The Railroad Problem Part 5

"Accidents and storms! When we get a smash-up on this section or on one of my neighbors' we all turn to and help the wrecking crew. I've worked fifty-one hours with no more than a s.n.a.t.c.h of sleep and without getting out of my clothing--and that was both accident and storm. It's storm that counts the most. It's nice and pretty out here today, even if a little warmish. Come round here next February, when the wind begins to whistle and the mercury is trying to hide in the bottom of its little tube, and help me replace rails in a snow-packed track."

Against conditions such as these the railroad finds no little difficulty in securing good trackmen. The section-boss will tell you how, until about twenty years ago, these were largely Irishmen, with a fair mixture of Germans and Scots--even a few Englishmen. The Italians began coming over in droves a little more than a quarter of a century ago and almost the first men they displaced were the Irish trackmen on our railroads.

Perhaps it would be fairer to say they took the jobs which the Irishmen were beginning to scorn. The latter preferred to become contractors, politicians, lawyers. What is the use of driving like a slave all day long, they argued, when you can earn five times as much by using your wits?

Of recent years there have been few Irishmen in track service--an occasional section-boss like the man to whom we have just been talking--and with the exception of Wisconsin and Minnesota, practically none of the men from the north of Europe. Even the better grades of Italians have begun to turn from track work. They, too, make good contractors and politicians and lawyers. In the stead of these have come the men from the south of Italy, Greeks, Slavs, a few Poles, and a few Huns. These seem particularly to lack intelligence. Yet they seemingly are all that the railroad may draw upon for its track maintenance.

These were the conditions that prevailed up to the beginning of the Great War in Europe. Since that time the situation has grown steadily worse.

With the tightening of the labor market, with the inadequate rates of pay in both the car and right of way maintenance departments of the railroads, the average railroad manager is hard pressed today to keep his line in order. Sometimes he fails. And a distinct factor in the run-down condition of so many of our second-and third- and fourth-grade railroads is not alone their financial condition, to which we already have referred, but quite as much their utter inability to summon track labor at any price within their possibility. It is rather difficult, to say the least, to get a section foreman at three dollars a day when Henry Ford is paying five dollars as a minimum wage in his Detroit factory and munition manufacturers are even going ahead of this figure. I myself have seen gra.s.s growing this last summer in the tracks of some mighty good roads.

And weeds between the ties and the rails are all too apt to be the indication of even worse conditions--not quite so perceptible to the eye.

It is this very polyglot nature of the men who work upon the track which has operated against their being brought into a brotherhood--such as those who man the freight and pa.s.senger trains. The isolation of the section-bosses and their gangs, as well as the dominance of the padrone system among the Italians until very recently, have been other factors against a stout union of the trackmen. But the mixture of tongues and races has been the chief objection. You do not find Italians or Slavs or Poles or Greeks on the throttle side of the locomotive cab or wearing the conductor's uniform in pa.s.senger service, although you will find them many times in the caboose of the freight and the Negro fireman is rather a knotty problem with the chief of that big brotherhood. In fact, it has been rather a steady boast of the engineers and the conductors that their great organizations are composed of Americans. That fact, of itself, is peculiarly significant.

Yet what are Americans? And how many of those fine fellows who drive locomotives and who captain fancy trains will fail to find some part of their ancestry in Europe, within three or four generations at the longest?

We have shown that responsibility is not a matter of color, of race, nor of language. And it is responsibility--responsibility plus energy and ability and honesty--that the railroad seeks to obtain when it goes into the market to purchase labor.

The day has come when the railroad has begun to take keener notice of the personnel of the men to whom is given the actual labor of keeping the track in order. The better roads offer prizes to the foremen for the best-kept sections. The prizes are substantial. They need to be. With hard work as the seeming reward in this branch of service the railroad, even before the coming of the war, was no longer able to pick and choose from hordes of applicants. A dozen years ago it began to fairly dragnet the labor markets of the largest cities; and when it gets men it has to use them with a degree of consideration that was not even dreamed of in other days.

