THE GENERAL MANAGER
HIS DUTY TO KEEP EMPLOYEES IN HARMONIOUS ACTION--"THE SUPERINTENDENT
DEALS WITH MEN; THE GENERAL MANAGER WITH SUPERINTENDENTS"--"THE
GENERAL MANAGER IS REALLY KING"--CASES IN WHICH HIS POWER IS ALMOST
DESPOTIC--HE MUST KNOW MEN.
The general manager operating the railroad is held strictly responsible
for the economical movement of the trains and the maintenance of the
property. To the greatest portion of the railroad army (nine-tenths of it
employed in the operating department) he is an uncrowned king. The
superintendent, as we shall presently see, is the unit of the operation of
the road, just as the division over which he is head is one of the
physical units that go to make up some thousands of miles of first-class
railroad track. The division superintendent deals in men; the general
manager deals in division superintendents; and right there is the radical
difference between the two.
The superintendent must see to it that his men get a square deal. If he
does not see to it in the first instance they will see to it in the last,
and woe to him if such be the case. For the men who work on the steam
railroad are well-paid, well-read, keenly sensitive as to their privileges
and their rights. And from these men have come the division
superintendents, as different each from the other as men can be grown. It
is the general manager's chief duty to bring these very different men into
harmonious action. That is absolutely essential to the successful
operation of the railroad. The general manager must have absolute firmness
with his superintendents. He can appoint or discharge them as they can
appoint or discharge their trainmen--more quickly in fact, for up to the
present time there is no brotherhood of railroad superintendents.
A certain division superintendent in the East had 150 miles of busy
double-track trunk line under his direction. At his headquarters were a
big classification yard and a coaling-station for the engine of the two
divisions that intersected there. In the course of gradually increasing
business, the coaling-station, which stood in a narrow ledge beside the
main-line tracks and under the breast of a steep mountain-side, had to be
enlarged. In so small a place, that was a difficult engineering problem.
It was necessary to build much bigger coal-pockets and while the engineers
were removing the old and building the new station, temporary coaling
facilities had to be provided for the busy engine point. That part of the
problem--more operating than engineering--was finally solved by going
across the main-line tracks and locating a temporary coaling-station
there. That made a bad situation--with the heavy main-line traffic
constantly intersecting with engines drilling back and forth to their coal
supply, and the general manager was quick to realize it. He went up there
and warned his superintendent.
"This is a danger place," he said, "and a mighty bad one at that. That
tower's too far away to guard this cross-over. I want you to put two
flagmen here at all hours and let them personally signal and safeguard
every engine that crosses these main-line tracks."
Then he went back to his own big office, feeling that the responsibility
for that danger place was off his own shoulders, in part at least. The
division superintendent put in the requisition for the four men he needed.
The requisition enmeshed itself in the red-tape at the general offices of
the system. Some smart young assistant auditor there, who couldn't tell a
coal-pocket from a gravity-yard, and who was 400 miles away, remembered
that he had been ordered to cut the pay-roll--and the requisition went
into the waste-basket. The division superintendent did not try to get
another requisition for those flagmen through. He did the next best thing
and told the towerman in the cabin--almost half a mile away--to keep as
good a watch as possible of the cross-over.
The inevitable came early one evening, in an October fog. The Chicago Fast
Mail ran into an engine returning from the coal-pockets and there were
half a dozen dead when the wreck was cleared away. The division
superintendent was hurriedly summoned down to the general manager's
office.
"I cautioned you against trying to operate that cross-over without special
signalmen," that officer said, as he discharged the superintendent and so
cleared himself of the responsibility.
And that is where the modern system of excessive consolidation in our big
land carriers turned one good, faithful railroad executive into a howling
anarchist. An illogical system has developed from this rapid expansion of
the great individual railroad properties. As its most interesting phase,
it offers the man who is farthest away from the detail of operation as the
man who decides. One man takes the judgment of another and both of them
are far removed, perhaps, from the seat of the very trouble that they seek
to remedy. The man on the ground is powerless in the matter.
