Foreword — To the unthinking, a railroad is merely two lines of rails over which certain powerful and ingenious mechanical appliances transport the people and the products of the country.
In truth, a railroad system is a thing of flesh and blood, of heart and brain, of the nervous force and energy, the trained intellect, the skill and devotion of the Railroad Man. It is neither far-stretching lines of steel nor swiftly moving engines, vast terminals, and warehouses, nor all the innumerable instrumentalities of traffic that constitute the real railroad.
It is the Man on the track and at the throttle, behind the ticket window and beside the dispatcher's desk, in lofty switch towers, and lonely telegraph offices, the Railroad Man in all his duties and daily work that make the real railroad to which we entrust our lives from day to day, unthinkingly, without regard or appreciation.
That daily life of the railroad man is the most romantic of all the world's business occupations. It is more dangerous than War, more hazardous than the Sea. It touches the daily life of all of us more nearly than any other industry. No citizen of the United States is so remote, so isolated that he is not affected by the railroads of the country. It employs more human beings than any other single industry except farming. This vast army of more than a million men, at work day and night, are more necessary to us than all the other occupations, for without them agriculture would be unremunerative, the loom would be stilled, the forge dark, crops would rot in the fields and all the fabrics of human ingenuity molder in their warehouses. One week's cessation of railway traffic would paralyze the whole social fabric of the country and bring starvation to our crowded cities. To the skill, devotion, and ceaseless vigilance of this vast army, we daily commit our lives and our dearest possessions. Their lives are one long battle against the elements, rain, snow, frost, and floods, in winter's cold and summer's heat. Their occupation is the most interesting of any work of human hands, and so far as I know, no attempt has ever been made to give anything like a comprehensive picture of it, of the operation of a great railroad.
To do so adequately and in its entirety is doubtless beyond the reach of any one man. But it will here be attempted to delineate the correlated workings of this vast machine, to illustrate some of its little-known phases, to give some just idea of the skill, the energy, vigilance, and devotion to duty, that combine to bring you in safely on the 4:10 train or distribute the daily bread of the world.
We shall begin with the Right of Way and end with the traffic men. We shall camp with the surveying party that locates the line, ride with the engineer in the cab, sit by the switchman in his tower as he cons the loom of terminals and shuttles the monster engines through the web of tracks. We shall miss much of it, but we shall see much that is new and strange, much I hope that will be remembered when next you travel by rail. There will be nothing technical in these articles. It is the day's work that we shall talk about, the daily task that keeps the world moving.
In the hope that you may find in this some of the interest that invests these lives, in the stronger hope that you will overlook the faintness of the pictures, the inadequacy of the descriptions, let us begin.
THE RIGHT OF WAY.
Among railroad men, the right of way means something more than the hundred-foot strip that has been purchased or condemned for railroad use. It means the entire fabric over which the trains run, the embankments or cuts, the bridges, ballast, ties, rails, switches, and signals.
It is the first step in railroading and, like all first steps, it is the one that costs. It is the chief item of outlay in a railroad. It is the most important, for upon it more than on any other one item depends on the success of a great railroad.
Broadly speaking, railroad men divide into three classes: Those who build and maintain this right of way, those who deal with the motive power, and the traffic men. The first furnish the road, the second the power, the last the profit.
Let us suppose that you and I are about to build a railroad. We have discovered a country that needs a railroad, possibly because it has none, possibly because a connection between two distant parallel lines would be profitable, open a new market for products, or a shorter route to an old market.
Being beginners, we will start with a common, inexpensive kind of a road, a road over a pleasant prairie country, with no mountain ranges to scale, with few streams to bridge, with the simplest of railway problems to solve.