No longer can an autocratic and brutal foreman stand and curse at his section hands. They simply will not stand for it. "Bawlers-out," as the worst of these fellows used to be known along the line, are not now in fashion. And the track supervisor who used to stand on the rear platform of a train and toss out "b.u.t.terflies" is far more careful in his criticism. "b.u.t.terflies," be it known, are indited by the supervisor _en route_ to call the attention of the foremen to track defects in their sections.

The Negro is still in large service in the South--below the Ohio and east of the Mississippi. He is a good trackman--and with the labor market as it stands today, drained to the bottom, it is a pity there are not more of him. Unlike most of the south-of-Europe men, he has strength and stamina for heavy, sustained work. Moreover, he is built to rhythm. If you can set his work to syncopated time he seems never to tire of it. He is a real artist. He cuts six or eight inches off the handle of his sledge hammer and it becomes his "short dog." Gripping it at the end with both hands he swings it completely around his head and strikes two blows to the white man's one, no matter how clever the white man may be. And he is actually fond of a bawler-out. He respects a real boss.

The hobo trackman is in a cla.s.s by himself. He is not the migratory creature that you may imagine him. On the contrary, in nine cases out of ten he can be cla.s.sed by distinct districts. Thus he may be known as a St.

Paul man, a Chicago man, or a Kansas City man, and you may be quite sure that he will venture only a certain limited distance from his favorite haunts. In the spring, however, he generally is so hungry that he is quite willing to undertake any sort of job at any old price, provided free railroad tickets are given.

The majority of these hoboes have had experience with the shovel. Some of them know more about track than their foremen. Unless the section-boss has had previous experience with hoboes, however, he will get no benefit from their superior knowledge, but will be left to work out his problem entirely alone.

As a rule the hobo becomes independently rich on the acquisition of ten dollars. Then he turns his face toward that town to which he gives his devoted allegiance. He now has money to pay fares; but he does not pay them. Summer is on the land and he likes to protract the joys of the road; so he beats his way slowly home and leaves a record of his migration executed in a chirography that is nothing less than marvelous. The day that masonry went out of fashion in railroad construction and concrete came in was a bonanza to him. On the flat concrete surfaces of bridge abutments and piers, telephone houses and retaining walls, he marks the record of his going and whither he is bound--and marks it so plainly with thick, black paint that even he who rides upon the fastest of the limited trains may read--although it may not be given to him to ever understand.

Down in the Southwest the track laborer is Mexican, while in the Far West he is a little brown man, with poetry in his soul and a vast amount of energy in his strong little arms. The j.a.panese invasion has been something of a G.o.dsend to the railroads beyond the Rocky Mountains. Up in British Columbia, where John Chinaman is not in legal disfavor, you will find him a track laborer--faithful and efficient. On the Canadian Pacific seventeen per cent of the total force of trackmen is Chinese. At the west end of that Canadian transcontinental, the track gangs almost exclusively are Chinese.

The j.a.p is not illegal in the United States, however, and he is turning rapidly to railroading. It is only fair to say that he is the best track laborer our railroads have known. He is energetic, receptive, ambitious, intelligent, and therefore easily instructed. His mind being retentive, he rarely has to be told a thing a second time. Though small, he is robust and possessed of powers of endurance far beyond any other race.

Furthermore, he is cleanly--bathing and changing his clothes several times a week. His camp is always sanitary and he prides himself on the thoroughness of his work. You may be sure he is carrying a j.a.panese-English dictionary and that from it he is learning his three English words a day. Track workers from the south of Europe will spend a lifetime without ever learning a single word of English.

There is another cla.s.s of Asiatic workers that in recent years has begun to show itself along the west coast and this cla.s.s is far less satisfactory in every way. These are the Hindus. They have drifted across the Seven Seas and marched into a new land through the gates of San Francisco or Portland or Seattle. But as yet they have not come in sufficient numbers to represent a new problem in American railroading. The j.a.panese already have attained that distinction.

Here, then, is the polyglot material with which our section-boss must work. His name may be Smith, he may have come out of New England itself, and his little house there beside the track is probably as neat as yours or mine. He works long hours and hard, with his body, his hands, and his mind; the men under his authority are more apt to be inefficient than efficient; his responsibility is unceasing. It is not an easy job. And for it he is paid from sixty-five to ninety dollars a month--rarely more. A locomotive engineer is paid three times as much. Yet he is protected by the eight-hour day as his standard of employment, although it is more than likely that his actual hours of work may be even less than eight. And his responsibility is little greater than that of the section-boss.

