recently gone on record as regretting the too rapid introduction of
big engines. To which from many an ancient office, from many a greasy
roundhouse comes a loud amen. The fad for big engines, the slavery to
the ton mile, the rack of the comparative statement, have cost the
granger roads a pile of good coin. Procrustes, the highwayman of the
ancients, fitted all his victims to stone beds, doubtless charging to
other expenses the stretching of an arm or the cutting off of a foot.
Nowadays we get our brains warped and our legs pulled just the same.
The methods are more subtle, the operations more graceful. Our
equanimity stands for almost any old thing, provided it is done in the
name of progress, or is called a process of analysis. Able men devote
their lives to the solution of problems of practical railroad
operation, to making maximum net earnings for their employers, only to
be discounted by the financial writers. Fools rush in where angels
fear to tread. The same writers who, to hear them tell it, can save
financial panics by sound advice to the country bankers, who can
instruct our Uncle Samuel how to handle his navy, who can hurry
Russian troops to Manchuria, can tell us just how to run our railroad,
just how many tons we should pull per train. Invention is the
handmaiden of progress. Inventors are usually laymen or outsiders.
Inventors and architects have to be held in check to prevent
development from becoming abnormal or one-sided. The man who invented
the air brake was not asked to come in and take charge of all
transportation. The men who design big engines should not be allowed
to forget conditions of track, territory and traffic.
Railroads are run to make money. A motion to manage them like golf
links is never in order. The track is built for running trains. To the
man with too much ton mile on the brain the running of a train, the
very object of the road's existence, becomes a bugaboo. He will
sacrifice business, incur risks of other losses, rather than run a
train. In some cases this is all right, in others it is all wrong.
There is a happy medium which all of us should be allowed to work out
for ourselves, to suit our own conditions. The trouble is that we are
denied a sliding scale. All roads look alike to the critic, the
reviewer and the broker.
Roads of dense traffic with much low-class freight, such as coal,
coke, ore, pig iron, etc., to move, found it more economical to have
large engines and heavy trains. The nature of the business demands a
considerable supply always on hand. This permits waiting for full
tonnage for every train. A few cars, more or less, at one end or the
other of the line make no great difference to the shipper. These roads
usually have more than one track and an old solid roadbed. This good
thing of economical transportation was pushed along to us of the
prairies. Here traffic is relatively thin, the track with dirt ballast
is less solid, hauls are many times longer, and single track is the
rule. Moreover, we frequently have merchandise, implements, machinery
and other high-class freight in one direction, and such perishable
stuff as live stock and dressed meats in the other. A dozen years ago
we had developed a combination freight and passenger engine, usually a
ten-wheeler with fairly high drivers, which handled such business
promptly and profitably. We could take out a Raymond excursion or a
theatrical special one way, and coming back make a fly run with
belated stock for a distant market. We may yet do the same with the
compound battleship, but it will first require alterations and a big
expenditure on track. When stock shows up you must get it moving. You
cannot hold it to club trains, as in the case of coal and pig iron.
You miss the market and there is a big claim to pay, to which the
financial gentleman in New York does not give sufficient weight when
he makes his wonderful analysis of our figures. It does not show up in
grate surface, tractive power, or weight on the drivers. It is not
complimentary to our wisdom that stock shippers have been compelled to
invoke State aid to force us to run stock trains regardless of full
tonnage, to do what our own best interests demanded. We should avoid
the necessity for even a just regulation of our affairs. It opens the
door to much that is unjust and undesirable.
The big engine has made us straighten curves, reduce grades, relay
rail, renew bridges, buy land, increase terminals, extend passing
tracks, abandon light equipment and increase wages. Its presence on
single-track roads has retarded traffic and has increased expenses. It
has torn up our track and increased the number of wrecks. Its long
hours and trying work have been an element of demoralization among our
men. The efficiency of our crews is limited to the endurance of the
fireman. This last condition must be remedied by an automatic
stoker--the most crying need of the present. Supply usually keeps
pretty close to demand and the automatic stoker should not be very
long in coming.
