Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 9

Given a broad-minded fairly planned salary scheme such as this--and having provided always that the scheme was well advertised--and the average railroad ought to begin to pull itself through on this difficult question of supplying a fresh quant.i.ty of proper officer personnel for itself. To this might well be added, as has already been suggested, a systematic plan for teaching the various phases of transport in many of our schools and colleges and then closely scanning the output of these cla.s.ses for future executive material. That such a plan would work and would be worth far more than its comparatively modest cost, is the opinion of far-seeing men within the railroad industry as well as outside of it. That more attention is needed to this vital phase of our transport problem is clearly indicated by the action of the Pennsylvania railroad immediately after coming out from government control, in appointing a high personnel officer with a t.i.tle and prestige none the less than vice-president.

The problem of personnel and its continuous and permanent supply, long since recognized by other of our industries than that of railroading by the appointment of well-paid specialists with staffs trained to handle it at best efficiency, is not in itself a particularly perplexing one. A fair degree of study and thought will solve it almost invariably. One reason perhaps that so many of our railroads have not met it properly up to the present moment is because only yesterday it became apparent as a really vital matter, not merely to their success, but to their very continuance.

It was but yesterday that trades-unionism became a dominating and fairly autocratic force in their operation, that the traditional stairways of progress from the engine-cab or the caboose or the little yellow depot became so firmly closed and abandoned, and that the railroads were really forced to look out into the broad world beyond for future personnel.

Our railroaders as a rule have not lacked technical ability. They have not lacked honesty. They are not lacking in these qualities to-day. Taken man for man I doubt if their high average for both of them could be exceeded by any other American industry or profession, or even equaled throughout the rest of the civilized world. That many of them have lacked both vision and imagination, I am going to contend at other times. For the present it is enough to say that theirs is indeed a difficult job, that, leaving aside the question of securing future executives, the task of the existing ones is very far from a sinecure. The relationship of the human factors in the operating phases alone of our railroads, from the top executives down through the mid-executives to the rank and file, is this very day and minute one of the vastly serious phases of our whole railroad muddle. For just as the problem of new personnel is to an extent a future one, so is the deplorable loss of the old tradition to an extent a past one. There is not much use in crying over spilled milk. The thing to do is to find just what can be saved from the spilling.

Jinks who reads this, and in his more serious moments conducts a cotton-factory, and Blinks, who has the biggest retailing business in his town, may both laugh at the thought that their railroading may be a supremely difficult business. Each of them _knows_ that _his_ is the most difficult business in all the world and has a thousand convincing ways of proving it. But Jinks may summon all his operatives into a hall at five minutes' notice--he has them all at work inside of a brick wall--and put the fear of the Lord (and of their boss) into their hearts in another five. While Blinks, as a matter of principle, reads the riot act to his clerks every morning as soon as he has unlocked the doors of the store.

A railroad's employees may be outstretched a thousand miles or more.

Remember again that the railroad itself is in truth a narrow ribbon, ofttimes no wider than the right-of-way of a single track, far-reaching and tremendously attenuated. A thousand employees here, and then twenty, thirty, forty miles to the next group of more than a dozen! What a small opportunity for any sort of close superintendency or inspection! How hard the problem of attaining a real morale! With the irregular demands of energy that a railroad makes upon a man's time--two trains perhaps within the hour, and then perhaps not another for three or four--it can rarely utilize a man's eight hours at best advantage. While if an employee is at all inclined to idle upon the job how rare the opportunities for loafing--or if not for actual loafing, the failure to work in his allotted hour to the top notch of his ability! These opportunities exist, and unless Mr. Ford's plan should become a howling success, must continue to exist, in a tremendous variety.

Our station-agent no longer has to work twelve hours a day. Under government control his hours began to approach those of an easy-going banker. He ceased to worry about the prospective pa.s.senger who may be thinking of going to California and who by proper persuasion may be induced to go by the S. A.'s line. All of which is another of the many evidences of the decline of our fine old-time railroad tradition.