CHAPTER VI

UNORGANIZED LABOR--THE STATION AGENT

The primary schools of railroading are the little red and yellow and gray buildings that one finds up and down the steel highways of the nation, dotting big lines and small. You find at least one in every American town that thinks itself worthy of the t.i.tle. And they are hardly less to the towns themselves than the red schoolhouses of only a little greater traditional lore. To the railroad their importance can hardly be minimized. They are its tentacles--the high spots and the low where it touches its territory and its patrons.

To best understand how a station agent measures to his job, let us do as we have done heretofore and take one of them who is typical. Here is one man who in personality and environment is representative and the small New York State town in which he is the railroad's agent is typical of tens of thousands of others all the way from Maine to California. Brier Hill is an old-fashioned village of less than 10,000 population, albeit it is a county seat and the gateway to a prosperous and beautiful farming district. Two railroads reach it by their side lines, which means compet.i.tion and the fact that the agent for each must be a considerable man and on the job about all of the time. Our man--we will call him Blinks and his road the Great Midland--has never lived or worked in another town. Thirty years ago he entered the service of the G.M. as a general utility boy around the old brick depot at twelve dollars a month.

The old brick depot is still in service and so is Blinks.

In thirty years his pay has been advanced. He now gets $110 a month; in addition his commissions amount to $40 or $50 a month. Engineers and conductors get much more, but the station agent, as we have come to understand, is not protected by a powerful labor organization. There is an Order of Railroad Station Agents, to be sure, but it is weak and hardly to be compared with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers or the Order of Railroad Trainmen. In some cases the station agents rising from a telegraph key have never relinquished their membership in the telegraphers' union. But, with the telephone almost accepted as a complete success in the dispatching of trains, the railroads see a new opportunity for the efficient use of men who have been crippled in the service; in some cases for the widows and the daughters of men who have died in the ranks. It takes apt.i.tude, long months, and sometimes years to learn the rapid use of the telegraph. A clear mind and quick wit are all that is necessary when the long-distance telephone moves the trains up and down the line.

Blinks, being typical, does not belong to a labor organization. Although he was an expert telegrapher with a high speed rate, he did not happen to belong to the telegraphers' organization. Instead there is in him a fine vein of old-fashioned loyalty to the property. He was all but born in the service of the Great Midland; he expects to die in the harness there in his homely old-fashioned office in the brick depot at Brier Hill. His is the sort of loyalty whose value to the road can hardly be expressed in mere dollars and cents.

If you would like to know the truth of the matter, you would quickly come to know that the real reason why Blinks has never joined a union is that he holds an innate and unexpressed feeling that he is a captain in the railroad army, rather than a private in its ranks. For he is secretly proud of the "force" that reports to him--chief clerk, ticket agent, two clerks, a baggagemaster, and three freight-house men. Not a man of these draws less than seventy dollars a month, so there is not much difference in their social status and that of the boss. No one has been quicker than he to recognize such democracy. He prides himself that he is an easy captain.

"We work here together like a big family," he will tell you, "although I'm quite of the opinion that we're about the best little collection of teamwork here in the village. Together we make quite an aggregate. Only two concerns here employ more help--the paper mill and the collar factory."

You are a bit astonished at that--and at that you begin to think--not of the relation of the town to the railroad but rather of the railroad to the town. You ask Blinks as to the volume of the business his road does at his station. He hesitates in replying. That is rather a state secret. Finally he tells you--although still as a secret.

"We do a business of $50,000 a month," he says quietly, "which is as much as any two industries here--and this time I'm making no exceptions of the paper mill or the collar factory."

Quickly he explains that this is no unusual figure. And figures do not always indicate. Smithville, up on another division, is only a third as large and does a business of $20,000 a month. There are paper mills here and inasmuch as they handle their products in carload lots on their own sidings there is need of a large force around the station. On the other hand, a neighboring town of the same size shows about the same monthly revenue and needs a station force much larger than Blinks's. For its leading industry is a paint factory, without siding facilities. Its products move in comparatively small individual boxes, requiring individual care and handling--that is the answer.