We first select our Civil Engineer and, mind, not every man who writes C. E. after his name can successfully locate and build a railroad. It is a gift, and to the gift must be added experience. Having selected our route in a general way the locating engineer will make a "reconnaissance." He will ride the whole line of road, zigzagging across it so as to thoroughly cover a strip from fifteen to twenty miles wide. He will make a rough sketch map of this reconnaissance, noting streams, hills, and valleys, the general formation of the country, the difficulties, and chances, the problems and the answers. But he will do considerably more. In his report to us, he will give us a general idea of the country, its productions, and probable tonnage; the size of the towns, competing points, and an estimate of the traffic we may divide with the roads already there. He will note the state of the country's industries and the chances and prospects of future development. He will go into this so deeply that he will estimate about how many trains a day we shall need at first to care for the traffic, the gross yearly tonnage of the line, the probable cost of building the road^ the necessary equipment, and the cost of upkeep. In doing this he will pay little attention to passenger traffic. His eye will be on the freight tonnage, for that is what pays the dividends. He will have a particular eye to fuel, for one of the biggest single items of railway operation is fuel and good coal mines on a line are a great asset.
When he has submitted this report the Chief Engineer will examine it with a wary and careful eye. A second and even a third reconnaissance may be ordered, and every item will be weighed and sifted, for a mistake in the permanent way is costly in operation and costly to correct.
But finally, a reconnaissance is approved and the permanent survey is started. Such a surveying party will consist of twelve to fifteen men. A chief and his assistant, transit men, rod men, chain men, cook, and teamsters. Such a party in a prairie country like Kansas will locate from five to six miles a day. They camp in the open and in such a country and pleasant weather, it is not half a bad job. Every day brings its problems upon whose solution depends the reputation of the Engineer and the profit of the road.
The ideal road would be the shortest distance between two points and on a dead level. No such luck as that. We have hills to climb or wind around, valleys and depressions to be crossed, streams to be bridged with a winding "development" to get down to the bridge and up again. And the grade and curvature must be kept always in mind. Every inch of grade, of deflection from a level, means that much power to be consumed. As slight a grade as 3 inches to the one hundred feet, what is known as a .25 grade doubles the resistance of a train, and a one percent, grade will more than quadruple it. Again there is a "ruling grade" for the Division, which fixes the tonnage a single locomotive can haul over the road. If the grade is increased beyond that, the size of the trains must be diminished. Result: more trains, more coal, and crews, more expense, less dividends.
Here is a hill ahead of us; shall we go through or around it? If our money were unlimited we would go straight through it, make a cut deep enough to keep to the ruling grade or timnel it. But there again the Engineer is limited. The estimated tonnage will pay dividends on only so many thousand dollars to the mile. The cost of ties and rails is fixed. Every cut and fill adds to the cost. Usually when a new road is built the ruling grade of a division is temporary and the engineer makes two profiles, one for the first building of the road, to keep within the cost, and another to be used for reducing these grades when our road has become a great and prosperous system. This matter of cuts and fills is serious for the expense mounts swiftly with increasing height or depth. Suppose the nature of the soil is such that the cut or fill must have one and one-half foot in width for each foot of height to keep it from carving or washing. For every foot of height or depth, we have increased the width three feet. So that when our engineer has the height of the hill, the yardage for the excavation at each possible depth of cut must be computed and its cost settled.
If the hill is too high, the cut too great to make a practicable grade under his limitations, then he must go around.
But every detour means so much farther haul and here enters another item. A grade means increased resistance, more expense for hauling, so does a curve. A five-degree curve doubles the train resistance and is just as costly as a .25 grade. Somewhere he finds a compromise. He rounds the hill, probably makes a cut, and by the detour and the cut, keeping within his means holds to the ruling grade or resistance. Nice complicated little problem, is it not? And in the best of country, it's a problem that confronts him every day.
When he reaches a depression the problem is inverted. If the hollow is narrow and steep, it may do for the present to build a trestle, for what is known as "the life of the timber." This depression will be filled later as we get money, the trestle will disappear in a solid earth embankment before it has rotted out.
If it is fairly easy, the grade will be reduced two ways, by filling the depression and cutting the hills on each side.
Sometimes cost can be saved here, for the earth from the cuts makes the fill. More often however it must be "borrow and waste." We borrow from a "borrow pit" on the right of way to make the fill and "waste" i.e. dump the earth from the cut on its banks. This because the cuts and fills are too far apart to use the dirt interchangeably.