Not that any fair-minded man would wish a return to the outrageously long hours, low pay, and difficult working conditions of say twenty years ago that it tolerated and condoned. But there ought to have been a happy medium between those conditions and the ones of to-day. It should not have been so very difficult after all to figure out a fair compensation and fair hours and keep a reasonable amount of affection and loyalty in the heart and mind of the employee for the property that he serves. Without these perfectly human qualities working for it within its personnel no railroad, limited as we have just seen by overwhelmingly difficult conditions of superintendency and inspection, can operate at anything like efficiency. It suffers and suffers greatly. And its patrons suffer in consequence.

For here again, Blinks and Jinks, does the railroad business differ from yours. If you cannot inspire your workers to affection and loyalty, and through these to efficiency, you fail. Your factory or your store closes.

But the community that you served may not suffer greatly--not for any length of time. It readjusts itself; it buys its cotton at another mill, its dress-shirts at the store across the street.

But if your railroad should shut down, unless it should happen to be a sort of fifth wheel in an unusually compet.i.tive territory, the whole community would suffer tremendously, immediately and permanently, while any perceptible lowering of the quality of its railroad service brings instant trouble and discomfort to it. When, as a war measure, the old-time station-agent, reared in loyalty and tradition to render a real service to his public, became even for a time the government bureaucrat, the traveling public quickly realized the difference. And no other one thing perhaps has done more to render the phrase "government railroad" more obnoxious to the average American to-day than the conduct toward them of many railroad employees during the twenty-six months of Federal control.

That the men in control of the Railroad Administration took steps, well-planned but fairly impotent, to bring about better politeness and courtesy among the railroad servants is not to be denied. But the problem was quite beyond them, the distances between the administration offices at Washington and the men themselves much too far to be efficiently traversed. Letters and bulletins urging courtesy were puerile. The railroad rank and file laughed at them. Why courtesy? They were autocrats.

Did not the first director-general himself proclaim that in the earliest days of his regency at Pueblo and again at El Paso? After such proclamation these courtesy bulletins were to be regarded as just so much waste paper.

Blinks and Jinks both know that in their business courtesy comes through contact. Blinks in his big retail store knows that courtesy is one of the invaluable and irreplaceable a.s.sets of his business. So he not only preaches it but inspires it through contact, through knowing his sales-people as well as the rest of his working force personally, and through trying to help them work out the many little problems that perplex their lives. Comparatively few--a mere nothing--of Jinks's employees ever come in personal contact with his customers. Yet he too has found long since that courtesy pays dividends, plain dollars-and-cents dividends. And so he too is preaching it, has well-salaried experts, under the t.i.tle of social workers, who give their days toward bettering the lot of his factory family, with the courtesy idea well in the forefront of their endeavors. Through personal contact the thing is accomplished, and with it enthusiasm and efficiency--all together the sort of thing that we have learned to call morale.

That this morale, the old-fashioned tradition of American railroading, can be returned to us I do not doubt. It cannot be easily accomplished. It will require a deal of study, and the exercise of great tact and diplomacy. It will have to be preceded by an end of union-baiting and of the more subtle but nevertheless bitter attacks upon government regulatory bodies. That there will have to be less governmental regulation or else the private operation of our railroads will collapse, is the handwriting that already is written upon the wall. That a lessening of such regulation will of itself bring the best blood of the land once again to American railroading or a better spirit of loyalty and energy and initiative to the present personnel, I do not for one minute believe. If that were so, the solution of our vexing problem would be easy. We simply would have to put the hands of the clock backward again, return to 1887 or thereabouts, and, presto! our troubles would be over.

Unfortunately no such quick cure awaits the sick man of American business.

The restoration of his health, putting him soundly upon his feet once again, requires a great deal of study and of thought. Already I have hinted at two possible embrocations in this very sore spot of his labor relationships--the readjustment of wages (it is hardly going to be possible to lower them far again unless possibly under some adaptation of the very sane British method which we have just seen) and the beginning of an organized movement to recruit and direct the best of our young men into a business which normally should have great fascination for them. There is another ointment which I have saved for the last.