Here is the yardmaster at a great interior railroad centre--we call it
Somerset for the sake of convenience. His is one of the biggest yards in
all this land, and he is a man whose judgment should be solidly respected.
There are four improvements in his yards that he deems absolutely
necessary in the face of a rapidly increasing traffic, and for a portion
of the property that depreciates rapidly under hard usage. His is a most
important position; and yet as he cannot spend a cent himself for the use
of the railroad, not even to buy matches, he embodies his four requests
for necessities into a requisition and forwards it to headquarters--at a
seaboard city. His superior officer thinks that Somerset is asking a good
deal, and he cuts the request down to three items. The next link in the
chain is a man--an auditor, perhaps--who happens to be imbued with a
strong streak of economy at that time. Middle division has had its
appropriation cut thirty-three per cent, so off comes another item from
Somerset yard. After a time, the yardmaster is lucky to get one single
item through--and that is sure not to be the essential item that he needed
most of all. Good, plucky, valiant railroader that he is, he is sure to
think the whole outfit in the general offices a set of arrant fools.
Perhaps the big accident comes, and then perhaps he has full opportunity
to set himself straight. It is more likely that he does not, and that he
is made the target for Grand Jury indictment and a lot of other fireworks.
That is an instance of the complications of the modern railroad--the vast
intricacy of organization. Wonder not, then, that many a general manager
of to-day must think twice before he remembers that some particular inland
town is one of the obscure branches of his property.
* * * * *
The superintendent deals with men; the general manager, with
superintendents. That statement is open to a slight modification. The
superintendent deals with the operating army in individual cases; the
general manager deals with them collectively. Somewhere in rank between
the division superintendent and the general manager stands the general
superintendent, but in the rapidly changing structure of American railroad
operation, his office is fast losing its individuality, is to-day in real
danger of utter extinction. On some railroads he is hardly more than a
chief clerk to the general manager, a rubber-stamp whose signature goes
mechanically upon papers bound upwards from division superintendent to
general manager. At the most he is to-day an outside man, getting up and
down the line and making constant reports to his boss, the general
manager.
[Illustration: OIL-BURNING LOCOMOTIVE ON THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC SYSTEM
THE STEEL PASSENGER COACH, SUCH AS HAS BECOME STANDARD UPON THE AMERICAN
RAILROAD
ELECTRIC CAR, GENERATING ITS OWN POWER BY A GASOLINE ENGINE
BOTH LOCOMOTIVE AND TRAIN--GASOLINE MOTOR CAR DESIGNED FOR BRANCH LINE
SERVICE]
[Illustration: THE BIGGEST LOCOMOTIVE IN THE WORLD: BUILT BY THE SANTA FE
RAILROAD AT ITS TOPEKA SHOPS]
For the general manager is really king of the entire situation. Just now
his reign is threatened from a new quarter, and you find him receiving the
opposition with both distrust and anger. This is the fine figure of a fine
man. He has come up the ladder, rung by rung--station assistant, telegraph
operator, despatcher, train-master, assistant superintendent,
superintendent, general superintendent, general manager; he knows
railroading, stick and wheel. His own railroad he knows as he might know
the fingers of his hand.
When we come into his office, the last of a committee of well-dressed
citizens is slipping out of his door; they are citizens from a prosperous
town in an adjoining State, and he may tell us of their errand.
"K---- is a good town," he will say, "and gives us a good and growing
traffic. We've a lot of nasty grade-crossings there, for the two of our
big lines that right-angle into there seem to get over about every street
in the place at level. They want us to elevate or depress our tracks
through there, and it should be done. This road wants it as much as
K----wants it; for it's one of the worst bottle-necks on our main line,
and Lord only knows how many thousands of dollars it's cost us in delayed
traffic."
This king of the railroad points to a sheaf of blueprints upon his desk.
