Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 6

Think of this single all-too-typical instance many times multiplied; combine this fact with that of the great decrease of freight-cars of any sort upon our rails to-day and you begin to get the measure of the true condition of our sick man of American business. To-day approximately 354,000 of the freight-cars of the United States are reported as being in bad order. And while a "bad-order" car may be, and frequently is, used for some forms of rail traffic (as for instance a leaky grain-car utilized for the shipment of automobiles) the fact remains that nearly 15 per cent. of our total freight-car equipment stands in great need of large repairs or of replacement, while 19 per cent. of our locomotives are so far gone that they have been thrust upon the sidings virtually abandoned. In another chapter we shall see how these locomotives might be rejuvenated and put to work again, more efficient than ever before. For this one however consider them nil and valueless to the American railroad.

It was partly to remedy conditions such as these as well as to provide for the return of the roads to private operation that the Transportation Act was pa.s.sed. For there is not only a great rolling-stock shortage but virtually little or no extension of our railroad structure. As recently as in the decade from 1901 to 1911, 52,000 miles of brand-new line--a larger route mileage than that of almost any other nation in the world--were laid down. Since 1911 there have been virtually no new railroads in the United States. The comparatively small San Diego and Arizona railroad was completed but a year ago, but this was more than offset by the abandonment and removal of such lines as the Buffalo and Susquehanna and the Colorado Midland, to take two instances out of several. In 1920 only 314 miles of new railroad line were built in the United States, while 536 miles were abandoned. In 1921 service was discontinued on 1626 more miles of railroad. For six years past our total rail mileage has been going backwards, not rapidly but steadily and perceptibly; the small amount being constructed each year is being rapidly overbalanced by that which is being torn up. Our sick man of American business is a very sick man indeed.

Up to a decade ago our railroads were still busy increasing and enlarging their terminals, double-tracking their single-track lines, and three-tracking and four-tracking their double-track ones. The Union Pacific was achieving the distinction of being the first long-distance double-track line in the great West; in the East the Erie, the Lackawanna, and the Baltimore and Ohio were completing their remarkable series of cut-offs. All this has ceased, even though the necessity for its continuation has not ceased. For if the country does not absolutely stand in need of new trunk-lines to-day there still is a vast and unanswered demand for feeder branches in many, many corners of it, for duplication of tracks upon existing and badly overcrowded single-track and double-track lines. New York, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburg--other important cities as well--fairly cry aloud for a revision and extension of their terminal facilities, and cry in vain.

Rates have been increased, comparatively recently, to a point, as we have seen, not only higher than the most imaginative of our rail traffic experts might have dreamed five years ago but, as I have remarked already, to one where the traffic instead of being attracted to our carriers is actually being driven away from them; and some of the wiser executives have come to the point of asking the Interstate Commerce Commission for a modification of rates. From a n.i.g.g.ardly policy of former years toward the railroads in regard to rates, this body, in professed obedience to the Transportation Act, raised them to the prohibitive point. Now it is beginning to see the error of its ways and, as we have seen at the behest of actual railroaders, is lowering certain of the freight charges, although not in any general or particularly scientific fashion. Recently the commission responded to a large public pressure by permitting the roads to reduce their freight rates on farm products 10 per cent. for a test period of six months, with the possibility that further freight rate reductions will be made.

And finally, as we all know, wages are now being reduced. Already they have been brought down half a billion dollars a year, and in all likelihood they will be even further lowered. As to the justice or wisdom of all this we shall talk presently. The fact remains here and now that a generous step has been taken in bringing down the greatest single item of the cost of conducting railroad transportation, while some of the other costs, chiefly materials, to-day are being reduced automatically by the steady fall in market quotations of supplies of every sort. The situation slowly but surely is working itself through.

On the other hand, what does the public demand in this railroad situation?

What is the opinion of the Man on the Station Platform? Surely he has a voice in the matter. He rides on the train, if not daily as a commuter, then perhaps as often as every week or every fortnight. He talks. He observes. He forms conclusions. And some of these last might be accepted as fairly indicative of his needs as a constant patron of the railroad in both its freight and its pa.s.senger services.

The Man on the Station Platform believes first and foremost that transportation in this country, as well as in all others, is not merely railroads or motor-trucks or ca.n.a.l barges--not even aeroplanes, if you please--but a scientific correlation of all of these agents of transport.

