^, 19 jmi y^'^'i^^^i 
 
 Col. J.M. Schoonmaker 
 
 AND THE 
 
 ITTSBTJEGH &, LAKE ERIE 
 
 Railroad 
 
 ms^wismjmmf.vis 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 Gift in memory of 
 
 MARY STEPHENS SHERMAN, '13 
 
 from 
 
 JOHN H. SHERMAN, '11 
 
Cornell University Library 
 TF 506.E6E53 
 
 3 1924 022 793 982 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022793982 
 

 / 
 
 
COL. J. M. SCHOONMAKER 
 
 AND THE 
 
 PITTSBURGH & LAKE ERIE 
 RAILROAD 
 
 A STUDY OF PERSONALITY AND IDEALS 
 
 BY 
 
 HARRINGTON EMERSON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE ENGINEERING MAGAZINE CO. 
 
 1913 
 
Copyright, 1913 
 By The Ehgiheebinq Maoazine Co. 
 
IN"TRODUCTION 
 
 ONE of Mr. Emerson's ablest reviewers recently ex- 
 pressed a hope that, as his first book has been a 
 declaration of a philosophy and the second a definition of 
 principles, the third might be a description of practice 
 animated by the philosophy and guided by the principles 
 of efficiency. 
 
 Meantime events were working toward this very re- 
 sult. The example is not one with which Mr. Emerson 
 has been professionally connected. It is wholly free from 
 any personal relation. It is a railroad in which ideals of 
 relations to the public, of personality, of organization, of 
 equipment and operation, were determined by the manage- 
 ment through their own discernment of the fundamental 
 truths on which all efficiency rests. 
 
 Mr. Emerson was placed on the iaside of the work- 
 ings of this road. By the courtesy and co-operation of 
 its officials he was brought into intimate contact with all 
 its problems and conditions. From this point of view he 
 shows how excellent a realization of the principles and the 
 precepts of efficiency may be secured and is secured in the 
 operation of the line in question — ^the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie. 
 
 The points of success are emphasized by contrast with 
 the points in which success is imperfect or is lacking. 
 The result is not a theory of operation, but a demonstra- 
 tion from the actual tiling itself. The first chapter 
 sketches the background of the picture by depicting con- 
 cretely certain corporations' ideals of service as shown by 
 their treatment of the public. Against this Mr. Emerson 
 displays contrastingly the subject of his study. He brings 
 out first the personality of Colonel Schoonmaker as proven 
 by his ideals of administration, and then that personality 
 as it expresses itself in the selection of staff, the choice of 
 personnel, the provision of equipment, and finally in the 
 practical embo^ment and application of all twelve princi- 
 ples of efficiency. — The Editoe. 
 
an open book to him who desires to learn; near, though 
 often unseen, are the boundless opportunities of the uni- 
 verse. Never before was possible love so productive be- 
 tween the great soul tind opportunity wooed and won. 
 The noble dreams of Egyptian, of Hebrew, of Greek, of 
 Eoman and of Teuton, of other great races and nationali- 
 ties, pale. 
 
 Egypt dreamed of immortality, the Hebrew prophets 
 of righteousness, Greece of beauty, Eome of law and order, 
 the Hindu of gentleness and kindliness, the Chinaman of 
 honesty, the Goth of the secrets of the underworld, Italy 
 of courtesy, Provence of romance — all ehildten of the one 
 Father. France dreamed of the brotherhood of man, of 
 equality and liberty; England's dream was commercial 
 conquest of the world, Russia's ambition territorial expan- 
 sion; Japan confirms by progress, by attainment and by 
 force of arms, the equality of the yellow race that gave 
 the world Confucius, Buddha, Jhengis Khan and the 
 great Moguls. What we of America are to accomplish is 
 yet to be proved. Thus far we have rioted immensely and 
 wastefully with our heritage, but all the lessons of the 
 past are ours, all the inspiration of the future -is ours, 
 greater opportunities than were ever given any other peo- 
 ple are ours. 
 
 Eailroads are the arteries and veins of our industrial 
 life. 
 
 Eailroad administration has been and is one of our 
 American problems. Railroads, if wisely administered, 
 immensely benefit the community, prove very profitable 
 to the investor, are at once the opportunity, the pride, and 
 the protector of the employee. At the present time they 
 do not fulfill their great function because so much of 
 value slips through the wide meshes of the crude admin- 
 istrative screen and is lost forever. 
 