"That tells the story," he says simply, "and the end of the chapter is a
bill for nine millions of dollars to get rid of those crossings. According
to law, K---- will have to stand about half of the cost of the work, and
K----, like most progressive American towns, has been running pretty close
to her debt limit. She is staggered at the thought of having to dig out
three or four millions of perfectly good dollars, and so her mayor has
made the naive suggestion that we advance the money and let them pay back
their share in the shape of refunded taxes and annual payments.
"We advance that money--and the big boss has to slip over to France and
try to sell our securities for mere necessities. The truth of the matter
is that we haven't the money to advance. We're grubbing to get enough cash
to buy locomotives and cars to keep pace with our business, not running a
loan business for upstart towns that have run through their capital."
In comes a second delegation, this one another group of commuters. They
have been asking for an additional train in on the Valley branch. The
general manager has said that the road cannot afford it, for the train
would have to be operated at a loss. He proves his statement.
"But," urges the spokesman of the party, "you will make traffic by it, and
eventually the train will pay."
"Eventually isn't to-day," said the G. M. stanchly, "and it is on to-day
that we are being judged. You gentlemen come here and ask me to place a
train in service that is a sure loser; and then you will go down to your
office, and when the difference between my net and gross comes to you upon
your ticket sheets, you will damn me as being a rank incompetent."
"But this one train?" protests the spokesman.
"Violates that very principle," replies the general manager. "Not another
car that does not pay its way."
And as that little group files its way out of the big office, uttering
sundry threats about going to the commission, the general manager
stretches his leg over his big desk. Under the glass top of that desk is a
big map, in colors, of his system--miles and miles and miles of
first-class railroad.
"They come to me--towns like K---- and tell me of their troubles," he
says, "as if I already did not know of them. I've a reconstruction plan
for every ten miles of our main-line." His finger traces upon the map to a
great division point. "Take Somerset here, and Somerset yard. That is some
yard, as the boys say. We have 110 miles of track in it, enough for a
good-sized side-line division, and that yardmaster has to be the equal of
a superintendent.
"You would take a good look at that yard, with its roundhouses and its
shops, its gravity-humps and its classification sections, and you would
think it big enough to handle every freight car that goes between here and
Chicago. It isn't. It isn't really big enough to handle our decent share
of that traffic to-day. We're trying to pour the business through it
to-day, and are succeeding only by the narrowest measure. It's a weak
valve in our biggest artery, and some day it's going to clog.
"It won't be five years before Somerset has me throttled again. Five years
ago it was as bad. It took us three to four weeks to put a carload of
freight through it in winter, and the shippers were howling bloody murder.
They got mad enough then to scare our directors and I got separate
east-bound and west-bound classifications yards, relief that I'd been
fairly down on my knees for, three years at least. I was the goat in that
thing. I always am; that's part of the job of general manager.
"I know just what the steady increase in traffic is going to bring me to,
at this point and at that. Here's where a couple of our biggest feeders
from the north come into our main-line; here are a couple of friendly
haulers dumping down into us from Canada; here, in the mountains, is where
we pick up our stuff from the south and the southwest. Every yard on our
system is beginning to stagger under the traffic that shows no let up, and
we've got to spend millions to keep ourselves from getting throttled.
Don't think I don't know every bit of that. I can see necessary
improvements all the way up our main line; but every one of them takes
money, and just now the big boss has to hustle to sell his securities and
raise the money. But when we know and can't improve--that's railroading."
A secretary tiptoes in. This railroad king looks up and smiles quite
frankly at us.
"Committee from the Chamber of Commerce at Zanesburgh," he announces.
"They want a new depot in Zanesburgh, and they're entitled to a new one,
costing at a fair ratio about $40,000. A $40,000-depot would give them
every comfort and convenience but they demand that we spend $100,000
because Great Midland has spent $80,000 in an architectural wonder in
Stenton; and the old time town rivalry makes Zanesburgh want to go Stenton
one better."