Cooperation beats regulation. It always has and it always will. Already we have quoted Vice-President Atterbury of the Pennsylvania as saying that in the future the employees should have direct representation in the management of the carriers. That is one of the few 100-per-cent.-right statements. Carried to the final degree of actuality it would mean employee representation upon a railroad's directorate. That such a representation would be a benefit to labor I shall not deny. But I am thinking of quite another thing, of the vast benefit that it would be to the railroad itself. There is the real kernel of the nut.

Some day we shall progress to the point where the directorates of our railroads will be very real directorates indeed, not groups of busy and harried bankers dropping in once a week for an hour or two for their twenty-dollar gold-pieces. The farce that such a representation is necessary to a proper protection of the underwritings will then be completely exploded. Possibly the most successful single private business in America, Standard Oil, is to-day operated upon the continuous directorate principle. Its directors give their entire time to the company upon whose board they sit. They are paid generous salaries for their entire time. They are experts in the refining and the selling of oil. And the board which sits each business day at eleven fritters away no time whatsoever in listening to the fads and whimsicalities of inexpert representation.

Some day some one of our railroads may have the vision and the enterprise to adapt that plan to itself. If so it does it will at one time have solved many of the most vexatious present-time problems of its operation.

The curse of absentee landlordism will then disappear almost automatically. And if that railroad has the future vision and enterprise, and the courage, to place at least one or two genuine labor representatives upon its board, 99 per cent. of its labor troubles will also disappear, also automatically. Already it has been suggested that future railroad legislation insist that such representation be made. I should hate to see such a step taken, by law. It would be worthless. It would be merely multiplying the evil of over-regulation from which our roads already are suffering. But I should dearly love to see the step taken in the only way it should be taken--from the heart of an American railroad itself, as a matter of good sentiment, good tradition, good business sense. Then and then only would it bring its great reward--a revival of loyalty, energy, ambition--the reincarnation of the spirit of our fine American railroader of yesterday.

CHAPTER VIII

THE POSSIBILITIES OF ELECTRIFICATION

The immediate needs of our railroads of the United States divide themselves into three great cla.s.ses: human, physical, financial. I shall not a.s.sume to say which of these three cla.s.ses is most vital or most important. In my own mind I frankly do not know. Already we have dipped into the human phases. Now for mere convenience in the telling, we shall give consideration to their physical needs.

Here again there is further division. A railroad in its physical aspect consists of the track that things run upon and the things that run upon the track. The track, in the broad sense in which we are now considering it, consists of far more than two steel rails set upon wooden ties or sleepers which, in turn, are set in a graded roadway. It means bridges, tunnels, switches, signals, terminal and intermediate stations, buildings, pa.s.senger and freight-houses, engine-houses, shops, and all the rest of it. And upon track, in this and every other sense the things that run, are to be translated as locomotives, of a variety of forms, and cars, of an infinite number.

And because cars are, as a rule, quite helpless without locomotives to push or to pull them here and there, let us begin with the locomotive. For the moment, we are going to pa.s.s by the steam locomotive, and the large possibilities of its development far beyond the present point, and come direct to the form of tractive power which has at least the most popular appeal to the modern imagination--electricity.

The use of electricity as a motive-power upon this country's so-called standard railroads (the electrical engineers like to call these heavy traction railroads) is no novelty. It began nearly thirty years ago when the Baltimore and Ohio railroad completed the electrification of its then new tunnels under the City of Baltimore. The move was made primarily to remove offensive smoke conditions, particularly in the main tunnel connecting Mount Royal and Camden stations, nearly two miles apart. In fact to-day trains going from Mount Royal toward Camden, a steady down-grade, are operated without the trouble of attaching electric locomotives to them; it is an easy gravity run for the two miles. For the up-trip the electric locomotive is attached at Camden Station in front of the through steam locomotive of the train and finally detached about two miles east of Mount Royal, by the simple process of running ahead and upon a facing-point switch--an adaptation of the old-time "flying switch."

The obvious success of this early installation slowly led to its imitation elsewhere among the railroads of the land--a third-rail suburban plan on the New Haven from Bristol through New Britain to Hartford, Connecticut, and a branch of the same system down to Nantasket Beach, Ma.s.sachusetts.