 Three wild beasts are tearing at each other's throats, 
 fighting to take and hold all the profit there is in sight, 
 aU unmindful of the great abundance that lies just be- 
 
 iv 
 
yond their vision. As to railroads, the three wild beasts 
 are the public, the employee, and the proiit grabber. The 
 public wants smokeless and noiseless locomotives, electrifi- 
 cation, elevated tracks, palatial stations, steel cars, faster 
 and more frequent trains, siunptuous comfort, interlocking 
 and automatic safety equipment, and lower rates. The 
 public cares nothing for the men who took the risk and 
 furnished the money; the public cares nothing for the 
 men who do the work. The employee wants a higher rate 
 per hour, fewer hours, and less work for the hour; he 
 wants less discipline, less responsibility and more author- 
 ity. The employee cares little about the public or about 
 the conservation of the property he uses. The profit grab- 
 ber wants monopolistic control, unhampered despotic 
 ownership, rates based on all the traffic will bear, better 
 security, higher dividends, and frequent melons. He has 
 no ethical feelings either for the public or for the em- 
 ployee. And therefore all three selfishly fight. 
 
 The great railroad executive is the one who by precept, 
 example, and demonstration shows the public, the investor, 
 and the employee that there is more, unbelievably more, 
 in wise and fair harmony than in selfish struggle. 
 
 Waste is everywhere ; it is one of our national character- 
 istics and failings. 
 
 For thirty years, from London, the investment capital 
 of the world, to the northwest Alaskan or Canadian or 
 southwest Mexican frontier, I was obliged to study and 
 report on wastes in agricidture, in manufacturing, and in 
 transportation. 
 
 The magnitude of these universal wastes is realized 
 by very few, their causes and their remedies are not under- 
 stood. It is not known that the average agricultural effi- 
 ciency of our country is only 12 per cent of a realized 
 maximum, only 25 per cent of an attainable average ; it is 
 not known that our managers of industrial plants do not 
 stand very much higher in efficiency than our farmers. 
 
Owing to the ideals of punctuality, owing to the stress 
 of emulative and comparative competition wholly absent 
 from agriculture and largely absent from manufacture, 
 railroads are more efficient than either agriculture or 
 manufacture; nevertheless, very great wastes exist. The 
 public is not adequately served, nor does it co-operate as 
 it should; the safety and inviolability of investment is not 
 safeguarded, but is ruthlessly attacked from all sides; and 
 neither the remuneration nor the safety of employees is 
 what it might be if wastes were lessened. 
 
 For many years I was in railroad work. In railroad 
 periodicals and before railroad clubs I had called atten- 
 tion to railroad wastes, and I wondered if there might not 
 be somewhere an ideal railroad — ideally operated, and 
 managed, consciously or unconsciously, in accord with 
 the principles of efficiency. 
 
 In making comparative studies of the unit costs of 
 railroad operations I had been struck by the fact that the 
 Pittsburgh and Lake Erie stood at the head of the list 
 even in those departments in which it had no special 
 advantage. 
 
 Mr. John E. Dunlap, of The Engineering Magazine, 
 suggested that I write about this railroad. Hitherto I had 
 always gained my experience first, and afterwards written 
 about it. I did not write about a Pacific Cable route until 
 I had sailed over it four times, summer and winter, per- 
 sonally visiting landing places, personally learning about 
 the climate. I did not write about transportation in 
 Alaska until I had personally driven dog teams on the 
 Yukon, personally surveyed railroad location. I did not 
 write about Pacific Coast coal mines until I had visited 
 nearly every operated mine from Oregon to Alaska. I did 
 not write about shop efficiencies until as superintendent 
 and manager in different shops I had worked out the 
 problems. The Pittsburgh and Lake Brie was a different 
 subject. I did not know the road or its officials; I had 
 to become acquainted with it first, and after the first inves- 
 tigation many others followed and nearly a year passed 
 
 vi 
 
before the introductory article was written. I had to call 
 on others more skilled than myself, and they lived on the 
 road and studied the details for weeks and then I again 
 went over the problems. I did not make the investigations 
 or studies at the request of the railroad or any of its 
 officers, whom at times we must have seriously troubled 
 with our persistent enquiries and demands for details and 
 facts; the expenses incurred were defrayed wholly by my 
 own office. 
 