"You've got a lot of these delegations?" we venture.
"I lose track of them," says the general manager. "It's all a part of the
day's work; it's railroading."
We know. Last night, this general manager was at a big freight terminal
there in the headquarters city, seeing with his own eyes until midnight
the fast freight and the express traffic under handling. The night before
he was there, and the night before that he was also there, and three days
before that he was out pounding over the line in his car, working eighteen
hours a day. That's railroading, too.
The freight house in this terminal city is one of his biggest problems.
His biggest local freight yard is in a narrow valley between high hills;
and these, together with fearful realty values, absolutely circumscribe
its area. The traffic is growing all the while, and all the local freight
for his road--running in strongly competitive territory--comes to this
terminal. Three hundred and fifty cars must be despatched every night for
different points, and yet a dray coming into the yard must be able to find
any one of those cars without an instant's delay. And still the narrow
physical limitations of that yard prevail. There is a big problem for a
big man.
And sometimes the big man must stoop to examine carefully into the little
things. When McCrea, the present president of the Pennsylvania, was a
general manager off on the western end of that system, his car was halted
in the middle of the night by a bad wreck on a single-track side-line. He
might have remained in his comfortable bed, but that would not have been
McCrea. He got up and dressed, went outside and offered his services to
the wrecking-boss. The wrecking-boss was competent and he knew it.
"There's nothing you can do, boss," he said.
"Do you mean to tell me that there is nothing that I can do--with a road
blocked on both sides with wreckage and stalled trains and track to be
laid?" said McCrea. "Well, let me tell you that there are ties down there
in the ditch that will have to be placed before another train goes over
here, and we might as well be beginning."
And with that General Manager McCrea suited action to word. He went down
into the ditch, picked up a heavy tie, put it over his shoulder, and
brought it up into position. In an instant he was in the ranks, working to
bring order out of chaos. That was the way a big man could do a little
thing in a big way.
It takes a really big man for that very sort of thing. And the big man,
general manager of several thousand miles of railroad, must understand the
smaller men beneath him--any one of whom is apt in some future day to
supersede him. Here is a man who has been known as one of the best general
managers in the whole land. Soon after he was made operating head of a
really big road, a certain train on which he was travelling was much
delayed. The new G. M. inquired the exact reason for the trouble. He was
not so much concerned for his own convenience as he was curious to know
why one of the road's best through trains should have halted until
assistance should come from the nearest roundhouse.
"The fireman lost his rake," was the somewhat perfunctory report that the
G. M.'s secretary returned to him. But if that young man thought that his
boss was going to be satisfied with that report, he was mistaken,
decidedly.
"Bring the fireman to me," commanded the chief.
That fireman was not of the sort that is easily feazed. He stood stockily
and in a low voice gave a very circumstantial explanation of the whole
occurrence. It seemed that he had missed the rake that morning when they
had started out from the yard roundhouse to take the Limited down over the
division. He was just going back for another, when they were called to
lend a hand at a small yard wreck. When they were done shoving and bunting
there, they had no time to run back to the roundhouse and get a rake. They
had barely enough time to get to the passenger station for the engine
change. That was a good story, with a deal of explanation, and the fireman
thought that the G. M. must be impressed with it.
The G. M. was not in the least impressed. He looked the coal shover up and
down, from head to feet, then said:
"How about those seven freights that you passed laid out on sidings? You
could have forced any one of those engineers to lend you his rake rather
than lay out this train."
The effect of that slight observation from the G. M.'s car was not lost on
a man on the system. The new man made good. From that time forward word
went out to the far corners of his road that the "new boss" knew
railroading; that he had four eyes in his head and that you had to be
pretty careful what sort of a story you put up to him. Calculate, if you
can, in dollars and cents the moral effect of such a stand upon the rank
and file of the king's army. The general manager, as we have already said,
must know men.
