Letters from an old railway official/Letter 13
LETTER XIII.
THE FRIEND-MILE AS A UNIT OF MEASURE.
My Dear Boy:—Your chief dispatcher blew through here the other day on his vacation and dropped in to pay his respects. He rather apologized for so doing, as he seemed to think it might be considered an intrusion to call on a stranger. I took it as a compliment to myself and as a mark of his loyalty to you. It is so easy for us old fellows to forget that we were once junior officials ourselves that I rather like to keep in touch with those who are to come after and maintain the time-honored standards of the profession. I never like to say very much about my desire to acquire information from everyone I meet, for experience has made me a little leery of the man who whistles too long for that station. He is apt to toot his own horn so much that he doesn’t hear the other fellow’s signals. So I tried not to do all the talking, and did not tell my guest of the great improvements I had made since I came to this position. I preferred to let him hear that from someone else. If one should take too literally the talk of the officials on whom he calls he would wonder how the road ever ran before each held down his particular job; how there can possibly be any improvement made by those who come after. No, I do not advocate hiding one’s light under a bucket in the cab all the time—only when running.
The world is getting to place more and more confidence in the man who thinks out loud. It trusts him because he is not doubtful of himself. The stunt of looking wise and not expressing an opinion when a suggestion is made is no longer popular. A non-committal promise to look into the matter may be construed as a mask for ignorance or timidity. The more a man knows the more frankly he acknowledges that a certain idea is new to him. Men to whom talking and writing do not come easy sometimes say beware of the windy man, but there are some mighty efficient railroaders who act and perform all the better for being able to handle words. Hot air is all right if properly compressed. The idle breeze dries the ground and runs windmills. Sand bites the rail in more economical quantities when fed down by the pneumatic attachment. Every division has its Windy Bill, its Chattering Charlie, its Gasbag George; but some way, when they are on the road you always feel safe. They may work a con game on some of the agents and dispatchers, but they get over the road with the local. You feel good when you meet them. The man you want to run from is Calamity Jake, who always has a tale of woe as long as a gravel train. His caboose rides rough; its stove smokes; the caller doesn’t give him time enough for his wife to cook breakfast; the yardmaster saves all the shop cripples for his train; he can’t trust the ignorant engineers; the brakemen are all farmers, and the signal oil won’t burn. If you tell him that’s all right, that you wall try and correct all these things when the car accountant’s office stops kicking on his wheel reports, he will look at you in sympathetic sadness and bewail the modern tendency to make clerks of conductors.
Your chief dispatcher is a fine fellow and understands the art of getting away. He didn’t wear out his welcome but broke away while making a good impression. You have to unlock the switch for some men before they can couple their crossings and get out of town. The dispatcher has to send the operator outside with a clearance. Acquaintance is one of a young man’s most valuable assets, and a two minutes’ interview may grade the way for a lifelong run. Before the world was as good as it is now, men rather prided themselves on the number of enemies they had made. Nowadays the friend mile is a more desirable unit of measure.
