Читать книгу The Railroad Problem - Edward Hungerford - Страница 5

Table of Contents

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.