The Railroad Problem

that a goodly measure of responsibility rests upon his own broad shoulders. Yet your veteran railroad executive do

r brow. You do

at the traveling freight and passenger agents, all that solicitous company which travels through the highways and by

tly right-p

self have seen him many times making his way down the aisle of the car; stopping patiently beside each of his passengers-we use the phrase "his passengers" advisedly-greeting old friends with cheery nods; upholding the dignity of the railroad and his own authority-quietly, but none the less surely-time an

with the man with whom we have just ridden in the engine cab; but the engineer cannot very well make or lose business for his railroad unless he stops his train too sharply and too many ti

ble and then attempt a feeble and impotent smile when he asked her for her ticket? And did he, with a sublime myopia, pass her by without demanding that bit of pasteboard? Your old-time conductor knew the difference between impostors-even in skirts-and empty-pocketed folks to who

tern gone into the scrap heap in these days of electric-lighted cars, on most railroads has practically no opportunity to use his judgment in matters that pertain to the fares. If he

own farms or banks or grocery stores. They headed their own roads and they assumed an attitude toward their men, autocratic or benevolent as the case might be, but almost always distinctly personal. The railroad as a separate unit had not then grown beyond a point where that was possible and

our railroads a quarter of a century ago are thanking all the political gods of the United States of America that this law was placed upon the statute-books; but it can be read too literally, just as the conductor of a

s how atrocious are the facilities for crossing the river at almost any point between those two cities. This tired, nervous man planned to catch the last train of the afternoon down the West Shore Railroad from Albany to Kingston. Under normal conditions he had about thirty minutes' leeway in which to make the change; but on this occasion the Lake Shore Limited was a little more than thirty

-faced fellow, typical of that other generation of train captains that one often finds upon the older rai

at Poughkeepsie, I might slip off some way," he finally ven

tor did no

water or anything else," he said. "

irectly opposite Kingston. That seemed too good

ck train for anybody," he said quit

d the conductor, "and I'm its high judge. You lost out on your connection at Albany thr

ps of soliciting agents. The Kingston man crossed the river from Rhinecliff in a motor boat and thanked the road and its conductor for the service it had rendered him. He was a large shipper and his factory in

the man was not permitted to alight at Rhinecliff because he was anything more than a patron of the road. He had no political or newspaper affiliations to p

ous competitor. Each road had just conquered a mighty river by boring an electrically operated tunnel underneath it. The tunnel had been well advertised

a look at the under-river bore. He wanted to stand at the rear of the aisle and look through the door at the

pany's rules prohibit passenge

the rule book and went back to his seat-thoroughly cowed. But how different was the case on the other railroad, by which he returned from Chicago! This second time he went to the rear of the train, recalling his first experience an

t out on this rear platform and see the big job we've bee

you suppose this condu

ailroad executive who reads th

e studied the motions of the bricklayer and we're dabbling in efficiency. We've modeled our railroads after the best of the standing armies of Europe and we've begun to move m

t from the Middle West, from the rails of the Santa Fé, the Union Pacific, the Milwaukee roads, veteran conductors coming forward, who not only did not hesitate to speak their minds against the measure, but actually sought out injunctions aga

tep to eliminate the haphazard, wasteful, inefficient old school of personal railroading. Consolidation has effected some wonderful working advantages in the operation of our giant systems, and it is a grave question whether today, with the margin between income and operating cost constantly narrowing, if the eggs were unscrambled and the famous little old r

nductors ceased to know it and to love it as the Old Colony. To older conductors the Panhandle and the Lake Shore are still as real and as vital as if those beloved names sti

hough sometimes this last is a man's job by itself. He must bear in mind that Bible of the railroad-the time card-the place his train takes upon it; its relation to every other train, regular and special, on the line. His mind must be-every minute that he is on the road-a replica of the dispatcher's, working in perfe

relation as the conductor passes up or down the line. He may have extra cars to his train and an extraordinarily difficult crowd of passengers to handle, but he cannot for a moment ignore the most minut

OF THE TI

ness are quite as much parts

n figure; no railroads else

In Europe, the state railroads of Germany and of France, the short, congested lines of Great Britain have not his counterpart. He is a product both of our nationalism and of the hard necessity that has hedged him in. And, in passing, it is worthy of note that some of the men who sit today in the highest e

eved it. Once in a while you will find a railroad executive-like that stern old lion, Edward Payson Ripley, who brought the Santa Fé Railroad out of bankruptcy into affluence and became its president-who states his disbelief and states it so plainly that there can be no doubt as to its meaning. For a long time Ripley has seen the handwriting on the wall. And so seeing, he has had small patience with the weak-kneed compromise that invariably has followed the so-called recurrent crises between the four big brotherhoods of the railro

east, have always ended in wage adjustments of a decidedly upward trend, are apt to be staged on the eve of an important election. They invariably are accompanied

sing cost of living. He feels it distinctly, because an instinctive idea of the manufacturer or the distributor is to add on the transportation cost to his manufacturing and selling cost, with something more than a fair margin. Thus a general increase of five per cent in freight rates may only mean that it costs a fraction less than two cents more to ship a pair of shoes from Boston to Cleveland. But the manufacturer in Boston is tempted to add five cents to his selling cost-to cover not only the increase in transportation, but other manufacturing-cost increases, less definite in detail but appreciable in volume. The wholes

tween income and outgo is beginning to narrow. He has a family to rear, a home to maintain-a pride in both. In the course of a short time the men at the top of the brotherhoods feel this mass pressure from below. They must yield to it. If they do not, their positions and their prestige will be taken away from them. So they get together, decide on the amount of

ion labor and the executives of the railroads had come to an actual parting of the ways-and the country was to be turned from threats into the terrorizing actuality of a strike. Only Congress, which seems rarely able to realize that it

nt Wilson in

I take it for granted we are not prepared to introduce. But the proposal that the operation of the railways of the country shall not be stopped or interrupted by the concerted action of organized bod

is apt to be popular-quite the reverse is probable. There are employers of a certain type, also employees of a certain type, whose bitterness against any fair measure of arbitration is unyielding. The great railroa

these are the types of railroad chiefs who are beginning to disappear under the new order of things in America. Theirs was another and somewhat

road, as well as to every other form of industrial enterprise. I am referring to the average citizen-the man who stands to lose, and to lose heavi

rt already and it has brought us nowhere. We had arbitration of the uncompulsory sort before the critical days at the end of last August. In the final course of eve

a thin veil for failure. And failure means that the whole thing must be gone ove

an inside the railroad whom no strong brotherhood organization, no gifted, diplomatic leader of men protects? It is this last class-the unorganized labor of the railroad, that I want you to consider for a little time. It is obviously unfair, from any broad economic standpoint, that these men, far outnum