Letters from an old railway official/Letter 11
LETTER XI.
PREVENTING WRECKS BEFORE THEY HAPPEN.
My Dear Boy:—An able and successful general manager—not all able men and not all general managers are successful—recently called attention to a most important distinction in the training and practice of superintendents. He says that too much stress is laid upon the development of ability to locate responsibility after a wreck occurs, and not enough upon the quality of controlling circumstances, of cultivating precautionary habits that will prevent disaster. As he aptly puts it, the superintendent should be a doctor, a health officer, rather than a coroner; his staff a sanitary commission, a board of health to prevent disease rather than a jury to determine its causes and effects. Some superintendents pride themselves on their legal acumen, their ability to cross-examine, and on the way they can catch a crew trying to lie out of a mix-up. This is all very well if it does not obscure the main object, namely, to minimize disaster in the future. The investigation serves, perhaps, to determine what men to discipline and discharge as an example to others in the service. It should also serve as a lesson in official methods. However thorough and searching, it cannot restore life or return property. The damage has been done. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put Humpty-Dumpty together again.
Some of your men every day will give you the old hot air, “As long as there are railroads there will be wrecks.” To which you should hand back the stereotyped reply, “Very true, but let’s figure on letting the other fellow have them.” A discreet remark or suggestion that will put a man to thinking for himself is one of the secrets of success in handling men. Never miss an opportunity to make the point that wrecks seldom occur from the neglect of any one man. It is when two or more forget at the same time or fall down together that trouble results. Impress on the brakeman the fact that the very stop he neglects to flag is the time when the operator is most likely to let two trains in the same block. Remind your conductor that when he fails to read the orders to the engineman in person and sends them forward by the porter or the head brakeman, that is the very trip the orders get torn or smeared so that a fatal mistake results. When a passenger train breaks in two the air usually sets on both portions. It fails to do so when bums or misplaced safety chains have turned the angle cocks; and that is the time there should be a trainman riding in the rear car. Men will tell you so and so cannot happen, but next week it does happen just the same. The whistle hose and the brake hose cannot be coupled together because the connections are purposely made of a different pattern. A green apprentice coupling an engine to a tender at a roundhouse managed to pound together the couplings of the wrong pairs of hose, which the engine inspector had failed to notice were badly worn. That was the day the car inspectors neglected to try the signal and the air before the train left the terminal. By a strange fatality the conductor trusted the car men for the station test. The engineman was too busy to make a running-test. They all got wise when the air wouldn’t work at the first railroad crossing. Watch the inspectors to see that they do not form the lazy habit of giving the signal to try the air from the next to the last car, of walking only half the length of the train to see the pistons and the brakeshoes. Never wink at an irregularity of that sort. It will come back to plague you a hundredfold. Go right after it quietly, but promptly and effectually. Do not wait for disaster or for investigation by your superiors to tell you that a loose practice prevails. Get such information with your own senses or from observations of your staff.
It is vigilance, eternal vigilance, that is the price of safety. Teach your men that a hundred successes do not justify an avoidable failure, that twenty years of faithful service cannot condone criminal carelessness. A fundamental is that when backing up there should always be a man on the rear end. Educate your men to feel that neglect of this wise precaution is just as mortifying as to appear in public without clothes. In shoving long cuts of cars without using air, get your brakemen and switchmen to feel a pride in setting a hand brake on the end car to take the slack and save the jerk on the drawbars. Work for the old-time feeling of chagrin that came to the calloused-armed passenger brakeman, in the days of Armstrong brakes, when he did not go after them soon enough and let his train run by the station. The men are not to blame for this loss of pride and interest. We, the officials, are at fault. We have not kept ahead of the game. We have been coroners, not sanitary inspectors.
If an engine is waiting at a hand derail or at a crossover for a train, neither switch should be thrown until the train has passed. Then, if the throttle happens to fly open at just the wrong moment, the train will not be sideswiped. If not trained, your switchmen will throw every switch possible beforehand so as to be ready. They may think such precautions are old womanish, but the time will come when your wisdom will be vindicated. If a train is waiting for a connection, with a siding switch in rear, the facing point switch should be opened, so that if the incoming man loses his air or misjudges distances the train will not be hit. Similarly a flagman going back to protect a train between switches should open the siding switch as he passes it. The switch is more effectual than a torpedo, and if a following train happens to get by him and his torpedoes his own train will not be hit. He should flag just the same, because a train entering the open switch too fast might turn over. It is better to take a chance on a derailment than on a collision. It is better still to have such training, vigilance and discipline that there will be little chance of either disaster.
Train your men to do things because they are right, because it is manly to do good railroading. Then, when you hold an investigation you will not find at the moment the accident happened that the engineman was priming his injector, the fireman putting in a fire, the head brakeman shoveling down coal, the conductor sorting his bills, and the hind man starting to boil coffee for supper.
There is hardly a conductor or an engineman of any length of service who has not at some time overlooked an order or a train. When he has forgotten, his partner has remembered. The trouble has come, bad luck, they call it, when they both forgot. Many a $50 operator has saved the job of a $150 engineman. Keep your men keyed up to the idea that this is too uncertain; that each must watch his own job, that in so doing he may keep his comrade out of the hole, that by conscientious vigilance he becomes a better man and more of a credit to his calling. No man wilfully courts danger to life and property. His failures are an accompaniment, a concomitant they call it in logic, of officials being better coroners than they are doctors.