Confessions of a Railroad Signalman (1908)

CONFE OF A JAMES O. FAGAN %1° Pv CONFESSIONS OF A RAILROAD SIGNALMAN Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from Microsoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/confessionsofraiOOfagauoft v Ik u|K& * v. ?i,;"yirq/t CONFESSIONS OF A RAILROAD SIGNALMAN BY J. O. FAGAN WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY (3TI)e fiivjcrs'i&c press Cambridge 1908 COPYRIGHT I908 BY J. O. FAGAN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published October iqo& CONTENTS I. A Railroad Man to Railroad Men i II. The Men 26 III. The Management 47 IV. Loyalty 69 V. The Square Deal 95 VI. The Human Equation 118 VII. Discipline 149 ILLUSTRATIONS A Typical Smash-Up Frontispiece A Head-On Collision 26 A Yard Wreck 52 A Typical Derailment 82 A Rear-End Collision 112 What Comes from a Misplaced Switch 132 Down an Embankment in Winter 150 The Aftermath 176 Acknowledgment is due to the proprietors of Collier's Weekly and of the Boston Herald for their courteous loan of the photo- graphs from which the above illustrations have been engraved. CONFESSIONS OF A RAILROAD SIGNALMAN A RAILROAD MAN TO RAILROAD MEN Considering the nature and intent of the fol- lowing essays on the safety problem on American railroads, some kind of a foreword will not be out of place. As much as possible I wish to make this foreword a personal presentation of the subject. But in order to do this in a satisfactory manner, it will be necessary to take a preliminary survey of the situation and of the topics in which we, as railroad employees, are all personally interested. In the industrial world of to-day, the railroad man occupies a position altogether different from the ordinary run of workers in factories or machine shops. On account of the nature and importance of our calling we are constantly in the public eye. By way of encouragement and as an incentive to good service, public opinion accords to us certain distinct- ive privileges. That there may be no excuse for laxity of conduct or inefficiency of service, we are looked upon in many ways as wards of the state and the nation. Not only are the hardships we endure 2 A RAILROAD MAN TO RAILROAD MEN and the dangers we are called upon to face matters in which the public is profoundly interested, but all details relating to our wages and to our treatment by railroad corporations have always been considered by the American people as topics in the discussion of which they are at all times intimately concerned. Glancing backward at the history of railroad life in America, it is easy to perceive that this public sympathy and encouragement has been the strong right arm that has supported the railroad employee in a long-drawn-out struggle for the bettering of his social and financial condition. In some direc- tions and in some branches of the service, the issues at stake have been bitterly contested, but the final results are probably unexampled among the suc- cessful achievements of organized labor. Not only numerically and financially, but also as regards the intelligence and education of its units, the railroad service to-day stands in the foremost position among the great industrial institutions of the country. The nature of the service we railroad men render to the public in return for these benefits is most im- i portant, and, under present conditions, extremely dangerous. Some idea of the hazardous nature of our occupation may be gathered from the facts that, in a single year, one employee in every 364 was killed, and one in every 22 was injured. In the A RAILROAD MAN TO RAILROAD MEN 3 ranks of engineers, firemen, conductors, and brake- men, one in every 123 was killed and one in every 10 was injured. This is about the average record of recent years. It means, of course, an appalling number of accidents, and these accidents are mani- festly an eloquent reflection of the risks to which the traveling public is constantly exposed. In many ways humanity is indebted to the railroad man to as great a degree as to the sailor. The latter, indeed, has greater hardships to endure ; he is not nearly so well paid, and he has to submit to a much stricter code of discipline. But for some reason the railroad man has the more dangerous occupation, if one may judge from a comparison of the fatalities that occur at sea and on the rail. In a storm at sea, when battened down under closed hatches, with nothing to think about but the fury of the gale and our own helpless situation, we appreciate to the full our dependence upon the courage and watchfulness of the sailor. But the public does not consider a railroad man from quite the same viewpoint, for the reason, perhaps, that the unavoidable dangers on the rail are not to be compared with the ever-present peril that surrounds a ship in its battle with the elements. And yet when we come to compare actual results, that is, the statistics in regard to ship travel and train travel, one is quickly confronted with the conclusion that the 4 A RAILROAD MAN TO RAILROAD MEN public is fully as dependent for its safety upon the human elements of vigilance and consecration to duty in the one case as in the other. Looking at our subject from the widest stand- point, however, it is evident that the dangers that threaten a passenger on the steam-cars are more numerous than the passenger himself has any idea of, and these dangers are very uncertain in their nature and difficult to guard against. Constant attention and supervision is being universally exer- cised by the railroad officials, for the purpose of reducing to a minimum the number of accidents that occur from defective equipment and the like ; but the accidents caused by the personal neglect or carelessness of the individual employee is a branch of the subject that calls for a very different kind of investigation and treatment. In order to get an intelligent and comprehensive idea of these railroad accidents, both avoidable and unavoidable, the National Government has directed and empowered the Interstate Commerce Commis- sion to secure and to publish statistics on the subject. In this way, for a number of years, the public has been kept informed in regard to all casualties of whatever nature that take place on our railroads. But right here the work and influence of the Na- tional and State Commissions, as well as of all railroad managers and individual investigators into the A RAILROAD MAN TO RAILROAD MEN 5 personal side of the problem, come to an end. Being in full possession and understanding of the actual results of our system of operating the railroad, the authorities seem disinclined to adopt any radical measures for the improvement of the service. In a report prepared for Congress some time ago, by the Interstate Commerce Commission, it was distinctly affirmed that these avoidable accidents are mostly due to the failure in duty of signalmen and enginemen. "There is no escape from the conclusion that the block system is the best-known instrumentality for the prevention of collisions," says the report, "not- withstanding the imperfections that have been shown in the results of its operations." According to the same report, during a given period, thirteen collisions occurred under the telegraph-block system, and all of these, so the com- missioners say, were chargeable, not to the engineman, but to the telegraph operator. Yet in the same period seven collisions occurred on lines operated under the automatic block-signal system, where the telegraph operators are eliminated. These collisions were due to misconduct or neglect of enginemen. It is reasoned from this that the defect in the automatic block system is that the telegraph operator is not there to caution the engineman. The presence of a telegraph operator who attends the signal sta- 6 A RAILROAD MAN TO RAILROAD MEN tion serves as a caution to the engineman ; where- as, when the telegrapher is not there, the engineman is in danger of failing to note the signal. In other words, the Commission finds the telegrapher left to himself is unreliable, and the same conclusion is arrived at in regard to the engineman and the automatic signals. According to the report, to obtain the desired security the best-known method is to rely upon the cooperation of these three ac- knowledged insecurities. But apart from this consideration, the point for us railroad men to note is that we have been found directly and personally responsible for the accidents. Our failure in duty has been the actual cause for the loss of life resulting from these collisions. To say the least, these failures in duty are very numerous, and the authorities who are depended upon to look into these matters are of opinion that "the block-signal system is the best- known instrumentality for the prevention of " these accidents. But, unfortunately, a great many years must elapse before the railroads, both single and double track, can be thoroughly equipped with these signals, and meanwhile the public must remain at the mercy of these failures in duty which in the main, some day, block signals are expected to elim- inate. Working along these lines, however, the progress A RAILROAD MAN TO RAILROAD MEN 7 made by the authorities in eliminating the causes of these accidents and in improving the conditions has so far been very insignificant.

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