Yet the process was slow indeed. Your typical railroader is particularly averse to novelties. It was not until about fifteen years ago that electric installation of any considerable size came into being: the large suburban services that were created by the New York Central, the New Haven, and the Pennsylvania, coincident with the similar suburban services in Oakland, California, and in Portland, Oregon, and in some of the longer tunnels of the land; the Hoosac tunnel of the old Fitchburg, the tunnel of the Michigan Central under the Detroit River, and that of the Great Northern through the Cascades in Washington being notable instances of this last sort of installation. After these came the large installations of the Norfolk and Western through the Alleghanies and of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul--of which much more in a moment. And after this a great hiatus, the huge rise in material and construction costs of every sort, the war, and the present paralysis of our railroad development.

Recently there has come a demand, from the laity of the railroad world at least, that there be a revival of progress in this extension of electrical power upon our standard railroads. McAdoo sensed this well before he left his high office and said that at least one-fifth of the railroad mileage should be operated electrically at the earliest possible opportunity. And more recently there has come a larger realization to the land of its wholesale waste in potential water-power, as well as a gradual closing and increasing expense of its coal-supply.

The big builders and designers of our steam locomotives have not been asleep to this movement. They have met it in very recent years by a real improvement in the quality of that machine. For many years the steam locomotive grew in quant.i.ty--in mere size and bulk, if you please--rather than in quality. Once again we were captivated by the use of the word "big." When we read not many years ago of the coming of the first 200-ton locomotive we drew in our breath a little. Four hundred thousand pounds!

And without its great load of coal and water at that. What a monster!

Here, indeed, was Frankenstein. But what old Frank could do in smashing down bridges and rail levels we wotted not of. Yet what was the 200-ton locomotive compared with the 300-ton and the 400-ton monsters that the Santa Fe and the Delaware and Hudson began installing about a dozen years ago? It seemed as if no limit could be reached.

Yet the fact that a size limit could be reached and apparently was reached, was still no sign that the limits of steam locomotive efficiency had even been approached. Because the methods by which these limits may be extended, apparently almost indefinitely, are so complex and withal so fascinating, I am taking them up in a separate chapter of this book. This chapter and the one that follows it are the record of the achievements and the possibilities of the electric locomotive, whether as a separate unit or merely as a compact bundle of energy stowed away in the trucks of a pa.s.senger or freight-car. That locomotive shall receive our first consideration.

Now despite all the improvements that we shall see have been made upon him, the American steam locomotive of to-day seemingly remains a laggard.

In the days when his fuel was both plentiful and comparatively cheap one might merely say that he was extravagant and let it go at that. But now when coal if not scarcer is far more expensive his extravagance has become totally unwarranted.

In 1918, the most recent year for which the figures are available, our steam locomotive consumed 163,000,000 tons of coal in addition to 45,700,000 barrels of oil. Reducing these last to their coal equivalent, we have a total fuel consumption expressed in terms of coal of 176,000,000. And when we measure that consumption alongside the freight carried--1918 was one of the record years of our American railroads--it will be seen that for every thousand tons of freight that they moved one mile they burned 290 pounds of coal. Through any modern steam-generating electric station--the figures taken from the modern power-houses of the few steam railroads that already have been progressive enough to install electric motive-power--an even hundred pounds of coal may easily move more than 1600 tons of freight one mile--in the accurate phrasing of the railroaders themselves, 1600 ton-miles.

In other words the same freight traffic moved by electricity through steam power houses would have required but a little over fifty million tons of coal. From 120,000,000 to 130,000,000 tons of coal would have been saved--a saving roughly expressed in money at between three-quarters of a billion and a billion dollars, which of itself would be a 4 or 5 per cent.

dividend upon the total capitalization of our American railroads.

In the saving that we have just shown we have presupposed an absolutely universal subst.i.tution of electric for steam power all the way across the land. This however is not practical to-day; nor is it likely to be practical in any day to come, for every mile of our 275,000 miles of American railroad system. On the other hand this huge estimate of national saving is based entirely upon the coal-consumption basis. The most impressive savings that you shall see before you are finished with this chapter are those accomplished by our lines which have bended water-power, hitherto wasted, to the movement of their trains. I have stood upon the brink of Niagara Falls and there seen train after train arrive and depart, each hauled by a steam locomotive. And all the while I knew that the force and power of that mighty cataract was lighting the homes and driving the street-cars of Toronto and of Syracuse--by land, respectively one hundred and 150 miles distant. What a travesty upon efficiency!

