Letters from an old railway official/Letter 24
LETTER XXIV.
THE ROUND-UP.
My Dear Boy:—When you have a conference of your staff, do not overlook the storekeeper. Even if he reports to the general storekeeper, he should be on your staff in somewhat the same relation to you as is the master mechanic who reports to the superintendent of motive power. If the management, in the last treaty of peace, has awarded the storekeeper to some other sovereignty, be foxy enough to invite him to be present for his own good. He will not decline to come. Then, when you are discussing work trains; when the master mechanic figures out the engines; the trainmaster, the crews; the roadmaster, the men; the chief dispatcher, the working hours; the whole arrangement will not fall down from lack of material which the storekeeper did not know about in time. Invite the storekeeper out on the road with you; drop in frequently at the storehouse and see if you cannot help him out of his difficulties. We all have our troubles. Do not proclaim your own inefficiency and narrowness by writing the general superintendent that your failure has been due to the store department falling down on material. Unless you have kept close to the game, you may find that you were lame in not giving sufficient warning; that the stuff was loaded in time but was delayed by the transportation department waiting for full tonnage.
When you get to be general manager, do not forget the general storekeeper. Keep close to him and take him out often. When you become operating vice-president, do the same with the purchasing agent, whose position, like that of the general storekeeper, is an evolution from a clerkship in some general office. Not all of us have realized the necessary elevation of these places to official status. They, too, have come to stay. They will survive even the awkwardness of their own titles. Would not “purchaser” or “buyer,” and “supplyman” or “supplier,” be better terms?
Speaking of inviting people to ride in your car. From operating vice-presidents down we do not avail ourselves sufficiently of the company of representatives of the accounting department. They do not and should not report to us. They, however, compile statistics from data which we furnish. We want to have our data in such good shape that they will not misinterpret. As they count our Australian ballots, it is important for us to know how to put the cross opposite the eagle or the rooster. On the other hand, the service will not suffer if we have a chance, on the ground, to show the inconsistency of some arbitrary requirements.
I carried by an idea in a recent letter. I asked the man on the opposite run to take it back; but he, too, had a big switch list and a time order. So it has been an over in the freight room until now I bill it free astray. The thought is that our organization should provide automatically, as in the army and the navy, for the next in rank available to assume the duties of an absent or incapacitated official. A superintendent has to be sick or absent for quite a long time before we designate an acting superintendent. We let the chief clerk sign for him, an absurd fiction if long continued. Why should not the assistant superintendent, or, if none, the trainmaster, sign as acting superintendent as a matter of course when the accidents of the service take the superintendent off the division? An assistant is really a deputy, although, with all our borrowing and mutilating of titles, we have not utilized the comprehensive qualification of “deputy.” The time is soon coming when we shall welcome the opportunity of making our organization elastic by giving understudies the title of acting so and so. As we grow in liberality we shall feel proud to lend one of our men to another road for a few months at a time to do special work or to introduce some new idea that he has developed. The other road will be glad to pay the man a good salary, and he will return to us all the broader and more valuable because of service elsewhere. We have been meantime training another man for any vacancy in the grade that may occur. By the same token, we shall by and by consider it a privilege to get back in our official family a man whom we trained to our ways in youth, but who has been broadened by service with different roads. We shall get over considering him as having lost his rights, as an unpardonable offender against our sacred civil service. There is never any affection stronger than our first real love.
As you master the details of your profession, as you carry out loyally the policies of your management, keep in mind the possibility of radical changes. We shall not forever keep up the absurdity of a Pullman conductor’s snap and a train conductor’s busy job. When we each own at least the sleeping and parlor cars local to our own rails, the conductor will run the train and perhaps work the sleepers, while a collector will work the coaches and chair cars. When oil burners and automatic stokers have revolutionized the fireman’s duties, when train orders are unknown, when the position or color of a signal is the only instruction, we may transfer the command of the train to one of the men in the engine. When we so protect our trains by block signals or other devices that to send back a flag is an absurdity, our trainmen will become starters, and perhaps collectors, with duties not dissimilar to those of guards on elevated roads. When the much-needed motor car for suburban and branch service is perfected, other changes will come. You may not live to see electricity displace steam for heavy motive power, but you had better not gamble all your life insurance on such a proposition.
The tendency has been to limit all the utilities of a railroad to transportation. Before long we shall, for a time at least, be going to the opposite extreme. Some of us have entered the pension and life insurance business, some own coal mines directly or indirectly. Should we not manufacture our own ice at various points as needed and cut out some haul? Should we not control the banks in the cities and towns where we disburse so much money? Why not grain elevators and industrial plants? Can we afford to manufacture relatively fewer of our own appliances than that comprehensive organization, the Standard Oil Company? These questions cannot be answered easily or by a simple yes or no. They all depend upon time and circumstance. Our trouble has been a fundamental error in reasoning, a dogmatic generalization from too few particular cases. Stagnation is usually death to business. As we cannot back up, it would seem wise to be ready to move forward in power and influence. Ours is a high destiny. The railway officials of the future will never be without knotty propositions to tackle. They will not have to work as long hours as we, but their problems will be more intense. The injector saves the drudgery of jacking up an engine to pump her, but it does not warrant sitting down while waiting for the steam derrick.
Through all the improvements, real or imaginary, through all the changes that the years may bring, bear in mind the human element. Although the race grows better all the time, the old Adam and Eve will be ever present in all of us. High explosives, armor plate, modern weapons, modify the conditions of war, but as the Japs and Russians are teaching us to-day we can never do entirely without the individual initiative, without the courage necessary for the hand-to-hand conflict. Some may deplore this condition, but, in the words of the Salvation Army lassie, I thank God for it.
For a period covering some thirty years, beginning and ending over a hundred years ago, an English nobleman and statesman, the Earl of Chesterfield, man of letters, wrote a series to his son. The morals inculcated are hardly acceptable in this better age. The manners taught, the art of pleasing so attractively set forth, have a value to-day, have made the term Chesterfield a synonym for grace. Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son were collected to the number of nearly five hundred and published in book form. He has had many imitators, and I confess to being one of them. Whether or not he borrowed the idea from some ancient father I have never sent a tracer to find out. Now that you and I are to be near enough for heart-to-heart talks, my weekly letters will cease. Whether or not they shall be preserved in book form it is up to you to say.