An important part of the work is the map-making, for our Engineer and his assistant must be skilled draughtsmen, and every night the work of the day from the notebooks is put on two maps one called the map showing the horizontal alignment of the road, the other the profile showing the surface or level. The first shows the line of the road as it crawls across the country, its curves and deflections with the width of the right of way, usually one hundred feet. Where it is necessary to borrow or waste, room must be provided for a wider right of way.
The profile show the cuts and fills, the grade, both as it is proposed to be built now, and as it may be made later when we have the money to reduce the
grade by higher embankments or deeper cuts. These maps must be made with the utmost accuracy, for they show every foot of length, and every yard of excavation that must be made, and on the map and profile the contractor bases his bid for building the road. In addition to the estimate of yards of excavation, the Engineer will make boring tests if there is a chance of striking rock in a cut. These tests are not binding, for the job will be let on the basis of so much for dirt excavation, so much for loose rock, and so much for hard rock of the country; but the boring will indicate in a general way what the contractor will meet.
On the map will be laid out the station yards and switches, and the profiles will show the cost of these.
But the most serious problem of all the many puzzles that our engineer will have to solve is WATER. Put that in big letters, Mr. Typesetter, for the bitterest foe of the Railroad Man is WATER. No third-degree drunkard, no gutter inebriate, ever hated water as does your railroad man. It haunts his waking hours and rides his sleep with nightmare terrors. It is the meanest, most insinuating, incalculable ever-present enemy of the right of way. Three-fourths of all the work on the right of way is done to get rid of water.
It must be gotten off the roadbed as speedily as possible, for if allowed to linger it will ruin the best track in the world in no time. A little hollow forms under a tie where the water collects and the ground softens. As a train passes over it, the tie sinks in the softened ground and the hole deepens. That tie sinking drags down the next one and that the next, each making its own little puddle to deepen and drop the ties and the beautiful alignment, that "razor edge" that the roadmaster had prided himself on is gone. So our track must be "bled," set up so that the water will run off swiftly. A little rivulet starts down the side of a fill. The moment it creates a little channel for itself, it gathers in volume, begins to dig and wash, and pretty soon goes exulting on with a piece of the track undermined a treacherous, unseen washout.
And so our engineer's problem is, above all else, to provide waterways proportionate to the biggest volume of water that will ever come down a particular depression. He must know the character of the rainstorms in that vicinity; whether the ordinary rainstorm of temperate regions or the torrential rains of the tropics. With this in mind, the maximum rainfall likely or probable measures the watershed that is drained by the depression and from its total area computes the volume of water that must be given room to pass. A mere pipe may be sufficient; it may take a culvert, or it may take a long trestle. Whatever the opening, it must be wide enough and high enough that the water may pass without banking up against the fill to melt it out. Ditches on each side of the track parallel to it must run the whole length big enough to sluice off the water that flows from the heaped-up roadbed, and over the crest of the hill on the upper side of every cut must be another ditch to keep the water from running down the side of the cut. One of the greatest railroad engineers in the country said to me not long ago, "I have been fighting water for twenty years and it always beats me. I've given up, now I get away from it."
For this reason, our Engineer will so far as consistent with his other problems, keep on the ridges, and avoid valley lines.
A self-draining roadbed is the dream of the engineer. It is only as a tribute to grades that he ever follows a river course, and then no longer than he must. The things that water will do to a right of way are almost incredible. The Purgatoire River at Trinidad, locally known as the "Picketwire," is an insignificant harmless looking stream. Five or six years ago it got on a spree, tore out two or three miles of track, riprapped with huge boulders, demolished the station, and rolled the big thousand-pound safe a half mile down the river.
A dry creek out in Arizona tore out two miles of embankment and picked up a reinforced concrete culvert twelve feet high and twenty feet in length and set it bodily fifty feet from the right of way. In some soils rain turns the earth to the consistency of chocolate, it simply dissolves like sugar. The whole track, ties, and rails, goes down into the mud out of sight. I have seen a locomotive on a Texas road come into a town splashed with mud to the headlight. How do they build a road there? Bleed it, get the water off the moment it falls.
