FILE NUMBERS.

Letters From A Railway Official

LETTER I.

A WORD OF CONGRATULATION.

March 20, 1904.

My Dear Boy:—The circular announcing your appointment as division superintendent has just been received, and it brings up a flood of thoughts of former years. I felt that you had made a mistake in leaving us to go with the new system, but it has turned out all right. I can appreciate the fact that you would rather work away from me, so as to make people believe that you can go up the official hill without having a pusher behind you.

This should be one of the proudest periods of your life. You are now in a position to do good to your company, to your fellow man, and incidentally to yourself. No matter how highly organized a road may be, the importance of the office of division superintendent is in direct proportion to the ability and earnestness of the incumbent. The position is little or big, restricted or untrammeled, just as you make it. Many a superintendent has had to double the hill of a swelled knob, and run as a last section into the next promotion terminal. You have too much of your mother's good sense ever to cause anybody else to put up signals for you on this account. Therefore do not lose your democratic manner. Keep your heart warm and regard the wider field as an opportunity to get more friends on your staff. Try to call every employe in your territory by name, as Cæsar did his soldiers; for all the traffic of goodwill must run in a direction toward you if you want maximum results, as they call efficiency nowadays. Good old rule 121 of the standard code says: "When in doubt take the safe course and run no risks," which, in the case of acquaintance, means if uncertain whether you know a man or not, speak to him and give him the glad hand anyway. You will have to discipline men, but that can be done without parting company with your good manners. Remember that the much-abused word "discipline" comes from the same root as the word "disciple," a pupil, a learner, a follower. It is always easier to lead men than to drive them.

When you go over the division do not try to see how many telegrams you can send, but how few. It is usually a pretty safe rule after writing a telegram on the hind end of a train to carry it by two or three stations to see if you would rather not take it back to the office yourself. The dispatchers used to tell your old dad that they couldn't have told he was out on the line as far as his messages were an indication. Another thing, do not try to plug your whistle and muffle your bell. Let everybody know you are coming. The "Old Sleuth" stunt is for criminals, not for honest employes. Be on hand so frequently that your coming is taken as a matter of course. Never hunt quail with a brass band, but bear in mind that men, unlike quail, rather like to perch on a band wagon. If you are tempted to wait behind box cars to see if the men on a night pony have gone in the hay, do not yield, but get out, see that the switches are lined up, and count the ties in front of the headlight until somebody gives her steam; just as Napoleon walked post for the sleeping sentinel. Then, if you administer a polite jacking up it will be twice as effective, even if the delay to the work that one time has continued. Remember that things are not as they should be, and it is probably your own fault if, under normal conditions, a particular movement depends upon your personal efforts. Any routine action that you take should be calculated to help many trains, or one train many times; or to help many men, not merely the trains or men in question. It is all right, in emergencies, to jump in and do the work of a conductor, of an engineman, of a switch tender, or of any other employe. The great trouble is in discriminating between an emergency and a defect which can better be remedied in some other way. The smaller the caliber of the official the more numerous the emergencies to his mind.

You should try to arrange your work so as to stay up all night at least once a week, either in the office, or better, on the road or in the yards. You will keep better in touch with the men and the things for which you, asleep or awake, are always responsible. You remember when your sister Lucy was little how we asked her why she said her prayers at night but usually omitted them in the morning. Her answer which so tickled you was, "I ask God to take care of me at night, but I can take care of myself in the daytime." It is much the same way with a railroad. From your point of view it will take pretty fair care of itself as a daylight job, but at night that proposition loses its rights. The youngest dispatcher, by virtue of being the senior representative awake, is to a certain extent general manager. The least experienced men are in the yards and roundhouses. The ever-faithful sectionmen are off the right of way. The car inspector's light and the engineman's torch are poor substitutes for the sun in locating defects. The most active brains are dulled by the darkness just before dawn. Then it is that a brief hour may side-track or derail the good work of many days. It is this responsibility, this struggle with nature, this helping God to work out the good in men, that makes our profession noble and develops qualities of greatness in its members.

Next time I shall try to tell you something about helping your train dispatchers.

