Letters from an old railway official (second series)/Letter 15
LETTER XV.
THE SIZE OF AN OPERATING DIVISION.
My Dear Boy:—How many miles of road should one division superintendent handle? Like the old lady’s recipe for pie crust, it all depends. Some superintendents in the east with two hundred miles handle as much business as do their western brothers with a thousand. As a matter of fact mileage has little to do with the question. On the ideal division the superintendent is in the middle with territory extending one freight district in each direction. If he happens to be at a hub he can comfortably handle several freight district spokes, which will increase his mileage accordingly. Under such a condition the advantages of a seemingly large mileage are numerous. The superintendent can run his power wherever most needed. He can hold back at the farther end of one district cars that he knows the connecting district cannot possibly load or unload for several days. He can preserve a balance which is impossible when jurisdictions divide at the hub. In the latter case each superintendent hurries freight to the end of the division to avoid a paper record showing delay on his territory. The result is that the next man has terminal indigestion because he has been fed too fast. Therefore, divisional jurisdiction should, when possible, change at an outlying district terminal away from a large city. This avoids the added complication due to industrial switching, suburban trains, restricted area, etc., etc. A congestion of cars is often caused by a congestion of jurisdictions. You may avoid the one by diffusing the other. Several roads in the country have saved heavy expenditures for larger terminal facilities by more scientific organizations.
The amount of mileage a superintendent can economically handle depends, then, for the most part upon the location of his headquarters. Such location in turn admits of no hard and fast rule. Cities and towns spring up and industries develop quite regardless of the limits of a hundred-mile freight district and a speed of ten miles per hour on the ruling grade. A railroad usually begins and ends at a large city which is either a seaport or a gateway. It is normally better to locate a division superintendent at such beginning and ending city. He can then handle its terminals and the one or more diverging freight districts. His division should include the terminal at the farther end of such districts, to afford him opportunity both to hold back stuff whose inopportune arrival might congest the more complicated terminals at headquarters and to relieve such terminals promptly by movement outward. In other words, owing to his important terminals this superintendent should have less mileage than his country brother who would be in the middle between the second and third districts.
Some roads try to solve the problem by giving the superintendent the first and second districts with headquarters in the middle. If in such case the general offices happen to be at the initial point they soon ignore the superintendent and do business direct with his terminal subordinates. When this condition becomes intolerable, one of two things usually happens. Perhaps the superintendent’s office is moved to the first terminal where it really belongs. Thereupon he loses full touch with his freight crews on the second district, which is left out in the air. The other attempted remedy is to appoint a superintendent of terminals reporting direct to the general offices. The difference in viewpoint thus legalized may cost the stockholders much money. To the terminal superintendent the trains are always made up on time and the power and road crews are seldom ready. To the division superintendent the trains are seldom made up on time and the power and road crews are always ready. Much energy of both officials and their offices as well as that of the general superintendent and his office is then directed to holding useless post mortems and negotiating unnecessary treaties of peace. Remember, my boy, that typewriters exert no tractive power and explanations move no cars. Self-preservation is the first law of nature. We must so organize that this law will operate to keep the company into clear, not to put some other fellow in the hole. All of these questions are largely matters of opinion. After working with every kind of terminal organization all over the country, your old dad believes that the best is to have a division superintendent at the big terminal with an assistant superintendent in direct charge of and responsible for such terminal, the superintendent controlling every diverging freight district to include the next terminal.
It should always be remembered that a large terminal demands preferred consideration, because owing to restricted area its problems are intensive and expensive. A dispatcher has a hundred miles or more over which to keep his trains apart, while a yardmaster finds his engines bunched within a mile or two. Again, if the cost of terminal switching does occasionally happen to be reflected in a freight rate, the genial gentlemen of the traffic department are prone to recommend its absorption. I believe as a broad proposition that the management of railroads is more scientific than that of most modern industries. I would not like, however, to file much of their terminal operation as an exhibit. A majority of the switch engines in the United States have one superfluous man in the crew. This is partly because so few operating officials have sufficient practical knowledge of switching to go out and intelligently handle a crew all day. If you don’t believe this, make some time and motion studies of switching. Compare the relative performance of your yard conductors. The tasks of road conductors are relatively so well defined that comparison of individual performance is not so difficult. The intense conditions of a terminal complicate such differentiation as among yard conductors.
Another factor of prime importance in determining the size of an operating division is the location of train dispatchers. The dispatcher’s table should always be considered an integral part of the superintendent’s headquarters offices. The train sheet is perhaps the best record on a railroad. It is never fudged by being made up in advance. It is a history usually unimpeachable because it is so close to the actual transactions which it records. It deals with the essence of railway operation, train movement. Few are the important records on a railway that do not derive their primary data from the train sheet. The sheet may be graphic, like a daily time card chart, or may be cut up into card strips, as under the A B C system. In any form, it is a fundamental of operating history.