He believes that each must have its own field in which it reigns supreme because in that field it is the cheapest and the most efficient form of transport. And therefore in that field should be recognized as supreme and so developed.

I share these beliefs of my friend who stands on the shady platform awaiting his up-local. I cannot see these agencies in the long run and in the fullest understanding as compet.i.tors but as correlators, if such a word may safely be coined. Each should supplement the other. In the full understanding of modern business compet.i.tion has little real value; in the conduct of public utilities it has none whatsoever. We learned long ago that in gas-works or in water-works, in telephone service, even in the traction facilities of our largest metropolitan cities, it was no lasting help in the long run but merely an added expense burden upon the community, and so should be eliminated or at least brought down to its lowest possible level.

Here then is perhaps the greatest of the burdens that the man outside of the railroad can wish to see removed from it. There are others: the neglect of the fine intensive salesmanship of transportation, which should have been brought to the fore years and years ago; the opportunity for the development of electric traction, of the container system of handling goods, which oddly enough brings us back again to the correlation of the several agents of American transport and the elimination of our absurd compet.i.tive plan.

All of these things will have had our attention before I am done. The question is one that demands a great deal of attention. The condition of our rails, instead of growing stronger each day, daily grows more precarious. It is obvious that this condition cannot long continue--the service greatly reduced and impaired, the men sullen and ofttimes working at direct cross-purposes to the management, the rates raised to the point where traffic begins to refuse to come to the stations, the financial condition so depressed that railroad securities will not sell under the absurdly uneconomic prevailing conditions, no thought whatsoever being given to the morrow.

Out of this miserable ma.s.s we must raise a program, definite and distinct and statesmanlike, as sound as the program under which we changed our money situation from periodic chaos to vast and proved stability. It must be a program of progress, not a continuation of the absurd artifice of compet.i.tion years after every other business has found that its economic strength comes in correlation and not in compet.i.tion, but a genuine progress--progress in the physical fiber of our railroad structure, using the electric motor, the gasolene motor, the industrial terminal, the package container, a dozen other steps as well; progress in the really fine science of selling transportation; progress in human relationship. In such progress there is nothing chimerical, nothing even remotely approaching the fantastic. And in such progress, and nowhere else, can one hope to find a solution of our railroad problem of to-day that even approaches permanency.

CHAPTER VI

THE MAN FACTOR OF THE PROBLEM

Progress in human relationship may be, I think, safely permitted at least the consideration of priority in any understanding of our surpa.s.sing railroad problem. For it may also be set down as fairly axiomatic that unless we progress in this phase of transport we cannot expect to go ahead in any other department of it. In its tense importance to the larger question this very human problem can be regarded as foundation-like. Upon it the railroad structure may yet build. Without it, it certainly must fall.

For more than two decades past, imagination, virility, foresight have been upon the wane in our railroads of the United States until to-day with these qualities quite gone upon many of them, the debacle of our national transport machine becomes a doubly depressing picture. The man with an idea may be needed upon our carriers but, as we shall see gradually, he is not often wanted there. They are ruled by conservatism; conservatism carried to the last degree. Yet only yesterday the man with an idea was at a premium in our railroading; our roads themselves were known for their daring, their strength, their progress. To-day too many of the men who operate them are the abject slaves of a system; the only ideas that they safely may advance are those leading to immediate economies. Immediate expenses, even with great and far-reaching economies as their ultimate result, are quite taboo. The railroader no longer may think. Apparently he may only execute.

What is the reason for this--for the human debacle of our carriers following so closely upon the physical, and in many cases responsible for it? Has the American railroader lost his ability to think and to act upon original lines? Has he sunk, with the debris of much of his once proud transport system, almost to the limits of degradation?

A hundred answers will be made to these questions. Some of them will come from banking interests--shrewd men, in banking. These will bear upon the degree of regulation to which our rail carriers are subjected to-day.

"These government sharks have killed railroad initiative," it will be said time and time again. There is some truth in that answer, yet I think myself there is greater truth in the statement that absentee ownership of the carriers--if I may be permitted to speak frankly, long-distance banker control--has done far more than regulation, either State or Federal, to kill initiative and progress in our transport machine. Wall Street is likely to think too exclusively in terms of dividends; Wall Street does not think enough in terms of men.