Washington Irving puts it very prettily where he says, “for who is there among us who does not like now and then to play the sage?” So I felt rather flattered when your chief dispatcher asked me for advice as to what to study in order to get on in the railway world. I told him first of all to read every bit of company literature that he could get hold of; not to skim through a part of the pamphlet on refrigerator cars and guess at the rest. A table of freight rates may become interesting if properly approached. Do not try to memorize data and statistics, but rather plod through them at least once with a view to trying to master the principles that govern. Life is very full in this twentieth century, but, broadly speaking, it is still possible to know something of everything as well as everything of something. The day is coming when we will not entrust a man with the important duties and the great responsibilities of a division superintendent until we have given him a brief course in every department. We examine a man before we let him run an engine, but how about the man who runs him? A superintendent should know enough about an engine to handle the enginemen just as he does the trainmen. When we have men successfully running engines who can barely read and write, it is a mistake to claim that a locomotive is such a sacred mystery that only the mechanical department can judge whether or not it is properly handled. Enginemen are transportation men, and the time that master mechanics put in assigning crews, keeping an age book, and otherwise duplicating the superintendent’s work might a great deal better be given to the back shop. The yardmaster has one caller and the roundhouse foreman another. The two callers go up the same street, sometimes together, and call men in adjoining houses, an expensive duplication of work. The trainmaster rides in the caboose and the traveling engineer—road foreman is the modern term—in the engine, but neither dares presume to know the business of the other. Every trainmaster should be a traveling engineer and every traveling engineer should be a trainmaster. That will be the case when we train officials along more definite lines. Honey bees feed their future queen a special food. No, I would not decrease the number of officials, if anything I would increase it, I would not, however, let every official created have a chief clerk and a stenographer. I would make it impossible for him to yield to the temptation to add a bureau of records to the amount of useless information already on file. I wouldn’t lose my nerve if now and then a set of ancient papers got lost, for with less red tape quicker action would result and little would get away. The first time the trainmaster had to wait an hour or two before he could dictate a letter in the superintendent’s office, or could use a stenographer in his own office, he would beef for a separate establishment. If more help should be needed, which would be very doubtful, put it on, but do not limit its usefulness to any one official. With a proper, responsible head it is entirely feasible to carry the community of interest idea into office organization. If the division engineer is under the superintendent, why, in sending papers into the next room to him, write a letter and burden your files with the carbon of the stereotyped, “Kindly note next attached and lake necessary action?” Is not his office a part of the superintendent’s? Have you not the same right to papers there that you have to those in the office of the chief dispatcher? Why not go even further and have one chief clerk and one set of records for the whole outfit, just as an assistant superintendent can handle a part of the work without having a separate force? If you ever rearrange an office building, fix it so that the casual visitor waiting to see the boss will not learn state secrets by hearing the chief clerk dictate letters.
A number of roads have tried the experiment of putting the enginemen and the roundhousemen solely under the superintendent, and of confining the master mechanic to his proper function of running the shops. It has usually failed; not on account of inherent weakness as a system, but because the superintendent didn’t superintend, and found it too convenient to try to shift the responsibility to the mechanical department. Reform has to begin at the top, and if the division is to be the unit the superintendent must be something more than a high-class chief dispatcher finding flaws in train sheets. It is not enough for him to be a star division engineer, a boss yardmaster. He must remember that his holding of any of these positions is ancient history, not to be forgotten, because valuable and instructive, but nevertheless a thing of the past. As the yardmaster and the dispatcher must scatter their trains, so the superintendent must keep his staff doing different things. He must avoid having two men doing the same thing. If it is better to call the roundhouse foreman a master mechanic and invent a title for the man behind the back shop, let us do so; but by all means avoid working the master mechanic at present as foreman, head caller, road time-keeper and roundhouse clerk. The superintendent can boss all these jobs, and transportation, including its operating attributes, must focus at his office. It is not the superintendent who works the most hours who is the most successful. It is he who puts in the best licks at the right time, night or day, and with the right man or men.
I told your chief dispatcher that a knowledge of law is as important to a real superintendent as a knowledge of telegraphy. I advised him to give himself the pleasure of reading Cooley’s edition of Blackstone, which, if taken in homeopathic doses, is one of the clearest things in the language. Every superintendent gets to be more or less of a lawyer. It should not be necessary to refer every little fire or stock claim to the legal department for some of its students to render a profound opinion upon a matter of common sense. It is so easy to follow the line of least resistance that we too often evade responsibility by throwing up our hands and saying that such and such is a legal question, a mechanical matter, or a traffic problem. We gracefully pass it up to the other fellow, and think we are in to clear when an investigation happens to come. By and by, oblivious of the relation between cause and effect, we deplore the curtailment of our authority and inveigh against centralization.
I had some other ideas to set out for you, but we have drifted so near the switch that there is not room enough to make a drop of the caboose. So I shall either pull the whole train into the yard or get permission from the yardmaster to cut off on the main, and like an orthodox conductor, leave them for the night men to switch out. We conductors feel that, as a switch engine lies around the most of the time, it can always do at least one more job, besides having time to shove us out of the yard and over the hill.