* * * * *
You are back with your first general manager again. He is tired of all
these problems, and yet he is now turning to another. This is formally
entitled the Situation. It is placed upon his big desk every morning. It
is a morning paper, if you please, prepared for a single reader. The
general manager is "Old Subscriber," in good measure; and if the paper
lacks both editorials and advertising, it is none the less interesting to
its star reader. Its news is as exclusive as its reader, and exclusively
the news of his system.
By it he knows first of the traffic that has been handled in twenty-four
hours, by cars and by trains. He knows by it the reserve forces of the
railroad, in cars and in locomotives, and just where they are located. By
the _Situation_, he can discover the over-massing of equipment upon one
division, the shortage upon another. After that he can begin to give
orders to his general superintendents and his superintendents of
transportation--these last the men who are directly responsible for car
movement--toward bringing a better balance between traffic and equipment.
The _Situation_ is on his desk at ten o'clock in the morning. By eleven,
whole brigades of locomotives may be under way, moving from their stalls
in some giant roundhouse out toward another division whose superintendent
is fairly shrieking for power.
But the _Situation_ tells more than merely this. It goes into history, and
in its own cold-blooded fashion tells what the road is doing by
comparison. It gives weather conditions and traffic for the corresponding
day, one year, two years, three years, five years before; and the general
manager will do well if he avoids giving mere cursory examination of such
tables. The _Situation_ not only notes weather conditions, it brings to
the eyes of the man whom we have called king in railroad operation the
more important train delays and the reasons that have caused them. Every
fact or incident that may affect the traffic or the operation of the road
is noted in its fine-filled pages. It is in every way a guide and a
barometer of the condition of a great property up to the very hour that
the general manager comes to his desk.
But the _Situation_ does not tell the entire story. Out in the nearest
passenger yard is a big private-car, almost as handsome and as well
equipped as that of the president of the road, and that car is in service
as many days as it stands idle there upon the siding. This man has 4,000
miles of railroad empire in his domain; there are nearly 70,000 faithful
privates for his army. To cover that territory means constant travel.
There are side-lines of less importance that sometimes do not see him for
six months at a time.
Of less importance, did we say? We had better not let him hear us breathe
that, for there are men in his employ who remember the first council of
the operating department staff after this G. M. came to the road. They
were gathered there for the time-table meeting--a general superintendent,
a whole round dozen of division superintendents, serious traffic-minded
folk from the passenger department, an auxiliary corps of chief clerks and
stenographers. Division by division, the passenger time-table problem was
adjusted. This superintendent asked a little more running time, for they
were putting in a cluster of new bridges, which made slow orders
necessary; another was thereupon forced to shorten his schedule, for the
total running time between main-line terminals of a road in hot
competitive territory could not be increased a single sixty seconds.
Finally, after a vast amount of argument, the main-line divisions were
settled, and attention was given to the side-lines. The first of these ran
through a section purely rural, but there was not a busier 500 miles of
single track in the East.
The general superintendent called attention to it, with a laugh.
"We'll now tackle the hoejack," said he.
It was an old joke, and the division heads began to laugh. They stopped
laughing the next instant. The new general manager was on his feet and
pounding thunderously upon his table top. His face was crimson, as he
demanded attention.
"Gentlemen," said he, scathingly, "the great railroad from which I have
had the honor to come has prided itself upon being a standard railroad.
Its standard is universal wherever its cars and engines run, and its
jurisdiction extends. Some of its lines are the busiest traffic-haulers in
the land. The four and even six tracks to each of them are hardly enough
for the great volume of high-class freight and passenger traffic that
press upon their rails. There are some side-lines, with but two or three
trains a day--side-lines that reach the main-line only through other
branches. But there are no hoejacks, nor peanut branches, nor jerkwaters
upon that system. Hereafter there are to be none upon this. The man who is
hauling a train on the most remote corner of this railroad is doing its
work quite as much as the biggest trainmaster here at the terminal. I
trust you follow me?"