People in Wall Street, and a good many others outside of that famous thoroughfare as well, think of the difficulties of our railroad problem as things merely of dollars and cents. They feel that the questions of rates and wages, of income and outgo, are the sole factors to decide the future weal or woe of the railroads. If the rates are put high enough and the wages and other items of expenditure are kept low enough the roads will prosper again. These people feel that the problem is solely an economic one.

I believe that they are wrong. Granted that dollars and cents _do_ enter largely into the problem and its solution, that unless our national system of railroads becomes a real "going concern" it can hope for no continued success, I still feel that the prime point of the entire question is contained in three words, the human factor. This factor comes first, not last. That Wall Street and other c.o.c.ksure people have in the past placed it behind the problem of finance, is one of the very large reasons why our American railroads are having such extremely hard sledding at the present moment.

The human problem of the railroad may be fairly said to be divided into two cla.s.ses, that of the patron and that of the employee. Before I am done the necessities of the first of these cla.s.ses will have had attention; for the moment those of the second claim our full interest. There is always that meaningful phrase, "the fine tradition of our American railroading,"

that we are using again and again because it stands for something very definite, the thing which was largely responsible for the first upgrowth and strength of our railroads and whose loss within recent years has been chiefly responsible for their downfall. It was that tradition, that old-fashioned affection for railroading and loyalty to it, that made men work, not eight hours, but ten or twelve at a single stretch, and under the stress of a great emergency, such as a flood or a blizzard, sometimes sixteen or twenty-four or even forty-eight hours at a stretch. To-day they will not do this.

Why?

It is not a story quickly told. To understand why the railroader of to-day will not work long hours, even in reasonable emergencies, save under the spur of fearfully high overtime pay, why he goes about with indifference in his manner and a lurking grudge in his heart, one must dive beneath the surface of the situation. There he may find the solution of the loss of our railroad tradition.

The beginnings of that tradition are in the beginnings of the American railroad itself. They root back to the days when the overland carriers were in that same flash stage of development that in our day we have seen come to the motor-car and the motor-truck--the days when romance rode the steel highway, when it was thrusting its stout tendrils here and there and everywhere, when earnings and enterprise and initiative were all alike unlimited, when, in a word, the railroad called in an all but irresistible way to the rich man's son and the poor man's too, when the banker's clerk a president would be and the farmer's boy had as his supreme ambition the driving of a fast pa.s.senger-locomotive.

What has become of that farmer's boy who used to stand in a field for a single idle moment to watch the fast express go sweeping by and dream wistfully of future possibilities, or who stood for a fascinated minute beside the iron horse as it paused at the country depot, studying the intricacies of thrust and gear and bearing? Alas, he no longer covets railroading. It has ceased to enthrall or even interest him, despite the fact that the swing of the pendulum is to-day all in favor of the rank and file of men who work with their hands upon the railroad. Yesterday, in those same golden days of which I have just spoken, the swing was at the other end of the arc. The railroad employee was down; his employer was up.

Two years ago this giant pendulum had completed its course. The employer was down, the employee up; and something approaching a social revolution in our railroading had been accomplished.

The railroad employee--succinctly the two million and a half of the rank and file of railroad workers--had become a political a.s.set. Two million and a half direct votes are a bait that few shrewd politicians can ignore.

That it was not ignored has in recent years been shown repeatedly, in the pa.s.sage, by this State legislature and that, of various protective statutes for the railroaders, some of them good and some of them absurd; in the thrusting through Congress of the Adamson Eight-Hour Law; and in the extreme deference shown by the first Federal director-general of railroads to the big brotherhoods and other unions of transport employees, with the final result that those groups of railroad labor which had remained unorganized up to the period of Federal control proceeded to organize themselves. The stake was too good.

Incidentally it may be stated that in past years the average railroad executive was himself the largest single force toward the propagation of trade-unionism within his industry. While decrying its steady growth he placed a premium upon its advantages. Let me explain. A few years ago, say ten or fifteen, at the most, there were but four important unions of railroad employees--the four great brotherhoods of train workers: engineers, firemen, conductors, and trainmen. These were and still are high-grade organizations, extremely independent, refusing for many years even to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor. The men who conducted them were high-grade men of great principle and considerable vision. They fought for the rights of their fellows and fought well, with the result that there were few times when train employees were not adequately paid.