A cloud burst in a mountain canyon may cost a road its whole year's dividends. Not long ago the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Road was washed out for more than a hundred miles by a single storm and had practically to be rebuilt. These things are unusual; they do not occur often but they may happen anytime. But always every day is the unceasing fight to maintain that right of way against the elements. Rain, snow, frost, and floods wearing, disintegrating, heaving, blocking, washing out, and under the roadmaster must fight them all the year around.
So our Engineer first, last, and all the time, looks for water and fends against it. I have wondered as I have watched the surveying party trail across a broken country, pegging the line, taking the levels, surveying the watershed, filling book after book with notes and strange and complicated figures, how he keeps up with his map work. But usually, the day's work is on the map and profile before he goes to bed. When the road is built, this profile and the map are very sacred things. They cost a lot of money, and every officer that deals with the right of way has copies for instant use. The Chief Engineer in his office knows from these, every foot of his right of way, every degree of curve and grade, every cut and fill every bridge and waterway.
When the water jumps his road, he knows why and what to do with it. As you ride over any of the older roads you will see beside you, abandoned embankments, cuts, and fills. Much of that road has been rebuilt. Curves have been taken out, embankments raised and cuts deepened to lessen the grade, and, in some cases, the whole of the original right of way has been given up because of water trouble and the track moved to higher ground.
Sometimes the lay of the country is such that our Engineer cannot keep within the ruling grade. He finds a hill or ridge that must be climbed, and the grade increased sometimes to four percent, four feet in the one hundred. Here a pusher engine will have to be kept to help heavy trains over the hill. It will be cheaper for the present. By and by we will reduce it and get rid of that extra engine and crew. Sometimes he can use a heavier grade by momentum, if he has two hills, near enough so that the downgrade of one gives the train momentum enough to climb the upgrade of the other.
Along with the Engineer goes one or more right-of-way men, who secure the land for the road. Sometimes the land is donated, sometimes bought, sometimes condemned by statutory proceedings. When the right of way is secured, he vanishes from the scene. He is no true railroad man and we will not spend time with him.
Our Engineer will locate division points from one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles apart, the distance within which one crew can operate a freight train in its regular working day of sixteen hours. At such points, yards for terminal work will be located and laid off, and if we are in a hurry we will begin to build as soon as the first division survey is completed.
By this time railroad contractors have heard of us. They are in the field to bid for the work. They take a copy of the map and profile and bid by the yardage, so much for each yard of excavation and fill, if it is earth; so much if it is loose rock, and so much for hard rock.
Bridge contractors bid on the bridges and the commissary must be considered; men must be fed, and the boarding house men are on hand to bid with the contractors for the board of the men unless the contractor boards his own men. As soon as the contracts are let an army of men and teams invades the silent green country and proceeds to hany and scar it, biting through hills, filling ravines, bridging the swift streams, and leaving behind them a long and, to the eye, apparently level bank. Our Engineer will follow the graders, see that the work is up to the specifications, and measure it for the pay. If a dispute arises, the Chief Engineer of the road is usually provided as the arbiter, who finally fixes the character of the work, whether earth or rock.
As fast as the work is surfaced, another army follows with ties and rails and the railroad begins to move. In the old days, the rails were carried and placed by hand, but now most of the rail laying is done from cars which advancing along the track as fast as it is laid, deliver the rails to the spot. Here again, there is a sense of impermanence in the new road. It is a foolish man who puts new wine in old bottles but it is a wise railroad man who lays old rails on a new track. Our right of way is soft yet. It will take winter and summer storms beating on it and the pounding of traffic to make a right of way. It may take two years, it may take ten before we can say that we really have a permanent way before we can lay rock or gravel ballast on it.
The first set of rails will kink and bend and curve and follow the depressions of this new soft track, and in two or three years they are practically gone. So we will be prudent and use "relaying" rails. That is rails that have been used till the ends are pounded and flattened. These are sawed off, new holes for the plates bored. They are good enough for the first few years of traffic, cost much less, and will last on that new ground as well as the costly new rails.