Yes, directly and indirectly, the big engine has cost us a lot of
dough. It is not an unmixed evil. It has its good points, to be sure.
Some of the new conditions it has forced would have come in time
anyway. Its advantages would be greater, its operation cheaper, if its
coming could have been broken to us more gently. It is now a
condition, not a theory, and we must do our best with it, regardless
of our personal predilections. Whether or not it has come to stay is
an open question. It probably has, but modified for higher speed, when
all conditions permit. We are not yet wise enough to know just what it
is costing us. Not even our own statisticians have had time to digest
fully the figures of increased equipment due to slower movement; of
increased cost of maintenance, both of track and equipment; of
unparalleled increase in freight claims; of higher wages; of
strengthened power of the labor organizations; of altered trade
conditions due to dissatisfaction with transportation; of changed
location of industrial plants; of the effect of reduced speed on water
competition; of the numerous conditions that go to make a railroad so
complex. In the language of the good old funeral hymn, some time we'll
understand.
We must make up our minds to prompter movement of freight, which may
mean increased speed. The people demand it and public opinion is king.
Here again the shipper steps in to help us out, for promptness
simplifies our terminal problems. The art of war has been defined as
getting the mostest men there the fustest. The art of railroading
comes to mean moving the mostest trains the soonest.
Affectionately, your own
D. A. D.
LETTER XVIII.
BE A SUPERINTENDENT--NOT A NURSE.
July 17, 1904.
My Dear Boy:--I am so sure that you will be a general manager some day
that I have been writing you a good deal of advice as to matters that
are above the control of a division superintendent. As a rule,
however, a man will fill any position better if he has a good
conception of the work that is beyond his own sphere. Some people do
not like to hire an ex-official for work subordinate to positions that
he may previously have held. They fear that the old superintendent who
gets aboard as yardmaster or dispatcher will be a nuisance, that he
will be all the time scheming for promotion, that he may try to
dictate to his superiors, that he will have too much dignity to climb
a side ladder, that he will be only temporary, that they will soon be
put to the trouble of breaking in another man. All of which is narrow
and shows in the aforesaid objectors a lack of confidence in
themselves and in their own organization. It all depends on the man
himself. If he is the right stuff he will take a broader view for
having been an official. He will appreciate the difficulties of his
superiors. His desire to make good should induce him to put forth
maximum effort. He may be able to get his men out of ruts of many
years' standing. It is so seldom that we get fresh blood we should be
thankful that circumstances permit us to get a three-hundred-dollar
man to work for one hundred. He may be only temporary for that
position, but if he makes us money we should be willing to be
incommoded later on. It is a selfish fear, this feeling that by and by
our royal selves may suffer the personal inconvenience of having to
look after a certain part of our machine that we thought was running
itself. Vain hope, this looking for any kind of perpetual motion. We
are paid official salaries to be big enough to tower over such lazy
feelings, over our own personal disinclination to exertion. Let me
repeat, once more, that for every position you should have an
understudy. Then if anybody drops out through promotion or otherwise
your task is a simple one.
A fact that none of us should overlook is that we all have superiors.
The president reports to the directors, and the latter to the
stockholders. The stockholder, big or little, is his or her majesty,
the citizen. Our superiors must know what we are doing. They will not
butt in and give us so many directions if we just keep them advised of
our progress. Your general superintendent is an able man, but neither
you nor he is a mental telegrapher. After you get the surgeons called,
the wreck train started, the general superintendent should be the next
man to have the wire. Tell him briefly what has happened, what you
have done, are doing and expect to do. If conditions are such that it
is wise for you to go to the wreck or the washout yourself, wire him
that you are on the ground. Don't think this is enough, but every half
hour or so tell him how you are getting along. He will feel better and
the officials above him will feel better. You will feel better
because, if they are wise, they will let you alone and not bother you
with instructions. Above all things do not try to pass responsibility
up higher by asking what to do. Tell the general superintendent what
trains you will detour, what equipment you will need from other
divisions for stub runs, what you have requested your neighbors to do.