They followed implicitly; and to that general manager has been finally
accorded the credit for bringing an operating department, torn by
inefficiencies and by jealousies, into one of the first rank among the
railroads of the land.
But he admits that he is going out upon side-line; and that particular
side-line brings a story to the mind of his chief clerk. When he has us
quite aside he tells it to us:
"The next to the last time the boss went up the Upper River Division, they
got his goat. We halted at the depot up at West Lyndonbrook, to fill the
tanks. The boss thinks that he will get out and stir his feet for a minute
on the right-of-way. Up comes a villager. 'Are you the general manager of
this 'ere road?' he says to the boss. Boss thinks he was some gentle
bucolic soul, and he says 'yes,' and offers him a real cigar. But the
gentle bucolic doesn't smoke anything cleaner than a pipe, and he just up
and says, 'Well, General, here's somethin' fer ye,' and shoves a paper
with a big red seal into the boss's hand.
"It seems that up in that neck o' woods they get grade crossings removed
as a last resort by going to the county court and the paper that the
constable served was one for the boss to come down there in a fortnight
for a hearing on an order to put a flagman and gates at our crossing in
West Lyndonbrook. The boss was mighty mad, and almost discharged the agent
for letting that constable hang around the depot. There isn't enough
traffic over that line to do more than keep the rust off the rails, and we
never had an accident in the sixty odd years that crossing has been in
use. And at that the boss might have fallen for a flagman. But the way
they rubbed it into him riled him. They might have gone at the thing in a
decent way--first sent a committee down to the division superintendent to
request that flagman.
"He went down on the appointed night to the old Town Hall. Before he got
there he started a guessing contest in that smart-aleck burg. The crossing
was right 'in the heart of the community,' as they put it themselves, and
the big citizens' houses were all within an eighth of a mile of our
right-of-way. Three days before the big flight of oratory down at the Town
Hall, the boss starts something. They hardly get away from their houses in
the morning before there is a bunch of those bright tech-school boys with
their rods and sextants and steel tapes measuring lines over the front
lawns. And the next thing they were planting bright new stakes in all the
flower-beds. There hadn't been so much excitement in West Lyndonbrook
since the last time Theodore Roosevelt talked there, and the townfolk
hustled down to the depot. The agent didn't ease their minds. The boss
wasn't working hand in glove with him.
"When the night came for the big time at the Town Hall, it was a regular
'standing-room only' business. The boss kept in the background while the
great minds of the township did their best. When it came his turn he
clamped across the platform like an avenging angel. He is a big fellow,
and that night he looked seven-foot-six, as he stuck his long fingers out
over that intelligent body politic and asked what it meant by trying to
cow the only first-class railroad that had ever had enough energy to put
its rails down in that township. Then he calls up an engineer from our
construction department.
"'Mr. Blinkins,' he says, in a voice that you could have heard across the
public square, 'this railroad has decided to temporize no longer in this
highway crossing situation on its lines. How much will it cost to put a
subway under our track at this crossing?'
"The engineer dove into his drawings and said: 'It'll be quite a big job,
and we'll have to cut quite a way into some of the front yards to get the
foundations for our abutments. My estimate of the cost of the proposed
improvement is $160,000.'
"Then it was the boss's turn again. 'Under the state law, work on
abolishing a grade crossing begins by the railroad expressing its
willingness,' he told them. 'The cost is divided--half being borne by the
railroad, the other half being divided between the township and the State.
West Lyndonbrook's share will reach $40,000.' Forty thousand dollars--why
$40,000 would have built either the new union school or the waterworks
that that burg had been hankering for and thought it couldn't afford. When
the boss breathed about that $40,000 it started the old feuds between the
waterworks crowd and the school crowd. They forgot all about the crossing
and our sin-filled railroad, and got to hammering anew on the old issue.
We slinked out while they were still at it--had the car hooked on to the
rear of thirty-eight and got started while the oratory was taking a fresh
turn.
"The boss? The boss is a diplomat. That's how he keeps his job."