, for the railroad, were regarded as its diplomats.”

You are partly right—partly wrong.

For the real diplomat of the railroad is multiplied in its service, far more than the freight or the passenger agents. The humblest and the rarest of passengers do not fail to see him. The man who rides on the railroad train for the first time in his life comes into almost instant touch with him. You yourself have seen him many times making his way down the aisle of the car; stopping patiently beside each of his passengers—we use the phrase “his passengers” advisedly—greeting old friends with cheery nods; upholding the dignity of the railroad and his own authority—quietly, but none the less surely—time and time again. Here, as we shall come in a moment to understand, is a real diplomat of the railroad—an autocrat of no small authority in those rare instances where he may fail to be a gentleman. And all this stands to the infinite credit of more than 60,000 conductors in the railroad service across the land.

We have just called him an autocrat. Remember, however, that for the safe movement of his train up and down the railroad’s busy lines he shares, in an important degree, the responsibility with the man with whom we have just ridden in the engine cab; but the engineer cannot very well make or lose business for his railroad unless he stops his train too sharply and too many times. The conductor—well, we are going to see him in his rÔle of peacemaker plenipotentiary to the public. It, of itself, is a rÔle where he can be and is of infinite value to the railroad.

Do you chance to recall the conductor of yesteryear—conceding no more than his blue cap to the growing use of uniforms in a republican country; somewhat unkempt perhaps as to clothes—yet benevolent and fatherly in his way? Did that sickly-looking woman at the end of the coach fumble and then attempt a feeble and impotent smile when he asked her for her ticket? And did he, with a sublime myopia, pass her by without demanding that bit of pasteboard? Your old-time conductor knew the difference between impostors—even in skirts—and empty-pocketed folks to whom a railroad journey might be a tragic necessity. A few years up and down the line, the constant study of the folk within his cars quickly taught him that. And it would have been a pretty poor sort of old-fashioned railroad that would not have allowed him discretion in such cases.

Your new-time railroad allows him little or no discretion in matters of this sort. Your conductor of today, finally quite at ease in the trimness of his well-set uniform, his arm-lantern gone into the scrap heap in these days of electric-lighted cars, on most railroads has practically no opportunity to use his judgment in matters that pertain to the fares. If he lets anyone ride free on his train—and the boss learns of it—he hears dire threats about the Interstate Commerce Commission, sees the yawning doors of the penitentiary close at hand.

Railroad managements have a way of using that law for the punishment of dishonest employees. So your conductor of today lacks the power of his brethren of an earlier day. They worked in a generation when the railroad still was a personal thing. Men and families owned railroads as they might own farms or banks or grocery stores. They headed their own roads and they assumed an attitude toward their men, autocratic or benevolent as the case might be, but almost always distinctly personal. The railroad as a separate unit had not then grown beyond a point where that was possible and the big boss was a real factor in the lives of his men. They might come to have a real affection for him—such as they had for Lucius Tuttle, when he was president of the Boston and Maine—and call him by his first name. No higher compliment can come up from the ranks to a railroad executive.

Today discretion is discrimination in far too many cases. So reads the Interstate Commerce Law about discrimination. It places discrimination in the same class with burglary and the shippers who had dealings with many of our railroads a quarter of a century ago are thanking all the political gods of the United States of America that this law was placed upon the statute-books; but it can be read too literally, just as the conductor of a modern train can be too sharp-sighted. Here is a case, which from too fine or technical a reading of the law might be read into discrimination; in reality it was an instance of real discretion on the part of the conductor.

A man—a nervous, tired man—was bound east through the state of New York upon the Lake Shore Limited. His destination was Kingston, which is situate upon the west bank of the Hudson River, almost half way between New York and Albany. The route of the Lake Shore Limited is down the east shore of the river, without a stop between Albany and New York. Anyone who knows the Hudson Valley well knows how atrocious are the facilities for crossing the river at almost any point between those two cities. This tired, nervous man planned to catch the last train of the afternoon down the West Shore Railroad from Albany to Kingston. Under normal conditions he had about thirty minutes’ leeway in which to make the change; but on this occasion the Lake Shore Limited was a little more than thirty minutes late and he did not alight at Albany—he had no wish to hang around there until some time in the early morning. He decided that he would go through to New York, cross the city from the Grand Central Station to Weehawken and then go through to Kingston on a night train. This meant 180 extra miles of travel; but the man was in a very great hurry and with him time counted more than miles.

As his train swept across the bridge and out of Albany the conductor came through. He was a round, genial-faced fellow, typical of that other generation of train captains that one often finds upon the older railroads of the land; and the man from Kingston halted him—told his story very much as we have told it here.

“I didn’t know but that, if you were going to stop for water at Poughkeepsie, I might slip off some way,” he finally ventured. “That would leave me less than twenty miles from home.”

The conductor did not hesitate.

“We don’t stop at Poughkeepsie—for water or anything else,” he said. “But I’ll stop at Rhinecliff for you.”

Rhinecliff is on the east bank of the Hudson, directly opposite Kingston. That seemed too good to be true—and the man stammered out his thanks.

“I didn’t think you’d stop this crack train for anybody,” he said quite frankly. “The time card doesn’t—”“This train stops for the proper accommodation of the patrons of this road,” interrupted the conductor, “and I’m its high judge. You lost out on your connection at Albany through no fault of yours. It was our fault and we are doing our best to make it up to you.”