The number of dispatchers to which a division is limited is, like the number of miles, variable. With headquarters at the hub, one superintendent and one chief dispatcher may comfortably handle three or four sets of dispatchers. An outlying division with thin traffic may require only one set of dispatchers. When it becomes necessary to locate a set of dispatchers away from division headquarters, it is time to appoint another superintendent and create a new division, perhaps with only a light staff of all ’round officials. So important is the train sheet and so much of vital, human interest centers around a dispatcher’s office, that the far away superintendent must refer much correspondence to this detached portion of his office. The result is expensive circumlocution and a lack of human touch. The superintendent has in effect become a general superintendent too far away from real things. A trainmaster or a chief dispatcher is really carrying the responsibility of a superintendent without the title and authority necessary for smooth administration. I know several railways that are fooling themselves into the belief that they are saving money by having one superintendent for two dispatching offices. One of them has five superintendents and ten dispatching offices, really ten divisions in fact, if not in name. By a logical arrangement of territory these ten dispatching offices could be consolidated into seven division headquarters and the road operated in seven divisions. In these days of overtime and complex working schedules, a timekeeper should check the time slips against the original train sheet, not against a copy, a transcript or an excerpt. A division accounting bureau handling all that it should handle has also much other use for the train sheet.
Second only in importance to the train sheet as a record, and with which it should be closely related, is the conductor’s car and tonnage report; what the men call the wheel report. This important report made by a division man is sent to a remote general office in disregard of the responsible head of such division, the superintendent. The result is that a distant authority, the superintendent of transportation, is telling the superintendent that certain cars are being delayed on the latter’s division. This profuse correspondence is often foolish, because meantime the cars have actually gone. Some roads now have a carbon copy of the wheel report made for the use of the accounting department. Why not send this carbon to division headquarters and let the division accounting bureau make up the ton miles and the car miles, subject to proper check after the fact? Why not have the office of the superintendent know so much about the cars on his division that he will tell the general offices that certain cars are being delayed on his division for lack of motive power, loading or disposition, conditions which, perhaps, the general office, with its larger view, can remedy? This would also permit, when desirable, the checking of the agents’ car reports against the conductors’ reports. The more closely to actual transactions we can do our checking the more intelligent should be the process and the smaller its volume.
I wish that you would come out here and see the Southern Pacific run its monthly supply, pay and inspection train. Before coming, re-read my letter to you on the subject some seven years ago. I know of no place where the idea has been better carried out. Ideas seldom originate with any one man. They seem rather to float around in the air. They are pulled down by those who happen to erect lightning rods or like Benjamin Franklin to fly kites. To vary the metaphor, do not laugh at people who ride hobbies. Sometimes they ride well enough and far enough to demonstrate that the hobby is a real horse. Then it is the turn of the horse to laugh.
Whenever I see an announcement that a division has adopted the telephone for train dispatching, I always feel that there should be an accompanying apology for being several years behind the times. For years progressive young railway men advocated the telephone only to be assured by old-time dispatcher officials of the unwisdom of such a course. Time and practical tests have shown that not only is the telephone practicable for dispatching, but it actually makes operation safer because of the increased human touch. Whenever and wherever we can replace a specialist with an all ’round man we are gaining.
The first train dispatching is said to have been done by Charles Minot when a superintendent on the Erie in the early fifties. So seriously was the matter taken that only the superintendent himself could issue a train order, even though this involved calling him out of bed. Hence the foolish feudal custom of signing the superintendent’s initials to all train orders. It soon developed that a regular dispatcher was necessary. Accordingly, a conductor, a man who knew how trains were practically handled, was taken off the road and brought to the superintendent’s office to dispatch trains. Stop off at Port Jervis, N. Y., some time and in a local hotel see the portraits of some of these old Erie dispatcher-conductors, their dignity being protected by the tall beaver hats of the period. The dispatcher not being a telegrapher, he wrote out his orders and handed them to a young operator to send. This operator was a bright fellow, who, by and by, graduated into a dispatcher, able to send his own orders and often to do the work previously requiring both men. Too often it has happened that the experience of the new dispatcher, a telegrapher specialist, was limited to the office end, with no first-hand experience in train service. The telephone, fulfilling the immutable laws of evolution, will take us back to first principles. The dispatchers of the future will graduate from the train, engine and yard service, through the dispatcher’s office to higher official positions. The man who gives the order will be a man who has once carried out such an order himself. The man below will obey the more cheerfully and the more intelligently because of increased confidence in the man above.
When the record is made up by the future historian, with that discriminating perspective which time alone can give, high will be the place accorded the railroad officials and employes of America. The military, the pioneers of civilization, the forerunners of stability, have their periods of enervating peace. Transportation, the first handmaiden of progress, is in active attendance every day of the year. Those who worship at her shrine and follow her teachings must lead the strenuous life and love the voice of duty. The splendid, virile performance of the past, handicapped often by crude facilities and forced expansion, must and will be eclipsed under the intense, trying conditions of the present and the future. In no profession more than in ours is there eternity of opportunity.