With a father's blessing, ever your own,

D. A. D.

LETTER II.

HELPING THE TRAIN DISPATCHERS.

March 27, 1904.

My Dear Boy:—I promised in my last to say something about helping your train dispatchers. The way to help any man is first to encourage him and by showing that you appreciate his good qualities give him confidence in himself. When you come in off the road tell the dispatcher, if such be the case, "Nice meeting point you made yesterday for 15 and 16; I was there and they both kept moving almost like double track." If your division has been badly handled, the dispatcher, unaccustomed to such appreciation, will at first think this is a sarcastic prelude to having the harpoon thrown into him; but your sincerity will soon disabuse his mind of such a notion. Sarcasm in official intercourse or toward one's subordinates should never be tolerated. It is an expensive kind of extra that should never be run. When you praise a man it will add to his good feeling if some one else happens to be present. If you have to censure anyone, whether directly or through the channels, do it privately and spare the recipient all unnecessary humiliation. The official who remembers to mention good work will find his rebukes and criticisms much more effective in remedying poor work than the official whose theory and practice are to take up failures and to let successes be taken for granted.

Another way to help a man is to lead him away from the pitfalls that are peculiar to his path of work. The official who is an old dispatcher has to fight in himself the temptation to be the whole cheese. He has to learn to trust subordinates with details. Every position entails some inherent temptations. The absolute, unquestioned authority given a dispatcher in train movements breeds a temptation to be autocratic and unreasonable, to put out too many orders, to give too many instructions. Therefore, try to get your dispatchers in touch with your crews. If the former are in a skyscraper uptown, get authority to build an office for them at the terminal where most of the crews live. Personal contact is much better than long-distance communication by wire. There is enough of the latter from the very nature of the business without causing an unnecessary amount by artificial conditions.

The temptation of a legislator is to make too many laws; of a doctor to prescribe too much medicine; of an old man to give too much advice; and of a train dispatcher, once more, to put out too many orders. It used to be thought by some that the best dispatcher was the one who put out the most orders. The later and better idea is that, generally speaking, the best dispatcher puts out the fewest orders. It is always easier to give orders of any kind than it is to execute them. It is a far cry from an O.S. on a train sheet to getting a heavy drag into a sidetrack and out again. It often takes longer to stop a train and get an order signed and completed than the additional time given in the order amounts to. Even a judicious use of the beneficent nineteen order involves more or less delay. One of the lessons a dispatcher has to learn is to know when he is up against it; when he has figured badly; and when not to make a bad matter worse by vainly trying to retrieve a hopeless delay. A good dispatcher will know without being told that he has made a poor meeting point. Educate him to consider that as an error to be avoided under like conditions in the future; not as a mistake to be made worse by putting out more orders that may fail to help the stabbed train enough, and may result in having every fellow on the road delayed. If any train must be delayed, let it be one that is already late rather than one that is on time. Above all get the confidence of your dispatchers so that they will not try to cover up their own mistakes or those of others. Teach them that, in the doubtful event of its becoming necessary, the superintendent is able to do the covering up act for the whole division.

Every superintendent and higher official should remember that if the same train order is given every day there must be something radically wrong with the time table. All over this broad land, day after day, hundreds of unnecessary train orders are being sent because many time tables are constructed on the models of forty years ago. At that time, in fact as in name, there were two classes of trains, passenger and freight. To-day there are in reality at least two distinct classes of passenger trains and two classes of freights, or at least four in all. On most of the roads in the country passenger trains of whatever nature or importance are all shown in one class, the first. As a result every limited train in the inferior direction on single track has to be given right by train order over opposing local passenger trains in the superior direction. In other words, the working time table, by definition a general law, has no more practical value, as between such trains, than an advertising folder. A train order by its very nature is an exception to the general law, the time table. When the exception becomes the rule it is high time to head in or to put out a thinking flag. Some years ago your old dad after much persuasion induced his superiors to let him make four classes of trains on a pretty warm piece of single track. The result directly and indirectly was to reduce the number of train orders by twenty or twenty-five per day. Every train order given increases the possibility of mistake and disaster; the fewer the orders the safer the operation. The change was made without even an approach to a mistake or the semblance of disaster. The dispatchers being less occupied were able to give more attention to local freights, and the general efficiency of the train service was greatly increased. The wires could go down and the most important trains would keep moving. It has stood the test of years and if the old method were resumed a grievance committee would probably wait on the management.

