Train in motion, has parted. Calls attention to following section. Highway crossing signal. Approaching stations, junctions or railroad crossings at grade. A succession of short blasts is an alarm for persons on the track and calls the attention of trainmen to danger ahead. These signal codes operate fundamentally in connection with the essential rules of schedule that I have already shown. The train despatcher, skilled in the quick movement of trains, may or he may not, have a map of the line in front of him as he sits at his desk. You may be quite certain that he knows where every moving train on the division is at the moment you see him, just as clearly as if it were all spelled there to the naked eye in some sort of picture map. No trains proceed without his express orders. He has “reliefs" and there is no hour of day or night when one of these is not at the despatcher's desk, having the work of the line under his exact supervision. A train receives its orders to start from the terminal of the division by telegraph from the despatcher. It is received by the telegraph agent at the terminal and written by him on triplicate tissue. It is repeated back to the despatcher's office for accuracy. The telegraph agent gives the order to the engineer and to the conductor of the train, retaining the third copy for his own protection. They sign a receipt for him and this fact is also telegraphed to the despatcher. The engineer is required to read his order to his fireman. There is little chance, apparently, for a mental lapse in this all-important matter of train orders and yet great accidents have happened upon American railroads just because men's minds have perversely refused to read what eyes and ears had read. The order that the train receives from the despatcher by means of the telegraph will direct it to proceed to a certain point on the line and will specify every train-regular or extra-that it will meet the meeting point. When the train has proceeded to the end of its orders, there will be more orders from the train despatcher to be receipted for, and so it will proceed to the end of the route. It is quite possible that at any stage of the journey orders will come from headquarters nullifying those already issued in part or entirely, and these must be accounted for in the same thorough and accurate fashion. Some of this seems "red-tape" to the men on the line and there come times when they are a bit disposed to rebel at what seems to them useless formality. There also come times when trains crash into one another and at those times the railroad, with its infinite system of recording its orders, is generally apt to be able to place the blame pretty accurately. Those are the times when the system of train orders justifies its worth. Some of the railroads, seeking to decrease their telegraphic expense, are experimenting with the telephone as a medium of despatching trains. The chief objection offered to this substitute lies in the absolute certainty of the telegraph, a certainty that is easiest reduced to written record. RAILROAD OPERATION AN EVOLUTION All this elaborate system of operation control has been built through many years of practice. Experience has been more than a teacher in American railroading. It has been a faculty and curriculum, too. Methods that promised well at the outside have been faulty after trial and rejected. Committees of trained experts have pondered and reported voluminously, the standard railroad codes of every sort have been born because of them. The operation of the railroad has been brought close to science. It would seem as if the entire field had been completely covered. And yet new situations constantly arise the like of which have never before presented themselves, even to the railroad veterans. Traffic moves in unequal volume, particularly freight traffic. There are single-track stretches through Middle West that starve through eleven months of the year and for the other thirty days handle in grain more tonnage than a double-track trunk-line in the East. Ob There are viously such lines cannot be double-tracked for thirty days of business; quite as obviously the overtaxed division, its equipment and men must rise to every necessity of the flood tide of business. fat years and there are lean years. There come years of bumper crops, years when the factory lights burn from sunset to dawn and wheels turn unceasingly, and then the superintendent wonders how his equipment and his men are going to stand. the strain. Engines are kept from the shops and in service, nothing that is even a semblance of a car is kept out of service, the demand for men is keen, prosperity strains the resources of the railroad. In the lean years engines are sometimes kept from the shops because the railroad feels that it must hold down its running expenses to keep pace with reduced revenues and such a course it can stoutly defend as nothing else than good business. Equip ent begins to stand idle. Engines are tucked away on empty sidings, boarded and forlorn, and if the year be very lean indeed the superintendent may find it necessary to send out a wrecking crane and begin lifting empty cars off the rails and leaving them in the ditch at the side of the right-of-way until the golden times shall come again. At such seasons his ingenuity is tested quite as much as in the times of flood-tide. Orders come to cut expenses and his big expense is the payroll. When he begins to blue-pencil that pay-roll some one is going to go hungry. The superintendent knows that. He must move with great care in such emergencies. WHEN ACCIDENTS HAPPEN The day comes that brings a slip-all the committees and all the codes in the world cannot prevent railroad wrecks. In one case it is the failure of the human factor, in another perhaps the failure of the mechanical. A man, upon whom responsibility rests, gives way; a bit of steel shows a flaw; possibly the accident is the sort of thing that seems beyond human ken, a landslide on the slope of a mountain, pitching great rocks down into the path of a fast express-the list of possibilities is well-nigh endless. There is a crash, sixty-ton cars piled about like billets of firewood, a giant locomotive breathing its last in the ditch, the bent and torn skeleton of a bridge stretched within the bottom of a river. The superintendent's telephone is at his bedside. When it rings at night time, he may think of the best and fastest trains on his division. Suppose one of those pet youngsters, all gay without in green and brass, is stretched at the foot of an embankment. He is called to it just as his emergency men are called. He will find his way to the rescue train-in England they call it the breakdown train, here we know it as the wrecking crew. The members of that crew, like trained firemen, are always held in the expectation of an emergency. They live in their homes but these must be close to the point at which their