War has been declared, the writs of the courts have ceased to run. You
are the general in the field and it is all up to you. From the moment
that you are wideawake enough to answer the telephone at the head of
your bed, your brain should be earning your company many dollars a
minute. As you slip into your clothes, think connectedly where all
available men and material are to be had. As you rush over to the
office, figure what the situation needs to protect the morning
suburban trains. When you see the train sheet, tell the dispatcher
what trains should be kept on time as long as possible, what trains
should be tied up to prevent a blockade. Don't sit down and take the
key, or act as call boy or for one second forget that you are the
superintendent, that the whole push looks to you. The cooler your
manner, the less hesitating your instructions, the greater the
confidence of your men in you and in themselves, the better their
work.
Arriving at the scene of trouble, size up the situation, reassure the
panic-stricken passengers, organize everybody present, give politely
all the information you have, how many hours passengers will be
delayed, what train will come to take them forward, when their baggage
can be expected. Be cool but sympathetic; alert, but polite. In a few
minutes your presence for good will be felt. Tell the wreckmaster what
to do first, but do not try to handle his men. Resist the temptation
to use an axe or shovel yourself. Do not shrink from the sight of
blood. Lead the relief parties, but do not try to be surgeon or nurse.
Let the others do the lifting of the killed or injured. You do your
work with your brains and with your voice. Be a superintendent. Care
first for the injured and the dead. Then look to the comfort of the
other passengers. Next in importance comes the mails, then the express
and the baggage. Do not give any grand stand orders to burn cars or
roll heavy equipment down the bank. Think twice before you destroy
more property. The line must be opened, but conditions may be such
that an extra hour or two will not complicate the situation, and will
save the company thousands of dollars. Men often earn big salaries by
the things they avoid doing.
When the work has been organized, circulate among the gangs, give each
foreman a word of praise, tell them all that you have ordered coffee
and sandwiches, that the company also gives its men square meals at
wrecks. Arrange to feed your transferred passengers earlier rather
than later than usual. Do not hesitate to feed badly delayed
passengers at the company's expense. When everything is running
smoothly keep your mouth shut and your ears open. As the country
people come flocking in to see the wreck, as the roadmaster yells his
orders, you will hear some sweetheart ask her swain if that is the
superintendent who has such a big voice. When he shakes his head and
the wreckmaster roars to take a fresh hitch, she guesses again, only
to be told that the quiet man over there with apparently the least to
say is the boss of all. Soon many of the bystanders are pointing
admiringly at you as the master of the situation. When it is all over,
when, hours or days later, you lie down for a well-earned rest, you
will feel that you are a railroad man, that you are holding down a job
for which no old woman need apply. There is some self-satisfaction in
this world which outruns the pay car, which cannot be measured in
dollars and cents.
What I am telling you holds good for a trainmaster, a yardmaster or
whoever happens to be the senior representative present. Sometimes it
is better to send out the trainmaster and stay in yourself to handle
an already congested situation. Sometimes the trainmaster is at the
wrong end of the line and you must go yourself. Common sense is a
pretty safe guide as to one's course of action. The principle to be
remembered is to avoid interference with the man on the ground. If it
is a minor derailment which the conductor is handling, do not rattle
him with messages, with requests for reports. When you examine your
conductors on rules, include questions and explanations which outline
action expected in emergencies. Forbid your dispatcher sending a
stereotyped message to get written statements of all witnesses every
time a personal injury occurs. Have your conductors, your agents and
your section foremen so drilled that they will keep the office
informed and will depend on themselves, not on the dispatchers, for
such things. Your rules, your organization, the instructions on your
blanks will amount to little if they are continually discounted by
special messages. You had better lose a set of reports than tear your
organization to pieces. When somebody falls down, discipline him in
such a way that the others will keep in line.
It takes patience and persistence, forbearance and firmness to drill
men to a high state of discipline. Disobedience and indifference can
sometimes be traced to unwise orders. The impossible or the
unreasonable is expected. There are too many bulletins and too many
instructions. Do not think a thing is done, an abuse corrected, a
condition remedied simply because you have given an order to produce
the desired effect. It is up to you to follow the matter to a finish.