Successful politicians and public speakers have long since learned not to disgust their hearers by trying to talk in language ridiculously simple and uncultured. For us to say that the intelligent employes of to-day cannot keep in mind four or even five classes of trains is to confuse them with the comparatively illiterate men of a bygone generation. The public school and the daily newspaper have made a part of our problem easier. We are paying higher wages than ever before, but is it not partly our own fault if we fail to get full value received?

Therefore, see if your time tables appeal to tradition or to reason; if they belong to a period when women wore hoopskirts, or to a time when women ride wheels and play golf. In brief, before you take the stylus to remove the dirt ballast from the dispatcher's eye, be sure that there are no brakebeams stuck in your own headlight.

Affectionately, your own

D. A. D.

LETTER III.

HANDLING A YARD.

April 3, 1904.

My Dear Boy:—You have asked me to give you some pointers on handling a yard. You will find that nearly all situations in a yard hark back to one simple rule, which is: When you get hold of a car move it as far as possible toward its final destination before you let go of it.

The training of a switchman is usually such that, if let alone, he will stick the car in the first convenient track and wait to make a delivery until he can pull every track in the yard and put with it all other cars with the same cards or marks. By this time some other fellow with a similar honesty of purpose but differently applied will come along and bury the car or block the first man in so that one engine has to stand idle. A yardmaster has to learn to keep his engines scattered and to hold each foreman responsible for the work of an engine. A good yardmaster knows instinctively where to be at a certain time to minimize the delay incident to engines bunching. The old switchman who becomes a yardmaster often proves a failure because he cannot overcome his inclination to follow one engine and take a hand in the switching himself. By so doing he may perhaps increase the work accomplished by that one engine, possibly five per cent; but in the meantime the other engines, for want of comprehensive, intelligent instructions, are getting in each other's way and the efficiency of the day's service is decreased maybe twenty per cent.

Good yardmasters are even harder to discover or develop than good train dispatchers. The exposure, the irregular hours for the yardmaster's meals in even the best regulated yards make a good conductor leery about giving up a comfortable run to assume the increased responsibility of a yard. The pay of a yardmaster is little more than that of a conductor and is sometimes less. Right here is a chance for some deep administrative thought. It is so much easier to get good conductors than good yardmasters, should we not make the latter position more attractive? Some roads have done this by making it one of the positions from which to promote trainmasters, and seldom have such appointees fallen down. However, there are hardly enough promotion loaves and fishes to go around. Men get tired of living on skimmed milk on earth for the sake of promised cream in heaven. Every switch engine worked costs the company several hundred dollars per month, and the yardmaster whose good figuring can save working even one engine is more than earning his salary.

The closer you can get your yardmasters to your official family the better your administration. Pick up a yardmaster occasionally and take him to headquarters with you so that he will keep acquainted with the dispatchers. This will hold down friction and save the company's good money. A dispatcher naturally wants to get all the trains he can into a terminal, while a yardmaster is doing his level best to get trains out. With such radically different points of professional view there is a big opportunity for the superintendent and the trainmaster to do the harmonizing act, to keep pleasantly before employes the fact that all are working for the same company, that all do business with the same paymaster. Blessed are the peacemakers doesn't mean necessarily there must first be trouble. Peace carried in stock is better than that manufactured on hurry-up shop orders.

If you are looking for talent to run a yard, consider some ambitious dispatcher. Too few dispatchers have become yardmasters. The same cool head, the same quick judgment, the same executive ability are needed in both positions. The man who has successfully filled both is usually equipped to go against almost any old official job, without having to back up and take a run for the hill. The curse of modern civilization is over-specialization. The world grows better and produces stronger, better men all the while. Perhaps this is in spite of rather than on account of highly specialized organization. No industry can afford to be without the old-fashioned all around man who is good anywhere you put him.