At that time the rest of railroad labor, with the very few exceptions, had no national organization; its individual loyalty was given instead to the properties for which it worked. With what result? Here is one glowing instance.

Conductors, then and now, belonged almost without exception to their strong trade organization, the Brotherhood of Railroad Conductors. It took good care of its own. A conductor on a fairly good run might easily earn from $175 to $200 a month, even in those prosaic days of b.u.t.ter at twenty-five cents a pound. It was a good pay, yet one could hardly say that the average conductor was overpaid. For he was far more than a mere train employee, particularly if he had a pa.s.senger run. He was a great point of personal contact between a railroad and its patrons. Upon his tact and diplomacy and understanding, or lack of these qualities, his road might rise or fall. True at all times, this was intensified in hotly compet.i.tive territory. A good conductor might easily bring or hold patrons for his road, a poor one drive them away to the other line.

Yet I think you will agree with me that at least an equal point of contact between the railroad and its patron is the man with whom he comes in contact before he boards the train--the station-agent. _His_ tact and diplomacy and understanding have a good deal to do with attracting patronage to the road. Yet it was not more than a decade ago that I found in a certain small brisk Eastern city of some twenty-five thousand people the chief representative of an important railroad working seven days a week, twelve or fourteen hours a day, and paid $85 a month. He knew what the conductors who ran the trains past his station were receiving and it rankled.

This was not an unusual case, this high-grade man, working long hours in his office at the pa.s.senger station and between trains scurrying out through the town to sell tickets to possible travelers over his line--it was in a genuinely compet.i.tive territory. It was all too typical. More than one railroad in past years paid its dividends out of the exploitation of its labor, and to-day is reaping the benefit of its short-sightedness.

One can imagine the ease with which the former United States Railroad Administration was able to help bring about a strong union organization of railroad station-agents and employees!

Mr. McAdoo was not asleep to the possibilities of this situation. We already have seen how from the outset he extended to labor a place in his cabinet and placed the entire vexed wage situation in the hands of a special commission headed by the late Franklin K. Lane. Now in all fairness and in simple justice to the Railroad Administration it should be set down that no matter what its motive it did seek to place railroad labor on a more scientific and more human basis with relation to its employer than any private corporation had ever succeeded in giving it. It tried to place the railroad wage on a basis more directly in accord with living costs, and less with mere supply and demand. Similarly it endeavored to better the working conditions of the rank and file of the railroaders. That in some of these last cases, particularly those of certain of the so-called national agreements, eventually it went entirely too far, is not to be denied. That is now proved by the willingness of the new Federal tribunal, the Railroad Labor Board out at Chicago, to abrogate these agreements as soon as the individual carriers shall have succeeded in making new ones with their workers.

This last, however, seems to be much easier planned than actually accomplished. Months are slipping by and some of the outrageous and expensive agreements still stand, along with some others which are neither outrageous nor expensive. The very worst of the lot, the meticulous arrangements under which a small job on a locomotive headlight (to make a single possible but rather typical instance) required six or eight men because each was a specialist and no man could infringe upon another's specialty, are going now and going rather rapidly. There is an apocryphal story around one Eastern railroad town to the effect that the changing of an air-hose connection on a Pullman sleeping-car one day more than a year ago cost the railroad forty dollars--a small job which two ordinary capable mechanics would have been glad to perform for but two or three at the most. Instances such as these have been multiplied. A farmer's boy who lived close to a railroad in the Middle West and who received five dollars a month and an occasional trip-pa.s.s to Chicago and back for oiling and watching an automatic electric pump at an obscure siding saw himself rated as an electrician and in receipt of $185 a month (standardized wage) without having lifted one finger toward the bonanza.

It was heyday for the rank and file. The Lane Commission, which really did much scientific work on this wage question despite the exceedingly great time pressure and the war crisis under which it worked, started the ball rolling, yet in what seemingly was a very fair and reasonable fashion. It was after that, even after Mr. McAdoo's actual term of office as director-general, that the real damage was done. The pendulum swung then, and swung far. From a point where the wage-scale was unfair to the railroad employee it came toward a point where it was unfair to the railroad investor.

