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.
[Illustration: 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--112-1/2 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.