It seems a great waste, but it must be done, for it should be thoroughly understood that when we have thus surveyed and built on road so that we may run trains over it, we have simply started to make our road. It will take from ten to twenty years before it is a real railroad with a solid bed, that will hold its surface, its evenness, and over which we can run three-hundred-ton engines at sixty miles an hour. At present, we shall be contented with light engines, light cars, light loads, and low speed.
We are very proud of our new road when we get it built. We, you and I, the "Board of Directors," are all present when the last spike is driven. We ride in the first train over it. We are banqueted at the towns, speeches are made and everyone is happy. We may have driven it through an unsettled country, vacant of all save cowmen till now. The outlook for traffic is poor, but we know our country. We know that people will follow the new road, buy the cheap land, build homes and towns, and if we have been wise and careful, the future of the road is fairly safe.
Not always nor often, though, does it happen that the men who build the roads in the western country reap anything from it. It has been a precarious business, a gamble all the time. In a country where for a generation, this year's crop overtaxed the capacity of the road to haul and next year's supplies must be hauled in to keep the people from starving, a new railroad had many ups and downs. The usual "down" was a receivership, reorganization, the first builders were wiped out, everyone lost money, the bondholders a part of theirs, and the stockholders all of theirs and a fresh start was made.
But our Western country is fairly settled now and the new road is safe enough if we have given ourselves room on either side for sufficient traffic. But if we are wise, and the traffic grows, we will not sit down with the idea that we have a railroad.
We will begin at once to rebuild our road, to make a real railroad out of it. We will put from four to eight men on every six or eight-mile section, each crew with an experienced boss. These men will patrol their sections day in and day out. We will have on hand for them new rails, ties, plates, and spikes. Our ties, if new, should last from five to eight years; if treated, twelve to fourteen years. But the rails will begin to give trouble from the start, and that trouble will stay with us as long as we are in the railroad business. At the outset, we have probably used a fifty-five-pound relaying rail. That is, a rail that weighed fifty-five pounds to the yard. As the traffic increases, if we are to keep up with it, these light rails must give way to heavier ones. There is a constant struggle in railroading between the right-of-way men and the motive power branch. It is like the race between armor and guns in the Navy. As fast as armor is constructed that will stop the shot of the latest and biggest guns, a bigger one is turned out that will smash that armor.
As the traffic increases the men who handle the traffic will demand bigger engines, engines that will haul a longer train, move the traffic quicker and save on train crews. You and I can remember the old "eigh teen-load" freight trains. We will talk about this engine business when we get to it but for the present, it is sufficient to say that locomotives have grown within a very few years from a hundred tons in weight to over four hundred tons. And the right of way must keep up with this weight. Speeds have increased from twenty-five miles an hour to fifty and sixty, and the right of way must be ready for the strain.
Ninety-pound rails are common enough now and the hundred-pound rail is no longer a novelty. The shape of the rail is a puzzling factor. Hardly any two railroad engineers agree on the best type of rail. The rail is broadly in three parts: the flange on which it rests, the web or vertical section, and the head. The flange gives stability against lateral shocks, the web supports the weight, and the head stands the wear of the wheels.
That is the universal type of American rail. The English railways use a rail with a double head, and set it in a chair, bolted to the ties. Sometimes they reverse the rail when the upper head wears. This is all right for the light engines and loads of the English roads, but not for ours. The conflict is over the relative amount of steel in head, web, and flange. The weak point in the rail is the joint. It seems impossible to make a joint that will not give. As it gives, the wheels pound it till the end is flattened so as to make a bump and the usefulness of the rail is gone. It must be taken up, sawed and new holes bored. Many forms of joint have been tried without any particular improvement on the square end. Some engineers prefer the bridge joint that is carried between two ties on a plate, others the joint directly over a tie. A certain space must be left between the rail ends to allow for expansion in hot weather, and there is the weak point. The man who can invent a continuous rail that will not expand and worm itself off the right of way has Carnegie and Rockefeller backed off the map.
At present the standard rail is eleven yards in length, but the tendency is toward a longer rail.