 The point of view graduallyX changed as the work pro- 
 gressed. At the start the immense locomotives, the long 
 trains, the big bridge, the low grades, seemed to be the 
 cause of success; but back of the railroad, back of its 
 favorable location, back of its modern equipment, back of 
 the administration, management and wonderful opera- 
 tion, back of the ideals and the service to the great 
 interests along its line, I found men, and their leader. 
 Colonel J. M. Schoonmaker, and his corps of staff and 
 line, who have demonstrated how an American railroad 
 can fulfill all three ideals of service — ^bviild up the com- 
 munity — ^make profits — ^upbuild the employees. Colonel 
 Schoonmaker took great and natural interest in these 
 studies of the railroad, which was one of his opportuni- 
 ties, and is largely the creation of his genius. He is proud 
 of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie, but it is also proud of 
 him. 
 
 The principles applied so successfully to the building up 
 of a railroad can be applied to any or all human activities, 
 and what the world needs is not more rails and locomo- 
 tives, but more leaders of men like Colonel Schoonmaker — 
 always a leader, whether in the cavalry charge at Win- 
 chester, or on Ohio River boats, or in the coke region, or 
 on the railroad, or bringing order out of chaos, harmony 
 out of discord in the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary 
 of the Battle of Gettysburg. 
 
 I intended to study a railroad ; I ended by studying the 
 man. 
 
 Haesington Bmkeson. 
 
 vii 
 
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 CHAPTER I 
 
 IDEALS OF CORPOEATION MANAGEMENT 
 
 TIRING the last five years there 
 have been outbreaks of great 
 hostility against the large cor- 
 porations. The corporations 
 have been both surprised and 
 grieved. They have been con- 
 scious of the great advances they have made; 
 they, better than anyone else, knew the cost in 
 money, in effort, of these improvements, and 
 they could not understand the hostility. 
 
 They called it muck-raking, ascribed it to 
 the pernicious activities of certain writers and 
 to the love of sensationalism of certain period- 
 icals, unmindful of the fact that no deliber- 
 ately set fire can kindle a great conflagration 
 in a desert. 
 
 The builders of modern buildings attempt 
 to make them fireproof; they patrol them by 
 
2 A BACKGROUND FOR THE PICTTJRB 
 
 their own watchmen, they do not trust to the 
 police to arrest incendiaries nor to the fire de- 
 partment to extinguish. A building like the 
 Equitable burned down because it was not 
 modem. Have the great corporations shown 
 the same skill in guarding against moral in- 
 cendiaries and brain-storm conflagrations? 
 
 I can largely sympathize with the surprise 
 of the corporations because I have had a sim- 
 ilar experience in my own work of applying 
 Efficiency Principles to modem industry. 
 Some erroneously confound Efficiency Princi- 
 ples with "Scientific Management" which uses 
 only some of the principles, not all. Science is 
 a good thing. Science is young. It has made 
 more strides in the last fifty years than in the 
 previous fifty centuries. Even the last ten 
 years have revolutionized our conceptions. 
 The discovery of radium and the invention of 
 wireless telegraphy are more than episodes. 
 To break up the atom into corpuscles is as 
 great an advance as to realize that the sun, the 
 moon and the stars, are not lanterns hung on 
 a great tent wall, but separate worlds in in- 
 finite space. To trace diseases to the multipli- 
 cation of infinitely small living beings is ob- 
 vious, but even yet scarcely accepted. That 
 magnetic oscillations return to the earth like a 
 shot arrow instead of vibrating like light in a 
 
ORDINAKY CORPORATION IDEALS 3 
 
 straight line out into space, makes us pause 
 and wonder whether light may not also travel 
 in immense parabolic paths. Take modern 
 science out of our lives and we drop back a 
 hundred years, and as far as any real differ- 
 ence exists, we might drop back five thousand 
 years, for the civilization and culture of Egypt, 
 of Mesopotamia five thousand years ago was 
 superior to that of London, of Paris, of Eome 
 one hundred years ago. Science is our best 
 servant. Management is also always a great 
 essential. It means the family instead of pro- 
 miscuity, it means the army instead of the mob, 
 it means order instead of anarchy. 
 
 Scientific management ought, therefore, to 
 be a most excellent combination to which no 
 rational being could object, especially as scien- 
 tific management is known to produce marvel- 
 ous results. Yet, somehow or other, those who 
 would be most benefited by scientific manage- 
 ment, the great employers of labor, the rail- 
 roads and the great labor unions, became hos- 
 tile. No "scientific management" for them. 
 It is evident that this hostility cannot be either 
 against science or against management, to 
 which separately we owe all the material part 
 of modem civilization. Therefore, those who 
 had successfully demonstrated the value of 
 scientific management in modern operations 
 
4 A BACKGROTIND FOE THE PICTURE 
 
 were surprised and grieved at the hostility 
 shown, but instead of continuing to be sur- 
 prised and continuing to shed tears it became 
 necessary to find out what it was that caused 
 hostility, since in spite of the words used 
 neither science nor management was guilty. 
 