You must know by observation, by inspection, by the reports of your
staff, that your order is being obeyed. The way to enforce discipline
is not to keep repeating the order. Except in rare cases an order
should not be repeated or a bulletin reissued. Weak men try to
strengthen their discipline by extravagant language in their
instructions. Do not say that no excuse will be taken for failure to
turn in these reports or to comply with these instructions. You may be
made to appear ridiculous, even mendacious, by a cloudburst, by a
holdup, by an act of God or the public enemy, as the old law phrase
runs. Vitality in expression is a good thing. It is useless without
vigor in enforcement. The latter does not depend upon the kind of
breakfast food you order in the dining car, but upon the ginger in
your administration.
Affectionately, your own
D. A. D.
LETTER XIX.
THE RACK OF THE COMPARATIVE STATEMENT.
July 24, 1904.
My Dear Boy:--You ask what I mean by the rack of the comparative
statement. I mean that, figuratively speaking, we are all pretty
securely fastened to the corresponding month of last year. What was
originally intended as a tavernkeeper's tab, as a rough check on
operation, has become a balanced ledger, a rigid standard of
efficiency. Time, even a short period, brings a sacredness to all
things. If we make a so-called better showing on paper than a
twelvemonth previous, we shake hands with ourselves and forget how
rotten we were considered just one short year ago. The ball team that
wins the championship and takes the big gate receipts is the one whose
members play for the side rather than for high individual averages.
The tendency is for our owners to expect us to make base hits rather
than send in runs which win games.
If in April and May we have a lot of ties on hand, we may not be
allowed to put them in the track because they will be charged out
before June 30, and make too heavy a showing of expenditure for the
fiscal year. So, with labor comparatively plentiful and the weather
comfortable, we wait until the new fiscal year comes in, until the sun
shines hottest on the track. Then, with farmers paying harvest wages
we have to offer more money. If we get the extra men the heat lessens
their efficiency. It is true we have probably had to pay the producer
for the ties, but if we fail to charge them to the final account, we
have a childlike confidence that they have not yet cost us anything.
The little matters of failure to utilize the full life of the tie, of
interest on the money invested, we dismiss with the thought that
trifling losses must be expected in the conduct of large affairs.
Maintenance of equipment as well as maintenance of way suffers from
too much comparative statement. Some new official pulls our power to
pieces to show us how they used to build up train-mile records on the
Far Eastern. The crowded rip tracks reflect the tractive power of the
big engines. Bad orders, the bane of a yardmaster's life, the teasers
of the traffic man's tracers, block our terminals. Our shopmen and our
car repairers, despairing of full time, move away. Yet withal we are
serene, for are not we operating just as cheaply as they did at this
time last year?
When I am in doubt, when I become mixed with the complexities of our
profession, I go back to my boyhood on the farm. From that gateway as
a basing point I can think out a rate sheet with fewer differentials.
The same common sense housekeeping which my mother practiced will fit
any railroad, however diversified its territory. The same
well-balanced management which enabled my father to pay off the
mortgage and extend his acres is suited to any railroad, however
complicated its financial obligations. The bigger the proposition, the
greater the need for sticking to homely basic principles. We learned
on the farm to expect about so much rainfall every year. Whether the
heaviest would come in one month or in another, the good Lord never
found time to tell us. We did the things that came to hand, sometimes
similarly, sometimes differently, from the corresponding month of the
previous year. If our crops were short we did not starve our work
horses. We sometimes found it paid, even with a poor crop in sight, to
go to the bank and borrow rather than neglect the ditching in a wet
field. If we made some surplus money we did not blow it all in for
tools and improvements. We knew that the inevitable lean years
preclude throwing the fat in the fire. If we ran behind some year, we
did some retrenching, to be sure, but we did not lose our nerve, did
not lose our faith in the future.
Some kinds of fertilizers on the farm are said to make rich fathers
and poor sons. The way some railroads have been run for a record you
would imagine that race suicide had reached a point where no further
generations were expected. One of the gravest of our mistakes has been
the application of the comparative statement, regardless of its effect
upon our men. The farmer finds it wise and economical to arrange work
for several monthly men in order to minimize the number of day hands
for his rush seasons. In the winter he may lay them off, but this is
for a period sufficiently long and sufficiently definite to enable the
farm hand to become something else, say a wood chopper or a lumberman.