For the moment however we are seeing the question, not in fine, but in large. It is terribly large, terribly wasteful, if you please. For not only is our steam locomotive a laggard in his over-greed for food but he is lazy into the bargain. A fearful proportion of his time he spends in resting or in being refitted for his work. For each hour that he spends out upon the line he spends another hour in the roundhouse--and this of course quite outside of the yearly visit to the shops for complete overhauling and repair. The traffic of Fifth Avenue, New York, or Michigan Avenue, Chicago, would never move if motor-cars were permitted to park alongside their busy curbs. One reason why the traffic upon our railroads has not moved better in times of stress is because there has been too much parking both of locomotives and of cars, particularly of the first.

An Eastern trunk-line railroad which a dozen years ago was having a fearful time moving its freight brought in a consulting engineer for an opinion as to the increase of its facilities. Like most engineers the outside expert saw the problem as a field-day possibility for contracting concerns--and engineers. A new cla.s.sification-yard here, great additions and rearrangements to others there, at other places a long stretch of additional main-line trackage--the trick might be done anywhere from sixty to one hundred millions of dollars there in yester-year.

These figures staggered the president of the road. He was not satisfied and so turned again for outside consultation, this time with the hard-headed general manager of a Western line.

"Tell me what you can make of it?" he asked.

The Westerner took a hurried trip over the line and had his report ready within sixty minutes thereafter; it was short, concise, verbal.

"Give me a couple of million dollars' worth of more locomotives and in a week I'll have your problem solved. You don't want more yards, to be clogged up in turn. You want yard shortage--and line movement. If you have a sufficiency of motive-power you won't need many yards, not as many as you have to-day. Your stuff will keep moving, not hanging around on side-tracks."

The problem of that Eastern road of a dozen years ago is to-day that of virtually every trunk-line of the Northeast. Remember, if you will, that for more than a decade there has been no main line trackage laid down east of Pittsburg or Cleveland. Previous to that time a considerable amount of relief work had been done by a half-dozen or so of the larger roads in that territory. But the relief that these changes gave has long since been swallowed up until to-day it is hardly apparent. And the steadily growing traffic demands fresh relief.

How it can be given is not as easy a problem to the big engineers. The Pennsylvania can and has planned still more low-grade relief-lines across and through the Alleghany Mountains, but Pittsburg still remains its bottle-neck--in there between the high hills and all but defying the railroad engineers. The New York Central needs more main-line trackage, but far more does it need relief of its own bottle-necks--at Albany and again at Buffalo. It is the problem of the cities that counts--not merely Albany or Buffalo or Pittsburg, but New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore and Cleveland and Cincinnati and St. Louis and Chicago.

There is no use in laying down additional main tracks when the terminals in the hearts of these great cities are so sadly congested as to take a freight-car as long to move through a single one of them as from three hundred to five hundred miles on open line.

The smooth and shiny steel rails that slip through each of these congested traffic-hubs are their Fifth Avenues and their Michigan Avenues too. We do not permit the gasolene locomotive to park and obstruct these highways of asphaltum. But the laggard steam locomotive is permitted to loaf in great roundhouses along the steel highway. He is to-day not merely a laggard but an actual obstructionist. I hinted but a moment ago at the time he must spend between runs resting and being more or less overhauled--fires cleaned, machinery overhauled, flues calked and the like, twelve hours out of each twenty-four. Moreover he requires water each seventy-five miles and a fresh supply of coal each 150.

On the other hand, take the electric locomotive. Not only does he save weight by carrying no coal or water and so put that weight into motive machinery--his strength to-day is 7000 horse-power as against but about 3000 of our largest steam locomotives--but he actually goes 5000 miles without having to receive the inspection attention that his old-fashioned steam brother apparently has to have at the end of 150. Which means that for days at a time--and even a week or a fortnight, if the necessity arises--he can remain in steady service, going from one train to another, and only changing crews. The locomotive is always ready.