 All of us want efficiency in our interest, not 
 at our expense. The principles which when 
 applied result in efficiency, are necessarily di- 
 vided into ethical principles and into practical 
 principles. This division is fundamental. 
 Practical principles are not opposed to ethical 
 or moral principles, nor are ethical and moral 
 principles opposed to practical principles ; but 
 the practical principles which particularly un- 
 derlie scientific management may be just as 
 much instruments of destruction as of con- 
 struction, if they are not combined with the 
 entirely separate moral principles. Moral 
 principles, on the other hand, are excellent in 
 themselves even in the absence of science and 
 of management. Those who thought they felt 
 in scientific management a submergence of 
 moral principles, naturally revolted and tem- 
 porarily combined with those who antagonized 
 science and management because their own 
 pickings lay in the wastes, which are due to 
 the absence of science and to the absence of 
 management. These distinctly selfish antago- 
 
OKDINAKY CORPOEATION IDEALS 5 
 
 nists hide themselves behind the ramparts of 
 those who object to the apparent neglect and 
 omission of moral principles. 
 
 As an indication of the extent to which prac- 
 tical principles may increase danger, we need 
 only refer to the wreck of the "Titanic." In 
 her operations every practical principle was 
 observed and every ethical principle neglected. 
 The practical principles were all in force. She 
 had been splendidly planned, every operation 
 had been scheduled and accurately despatched, 
 conditions and operations were standardized, 
 instructions were specific, records were reli- 
 able, immediate and adequate. 
 
 The ethical principles were, with one excep- 
 tion, largely ignored. The ideal of safety was 
 wholly subordinated to speed, to luxury ; com- 
 mon sense was non-existent. A steamship must 
 not at night fling ahead at 21 knots or more 
 when in a well known field of ice. Definite 
 counsel as to location of the ice, and even more 
 definite counsel given in the preceding Novem- 
 ber by Captain Eoden in "The Navy" was dis- 
 regarded. The fair deal to passenger and crew 
 alike, who had a right to expect that speed and 
 luxury would be additions to, not substitutions 
 for, safety, was ignored. Discipline alone of 
 the moral principles prevailed, because disci- 
 pline even more than safety is the oldest prin- 
 
6 A BACKGEOUND FOR THE PICTUEE 
 
 ciple of the sea. There were no efficiency re- 
 wards for acts showing compliance with the 
 essential ideals. The 1,635 perished not be- 
 cause the lifeboats were too few. A Cunard 
 steamship is safer without lifeboats than some 
 other steamers with a cargo of them. Noah's 
 ark had no scientific management, conditions 
 and operations were both most elementary, not 
 to say horrible, its plan was childish, its jour- 
 ney was neither scheduled nor dispatched, the 
 ventilation was very poor, but Noah had an 
 ideal, one ideal — safety. He took advice when 
 it was given, he used all the common sense he 
 had, he maintained discipluie, he, in the quaint 
 practice of his time, gave an efficiency reward 
 to the Lord and through it secured a promise 
 that the earth would not be destroyed again. 
 
 Noah's ark was safer than the "Titanic" be- 
 cause morality without science is always safer 
 than science without morality. 
 
 The teachers of scientific management have 
 not been negligent of the ethics underlying 
 practice, but some of their followers have, and 
 even the teachers have unfortunately magni- 
 fied the practical rather than the ethical gains. 
 When a man hears that he can do four times as 
 much work, he and his employer also are apt to 
 think that he must work much harder. If he 
 had been asked whether he would prefer to 
 
OEDINAKY CORPOKATIOlSr IDEALS / 
 
 run an automobile a few hours a day and draw 
 $4 or drag a rickshaw 10 hours a day for 10 
 cents, he would recognize that the ethical gain 
 of lessened exertion, lessened fatigue, of more 
 leisure, of more pay, was of even greater value 
 than the increased output. It is because the 
 rickshaw man pulls only 200 poimds at 4 miles 
 an hour that he has to work hard for long 
 hours. It is because the chauffeur, using his 
 supervising skill, hurls the automoMle, weigh- 
 ing, with passengers, 3,000 pounds, 40 miles an 
 hour along a road, that he is able to command 
 leisure and high wages. 
 