Can we expect our car repairers, our sectionmen, to be loyal and
faithful if we lay them off with necessary work in sight, simply to
make our books look better? They know that later on we shall, at the
last minute, at the scratch of an indefinite somebody's pen, put on a
big force and with a hurrah, boys, rush it through. Is this fair? Is
it not better to keep twenty men steadily employed than to have forty
on half time? The unquestioned deterioration in the quality of our
labor, in the morale of our forces, cannot all be laid on the union's
doorstep. There is a responsibility here which we cannot shirk.
Cutting down expenses has been done in an unintelligent, cold-blooded
sort of a way. We go home at night feeling good at having cut down our
payrolls. We should be feeling sorry at the necessity for taking from
men the wherewithal to pay the unceasing rent and grocery bills. Our
methods give some room for the populists' plea to put the man above
the dollar. No, I do not expect ever to see an entire correction of
these conditions. In the play of economic forces the weak have to
suffer. I believe, though, that through minimizing such suffering we
can improve the service and earn bigger dividends for our
stockholders. Each of us can do a little; all of us together can do a
great deal toward making the problems easier. As the French say,
noblesse oblige--rank imposes obligation--every time. It is up to us,
the educated, powerful class, to take the lead and to do the most. We
cannot expect the poor, unlettered man to work out his own salvation
unaided. We cannot turn him loose to face an unequal struggle. If he
fails, if he has too much time for brooding, society at large has an
anarchist and we are the losers. Do not understand me as advocating
the employment or retention of unnecessary men. What I am kicking for
is a better balanced system. When we lay off our extra sectionman in
the fall, do we give him a pass and ask him to come to town and work
when we put on more unskilled winter labor in the shops and
roundhouses? No, he is in a different department. An official or a
foreman might be put to the inconvenience of waiting a few days, of
breaking in a new man. Next spring there might have to be a
readjustment when the work trains go on. Some big, strong railroad men
are coming to the front who will improve these conditions by working
from a broader viewpoint. We need more brainy men with nerve enough to
stand up and insist upon a consideration of the welfare of our
properties ten, twenty or fifty years hence. Because we need them they
will be developed.
Now do not hand me the old song and dance about business being
cold-blooded and devoid of sentiment. We spend money directly and
indirectly for advertising with a view to fostering public sentiment
in favor of our line. Business comes from an increase in population,
from development of resources, from the growing sentiments of the
human race. Life owes its origin to love, which originates in
sentiment. The family, directly traceable to sentiment, is the unit of
civilization. The way to have our heads rule our hearts is not to
forget that we have hearts.
Business is so attractive because it is chock full of sentiment which
can be made an asset.
Affectionately, your own
D. A. D.
LETTER XX.
HANDLING THE PAY ROLL.
July 31, 1904.
My Dear Boy:--I have your letter about the supply train. Please do not
fail to consider that it is an inspection and administrative train as
well as a traveling storehouse. The term company train perhaps comes
the nearest to a comprehensive designation. As a tentative
proposition, to be modified by experience, I think I would distribute
one-half of the expense of the train to supply, the other half to
inspection and consider both halves as money well spent. With the
enormous growth of business, with the increasing expansion of systems,
we have had to leave more and more to departments. The result is that
each department becomes more and more forgetful of the others. It
isn't enough to have the heads at the general offices take lunch
together. We must begin farther down in our administration to keep our
departments in touch. Representatives of the traffic department should
accompany the train and distribute their own advertising matter.
Perhaps the best feature of all would be the improved feeling among
the country agents due to more intimate acquaintance with the
operating and traffic officials with whom they are doing business. We
can afford to compete with the organizers of the telegraphers and
clerks for this spirit. It will interest you to know that at least two
large systems are figuring on a company train. When it comes, as come
it will, we shall all wonder, as in the case of the telephone, how we
ever got along without it.