This was particularly true in the case of the shop-craft men. They seem to have been the real offenders in the situation. With the position of the men in the train service, the members of the brotherhoods, I can have little else than great sympathy. Their plight at this moment is deplorable. At the best, they catch the hard end of railroading, the long, unconscionable hours, the stress of bad weather, the nights away from home, all the other difficult conditions of life upon the road. I do not believe that there have been many times when these men have been seriously overpaid. The score is far more apt to lie upon the other side of the table.

True it is that even in these branches of railroad service the unreasoning form of national agreement has crept in. I can remember not so many years ago up in northern New York when if a switch-crew was sent down to one of the paper-mills to get a box-car it was paid two hours' pay for two hours'

work. That was fair pay--and it was not. A switch-crew even in dull times could hardly exist on the prospect of getting no more than two hours' pay out of twenty-four. Gradually the pay for such a job--any job at all--was set at a minimum of half a day. That seemed fair. A little later this minimum, no matter how small the job, was set at a full day's pay. Even that might have been fair were it never abused. Let me ill.u.s.trate.

Here is a yard-crew kicking around in Watertown yard. The first thing that happens in a brisk day is that an engine derails somewhere south of the junction. It is not a serious mishap, and the yard-crew, acting as a wrecker, cleans it up in ninety minutes or thereabouts and gets a full day's pay. An hour later that same crew has to take a box-car two miles down the Cape Branch to a paper-mill, another ninety minutes perhaps, and another full day's pay for every man Jack of the crew. They sit around for three hours in the yardmaster's cabin and settle all the affairs of the New York Central railroad. In two or three more hours a careless switcher sends two flat-cars off the end of the siding up at Sewall's Island. Our little crew is again a wrecker. It goes up to the Island, puts the derailed cars on the track again,--another ninety minutes of actual work,--and draws a third full day's pay. Three days' pay in eight or nine hours is not bad. I should like to be able myself to turn the trick.

This is an exceptional case, of course--and it is not. Some strange things are possible in the national agreements which were foisted upon the Railroad Administration during the control of Walker D. Hines. I do not believe that Hines himself ever realized how strange they might become--his own large railroad experience would have guarded him against them.

When the versatile Henry Ford embarked not so many months ago on the difficult and time-honored business of running a railroad he was not greeted with any warm-hearted reception dinner by the American Railway a.s.sociation. He probably was not even asked to join the a.s.sociation. Its members had heard of Mr. Ford as a shatterer of traditions. And traditions, as you already know, to the heart of the old-time railroader are like unto the ten commandments themselves. I have no brief for Mr.

Ford, any more than for Mr. McAdoo. He is not an economist, although he would like to think himself one. He is a mechanic, a super-mechanic if you please. And he has a glorious knowledge of men, their strength and their weaknesses. Yet this is not criticism. These last qualities are much needed in our American railroad situation to-day. By this time there is almost a superfluity of economists in it.

Mr. Ford at the outset sought to solve the railroad labor question by straddling it--by tearing up all the c.u.mbersome and complicated standardized national agreements between the men of the small railroad that he now owns and subst.i.tuting for them a generous minimum wage and the right of the road to utilize a man at whatever work it pleases, within his established eight hours of labor. On Mr. Ford's railroad an employee may possibly drive a locomotive for ninety minutes and then spend five hours and a half washing car windows, or trucking cases upon a freight-house platform. And the astonishing thing is that in this one instance at least the plan apparently is working.

It may be that Mr. Ford has reached the solution of the problem. I am not at all sure that he has not. But I feel that if he has, a large number of railroad executives and sub-executives will forget their annoyances at the Detroit gentleman's publicity methods in connection with his personal railroad and begin to call him blessed. They have had little good fortune as yet in handling the standardized national agreements with their men, which were their unwilling inheritance from Uncle Sam, railroader sublime.

The agreements still stand despite the professed entire willingness of the Railroad Labor Board to abrogate them, for the simple reason that no acceptable subst.i.tute for them has yet been brought forward. The Labor Board has made some rather sweeping rulings in cutting down overtime payments and the like, however--all to the cost of the rank and file of the railroaders. Their position steadily becomes less and less enviable.