train is kept ready for service. They, too, have telephones at their bedsides and when the despatcher gets word that the worst has happened he routs out the members of the crew in quick shape. They get down into the yard, an engine manned by the extras that are always held in reserve at every big roundhouse point is coupled to the train and they are off to the scene of trouble, just as the fire-laddies find their way through crowded city streets. The track is cleared for the wrecking train and the crew makes a last inspection of the equipment on the way to the scene of trouble. The chief feature of the outfit is a huge crane, set low enough to come within the head and side clearances of the line, and when the relief has come to the wreck that crane reaches out its great arm and begins to bring order out of chaos. Sometimes there is little work for the crane. The wreckage may be so spilled over the track that the superintendent, who is like a general on the field, may order the wreckage burned. That costs money, but time is money on a railroad and in such cases often bigger money than the value of a lot of crushed and splintered cars. The "super" must remember again that a blocked railroad is worse than no railroad at all. There may be all sorts of passenger and mail trains tied up back of that wreck, for which the railroad has to pay heavy penalties in the event of their being detained. In such a case his judgment may be worth more to the railroad than his salary for an entire year. He must know when to apply the torch and when not to. It is that sort of judgment that makes a man a ruler over men in the principalities of the railroad empire. Of course, the superintendent does not run out to every smash-up on his division. It keeps the wrecking-crew busy most of the time doing that, for there are thousands of minor accidents that, while they pile up broken equipment and delay operation, can still be capably handled by minor officials. In the case of a fairly sizable division there may be an assistant superintendent who has this phase of actual railroading under his routine. Still if the wreck is at all sizable the "old man" is apt to come hurrying down to the scene. He has his telephone and he is his own judge as to that necessity. There is more clearing up after the accident than that accomplished by the wrecking crew. Within a few hours the superintendent's office is transformed into a courtroom and a rigid investigation is under way. A railroad hates to have two accidents happen because of the same cause. So it proceeds into inquiry, formally and legally, with stenographers making a record of the proceedings. All is secret. Rumors come out from the inquiry but they are short for it is not a long time before the verdict is known. The verdict may be known but the findings are rarely published. Some persons have had an uncomfortable time of it, and there may be some who will quit railroading because of this. It seems hard to the employee when the "old man" sits in judgment upon him. The superintendent to him is a big man and powerful. Yet chances are, judgment is being passed upon that very superintendent by the "powers that be" down at headquarters. This may be the last of a long series of accidents upon the division and the "super's" job may be hanging in as delicate balance as that of some refractory office-boy. So, hoping for fair play he plays fair himself, and the judgment of that tribunal will probably be good law and good sense. The superintendent will play fair; in most instances because, as you have already been told, that is the way of such executives in American railroading, in a few instances perhaps because there is a fate that awaits the men who do not play fair with their subordinates. The tangle of railroad lines that rests upon the United States is strewn with more wrecks of men who neglected this phase of their work than ever it was strewn with the wrecks of engines or of cars. THE GENERAL MANAGER The general manager is a larger edition of the superintendent. In nine cases out of ten he will first have filled that difficult position. He will have probably passed through the intermediate offices of assistant general superintendent, general superintendent, and assistant general manager. His path has been a succession of rising steps, each one a preparation for the next. He will have anywhere from a thousand to ten thousand miles of system under him. The entire road in operation-the mechanical and maintenance of way forces reporting to him, whether the organization of the road be departmental or divisionalwill be at his command. To him a company of superintendents will come with reports and suggestions, to receive orders. He will place himself within no small limits. He must understand and appreciate the difficulties of his captains who handle the mountain-climbing reaches with their giant and stupendous curves, and he must understand quite as well the problems that beset the men whose divisions span the broad prairies. Every morning he has a morning paper placed upon his desk of which not more than half a dozen copies are printed. It is called The Situation, and it gives him nothing but the news of his system. By it he knows of the traffic handled upon the line, all subdivided into divisions so many trains, so many cars-roughly, so many tons carried, and it will go into history in cold-blooded fashion by showing just what the traffic was for the corresponding day one year, two years, five years before. The weather conditions at each point of the system are noted in detail, the more serious train delays and their causes, every fact or incident that might affect the traffic or the operation of the system will be spread upon it; it will seek in every way to act as a guide and a barometer of the condition of a great property up to the very hour at which the general manager comes to his desk. With "the situation" well digested, this prime minister of the railroad empire is prepared to enter upon his day. He receives committees of national commercial organizations, committees from the brotherhood organizations of his men, confers constantly with the president of the road. On most systems he carries the rank of vice-president, and as such he enters into the executive councils of the company. His empire is not counted by counties. It stretches across many states and links far distant towns. He may have as many as a quarter of a million of employees receiving his orders, more than a million men, women and children directly or indirectly dependent upon him. He buys five million dollars worth of cars to-day, and to-morrow a solid mile of new locomotives. He is up and down the line all the while, watching here, probing there. His is a big job, he must reach it in a big way. There are whole principalities of Europe, whole states of the Union that do not compare in the magnitude of their workings with those of his industrial empire. |