The tie problem grows more serious every year with the destruction of our forests. A tie should be six inches thick, eight inches wide, and eight feet long. When you consider that not less than 100,000,000 of them were used last year by the railways of the United States, it will be easily seen that unless reforesting begins quickly and on a vast scale, something else must be used instead of wood. And the trouble is nothing else answers so well. Concrete and iron ties have been tried, but they are too rigid. For contrary to the general impression, rail, tie, and ballast must each and all give a little under the strain. A perfectly solid road bed would knock the rolling stock to pieces in a short time.
There must be a spring. That is why rock or gravel ballast is the best. It makes a "cushion" that will compress under the pressure and resume its alignment. Various forms of treating ties have been tried, creosote seems the best, and it fairly doubles the life of the ties, but it is expensive and the waste of timber goes on.
We are importing ties from Mexico and Hawaii now, and the price has grown from thirty and thirty-five cents to a dollar or more.
For many years the rails were held to the ties by a standard form of wrought spike. As soon as the tie began to check or soften, the spike loosens. Recently and very generally on the larger roads, a plate is laid under the rail over each tie, and the whole screwed to the tie with a threaded spike. Given an old roadbed, well hammered down, bled, and drained, twelve to sixteen inches of crushed rock for ballast, creosoted ties, ninety-pound steel rails with plates and screw spikes, and you have the last word in railroading for the present. Over this an 850,000-pound engine will roll smoothly and a passenger train will travel seventy miles an hour without a jar or roll. Rock ballast it would seem is one of the things that ought not to wear out, but it does. Every five years the best rock ballast has to be removed, cleaned by forking it, and replaced. Dirt blows into it, vegetation starts, in a little while it becomes foul and rots the ties, and, worst of all, it cements into a solid mass without resiliency. Then an extra gang must be thrown in and the work all done over again. To watch a Mexican removing this ballast, clean-ing it, and ramming it back under the tie with a blunt-headed pick looks like the labor of an ant. It seems so slow, so interminable. But it must be 'done and it costs. So the light goes on. Besides the regular section gang, and boss, there is nearly always an extra gang at some such job, forking ballast, putting in new ties, laying heavier rails, and the bridge men are always at work somewhere, putting in newer, heavier, wider bridges for the new locomotives and cars. Day in and day out the year around the fight to keep the track level and smooth and safe goes on.
Most of the track work nowadays is done by Mexicans or Greeks or some similar form of animal life. The Irish man who was formerly the standby long ago got too smart to handle pick and shovel and the humble Mexican or the black-visaged "hunkie" with his padrone fills his place. They come North and work for six months, accumulate a little money, and go back to the land of "poco tiempo" for a rest.
A good deal of the money that financed and much of the spirit that fought the late revolution down there came from these humble track workers who had come up here, breathed the air of freedom and independence for a few months, and on their return kicked at the veiled despotism of Diaz. They form an alien class, living mostly in boarding cars, or shacks along the right of way, peaceable enough, good workers and honest. Their principal crime is the phonograph. The first seven and a half they accumulate goes into a squeaky, raspy, talking machine, that night after night agonizes their neighborhood with airs of that peculiar pat-your-stomach-and-rub-your-head rhythm that delights the Mexican ear.
Above these workers and their bosses is the roadmaster. He is responsible for a strip of from one hundred to a hundred and fifty miles of track. He rides his stretch on a velocipede, if he is up to date, with a motor to it, a thing about as big as a grasshopper and just about as easy to ride. It will shy like a horse, jump switches, turn somersaults, and is generally cussed, but it gets over the ground. The roadmaster doesn't mind weather, in fact rather likes it, and he must know all there is to roadbed, ballast, ties, rails, plates, and spikes. He must know where the next new ties are needed on his whole line, and how many. Yearly he demands so much money and wrings out what he can from the management and with that, he performs miracles. He reports directly to the Superintendent of the division who is the connecting link in the management between right of way and motive power. He bosses both and has to know both. The higher you go in railroading the more you must know, until when you finally arrive at the Presidency you must know it all from the shape of a spike to the composition and probable intentions of a Legislature.