Consider the value of such a man to the organization which employs him. That little act was worth more to the big railroad whose uniform he bore than a ton of advertising tracts or a month’s service of its corps of soliciting agents. The Kingston man crossed the river from Rhinecliff in a motor boat and thanked the road and its conductor for the service it had rendered him. He was a large shipper and his factory in the western part of the state is in a hotly competitive territory; but the road that through the good sense of its employee had saved him much valuable time today hardly knows a competitor in his shipping room.

Discrimination? Your attorney, skilled in the fine workings of the Interstate Commerce Law, may tell you “Yes,” but we are inclined to think he is wrong, for the man was not permitted to alight at Rhinecliff because he was anything more than a patron of the road. He had no political or newspaper affiliations to parade before the conductor; he did not hint at his strength as a shipper, he did not even give his name. If there is discrimination in that, I fail to see it.

A certain man took a trip from New York to Chicago three or four years ago. He went on a famous road, well conducted, and he returned on its equally famous competitor. Each road had just conquered a mighty river by boring an electrically operated tunnel underneath it. The tunnel had been well advertised and the man, whose mind had a mechanical turn, was anxious to see both of them. In each case the train bore a wide-vestibuled day coach as its last car.

In the first tunnel through which he passed he went to the rear of the day coach with the intention of taking a look at the under-river bore. He wanted to stand at the rear of the aisle and look through the door at the electrically lighted tube. But the conductor anticipated him. He drew down the sash curtain of the car door.

“Sorry,” he said, “but the company’s rules prohibit passengers from standing in the aisles.”

One might write a whole chapter on the thoroughly asinine rules that some roads have made for the guidance not only of their employees but of their patrons as well. But this man did not argue. He bowed dutifully to the strong arm of the rule book and went back to his seat—thoroughly cowed. But how different was the case on the other railroad, by which he returned from Chicago! This second time he went to the rear of the train, recalling his first experience and the rebuff he had received. But this road and its conductor were of a different sort. This second conductor was fastening the outside doors of the vestibule at the rear of the last car and saying to the little group assembled there:

“If you will wait a minute I will give you a chance to get out on this rear platform and see the big job we’ve been working on so long. We all of us are mighty proud of it.”How much of an asset do you suppose this conductor was to his company?

By this time the new-fangled railroad executive who reads this will be filled with disgust.

“Doesn’t he know,” I can hear him say, “that railroading has taken some pretty big strides within the past fifteen or twenty years? We’re perfecting; we’re systematizing. We’ve studied the motions of the bricklayer and we’re dabbling in efficiency. We’ve modeled our railroads after the best of the standing armies of Europe and we’ve begun to move men like units. That means that we’ve no room in railroad ranks for individualists. An individualist never makes an ideal unit and the new efficiency demands units—not thinkers!”

Does it? In the minds of a good many railroaders of the newer schools it seems to. Yet some of these very same railroaders were overjoyed a little time ago—when the half-baked Adamson eight-hour law was being jammed through Congress—to see out from the Middle West, from the rails of the Santa FÉ, the Union Pacific, the Milwaukee roads, veteran conductors coming forward, who not only did not hesitate to speak their minds against the measure, but actually sought out injunctions against it. What it might cost these men in prestige and in the affection of their fellows, in possible punishments by the lodges of their brotherhoods, the outside public may never know. It can be fairly assured that the price was no small one.

Would the railroad executives of the Middle West have preferred that these men be units, rather than individualists? I think not. The truth of the matter is, that in its very desire to stand straight, the new school of railroading sometimes leans backward. We will grant that in the coming of the great combinations of new-time railroads it was a mighty good step to eliminate the haphazard, wasteful, inefficient old school of personal railroading. Consolidation has effected some wonderful working advantages in the operation of our giant systems, and it is a grave question whether today, with the margin between income and operating cost constantly narrowing, if the eggs were unscrambled and the famous little old roads returned, they could be operated long and dodge the scrawny fingers of receivership. Yet it is a fact that if they have gained in many ways by consolidation and centralization, they have lost something definite in the personal feeling which used to exist between their men and themselves. It was an asset that could hardly be expressed in dollars and cents.

After the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad had absorbed the famous Old Colony—down there in the southeastern corner of Massachusetts—it was five years before its conductors ceased to know it and to love it as the Old Colony. To older conductors the Panhandle and the Lake Shore are still as real and as vital as if those beloved names still appeared upon the rolling stock. Measure such an asset in dollars and cents if you can! You cannot, thank God, place a valuation upon such assets as affection and loyalty.

So to your first qualities of dignity and authority and discretion—in these days we dare not call it discrimination—supplement those of affection and of loyalty. And to these add that of ability; for a conductor’s entire work is not merely collecting his tickets and keeping the passengers of his train in good humor—though sometimes this last is a man’s job by itself. He must bear in mind that Bible of the railroad—the time card—the place his train takes upon it; its relation to every other train, regular and special, on the line. His mind must be—every minute that he is on the road—a replica of the dispatcher’s, working in perfect synchronism with that of the controlling head who bends over the train sheet back at headquarters. This work, comparatively simple on a double-track line, becomes, in many instances, tremendously complicated upon the many miles of single-track railroads that still bear a heavy traffic up and down and across America.

The “opposing trains” to be met and passed; the slower trains moving in the same direction to be overtaken and also passed; the complications of special movements—all these must be borne in accurate correlation as the conductor passes up or down the line. He may have extra cars to his train and an extraordinarily difficult crowd of passengers to handle, but he cannot for a moment ignore the most minute detail of the flimsy messages that are handed to him during the entire length of his trip. And back of his specific orders for the day he must ever carry the entire scheme of the division’s operation.