"You work long hours and hard hours?" you may demand of Blinks.

He shakes his head slowly.

"Long hours a good deal of the time, but not very often hard hours," he tells you. "My work is complicated and diverse but it is largely a case of having it organized."

Indeed it is complicated and diverse. There are only four pa.s.senger trains each day up and down the line, but the rush of freight is heavy, particularly at certain seasons of the year. And both of these functions of the railroad as they relate to Blinks's town come under his watchful eye. In addition, remember that he is the express agent and is paid a commission both on the business bound in and on the business bound out of his office, as well as the representative of the telegraph company. The telegraph company pays him nothing for handling its messages, but from the express company he will probably average forty-five dollars a month, particularly as his brisk county-seat town is one in which the small-package traffic does not greatly vary at any season of the year.

Down in the Southwest, where a great amount of foodstuffs moves out by express within a very few weeks there are men who may, in two months, take several hundred dollars, perhaps a check into four figures from the express company. The gateway to a summer resort is regarded as something of the same sort of a bonanza to the station agent. Still Blinks, if he would, could tell you of a man at a famous resort gateway who lost his job through it. The president of his road was a stickler for appearances. On a bright summer day when vacation traffic was running at flood tide, his car came rolling into the place. Word of it came to the station agent, but the station agent was lost in an avalanche of express way-bills. He should have been out on the platform in his pretty new cap and uniform. At least that was what the president thought. So nowadays that station agent gives all his time to the express way-bills. There is a new man for the cap and uniform, and when the president of that railroad arrives in the town he is greeted with sufficient formality.

As a matter of fact the express companies prefer to maintain offices wherever it is at all possible. The bonanza offices for the railroad agents are few and far between and when the railroad begins to find them it is apt to part. So Blinks can consider himself lucky that his commissions do not run over fifty dollars a month. That means that the express company will not attempt anything as suicidal as establishing its own office in Brier Hill and his own modest perquisite is not apt to be interrupted.

His is routine work and intricate work. He writes enough letters in a week to do credit to a respectable correspondence school and he makes enough reports in seven days to run three businesses. His incoming mail arrives like a flood. There are tariffs, bulletins, more tariffs, instructions, more tariffs, suggestions--and still more tariffs. The tariffs, both freight and pa.s.senger, are fairly encyclopedic in dimensions and the folks down at headquarters fondly imagine that he has memorized them. At least that seems to be their a.s.sumption if Blinks can judge from their letters.

Every department of the road requests information of him, and gets it. And when he is done with the railroad he realizes that he is violating biblical injunction and serving two masters, at least. For the express company is fairly prolific with its own tariffs and other literature. And the telegraph company has many things also to say to Blinks there in the old brick depot.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE STATION AGENT

He is the human tentacle of the railroad; the flesh-and-blood factor by which it keeps in touch with many, many thousands of patrons.]

Yet the wonder of it is that Blinks endures it all--not only endures but actually thrives under it. In a single hour while you are sitting in his dingy, homy little office just back of the ticket cage, you can see the press of work upon him. He has just finished a four-page report to the legal department, explaining the likelihood of the road's being able to stave off that demand for an overhead crossing just back of the town; there is a letter on his desk from the general freight agent asking him for a "picture" of the business at Brier Hill, which means a careful a.n.a.lysis of its industries and trade--not an easy job of itself. There is an express package of $25,000 in gold destined to a local bank, over in the corner of the ticket cage. Blinks keeps a bit of watchfulness for that "value package" down in the corner of his mind while a thousand things press in upon it. Number Four is almost within hearing when a young man and his wife appear at the window, baggage in hand, and demand a ticket via Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Sedalia to Muskogee. The young ticket clerk tears madly through a few dozen tariffs, scratches his head blankly--and Blinks has to jump into the breach. In thirty seconds he has the right tariff.

"I think the through one way is thirty-four sixteen," he smiles at the patrons, "but I had better look up and make sure."

His memory was right--but Blinks takes no chances.

"Can we get a stop-over at Urbana?" asks the woman.

The station agent dives into a tariff, after a moment nods "yes."