 The difficulties, the prejudices, that modem 
 efficiency teachers have encountered from the 
 just indignation and alarm of the public at 
 perversions of the new methods, railroads and 
 other large corporations have encountered not 
 on account of their virtues but on account of 
 their faults; and it is their faults, their real 
 faults, that inspire antagonism even if the un- 
 thinking attack the virtues instead of the 
 faidts. 
 
 To test out the attitude of mind of managers 
 of great corporations towards the public, I 
 recently seized on trivial occurrences to make 
 protests and see how they would be received 
 and met. It is, of course, always easy to find 
 occasion for offense, very real offense. Offenses 
 
8 A BACKGROUND FOR THE PICTURE 
 
 of this kind must occur by the millions, and 
 each offense will recur unless its distant cause 
 is remedied, thus stopping not only its source 
 but that of hundreds of others. Offense engen- 
 ders hostility which very rarely becomes artic- 
 ulate. The victim waits until he has a chance 
 and he then delivers a flank attack. 
 
 There are army officers, martinets, who exas- 
 perate the rank and file in times of peace and 
 who are the first killed, from the rear, in time 
 of war. In Germany recently a private shot 
 an officer during parade and immediately 
 killed himself, thus escaping court-martial and 
 jgis;ecution, but the highest military authorities 
 ^eizM on this episode to caution aU officers to 
 use a less exasperating manner towards those 
 wjipm in point of fact they were to serve, to 
 encourage. 
 
 My^experience testing railroad officials will 
 serve as a preface to the concrete study of the 
 ethical and practical excellences of the road 
 which is to be the central subject of these arti- 
 cles. It will fill in the background against 
 which the individual case is to be displayed. 
 
 A lady bought a return ticket from the Pac- 
 ific Coast to Buffalo. The ticket had to be 
 validated in Buffalo before return. She came 
 through to New York. Returning, she wanted 
 to take an express train passing through Buf- 
 
OEDINAEY COEPOEATION IDEALS 9 
 
 falo at 2 a. m., a most inconvenient hour for 
 an invalid to leave the train and go to a ticket 
 office. I asked that either the validation be 
 made through the New York oflS.ce, or the agent 
 at Buffalo go to the train. Both requests were 
 curtly and insultingly refused. I appealed to 
 the general ticket agent, and he at once took 
 every pains to accommodate the traveler, ut- 
 terly repudiating the hoorishness of the under- 
 ling. Had I not made the protest, the traveler 
 and all her circle of friends would forever have 
 nursed a grievance. 
 
 I stumbled in the dark over a water pipe 
 at the top of a station flight of stairs down 
 which I pitched. As a man-trap the arrange- 
 ment was unusually effective. I wrote to the 
 general manager, who at once replied stating 
 that the laying of the pipe was due to the care- 
 lessness of a workman and that he would have 
 it removed. He thanked me for calling his 
 attention to the danger. 
 
 At Long Branch early on July 4 I bought 
 two tickets for Philadelphia. While I was 
 buying them the train pulled out. I asked 
 the ticket agent to redeem them, saying that I 
 would buy tickets to New York instead. He 
 replied that redemption would be impossible 
 and that I would have to send the tickets in to 
 the central oflfiee. If I had been a poor Italian 
 
10 A BACKGROUND FOR THE PICTURE 
 
 bent on a holiday this would have been a mon- 
 strous inconvenience. The superintendent of 
 the road wrote me that the agent was quite 
 right in refusing to redeem. The rule was, in 
 any case, not inflexible, for the next week, as a 
 test, I asked for two tickets to Philadelphia 
 and after they were issued and handed out, I 
 refused to pay for them and handed them back, 
 enquiring how he would fix it up. This was ev- 
 idently one of those cases where some minor 
 clerical convenience to the railroad is given 
 preference over ethical rights of the traveling 
 public. 
 
 Leading from another railroad station was 
 an outward swinging door with a step for the 
 threshold. My wife, not seeing the step on ac- 
 count of the closed door, stumbled down it and 
 was slightly injured. I complained. The vice- 
 president of the road ascertained that about 
 200,000,000 passengers had passed through 
 that door and over that step without com- 
 plaint. The statistics were certainly against 
 me, but it was not on statistics I was relying. 
 Statistics could have been quoted against pas- 
 sengers on the "Titanic" complaining of in- 
 sufficient lifeboats, absence Of searchlights, etc. 
 My complaint was made for two reasons. First, 
 to see whether the railroad company, so very 
 progressive in other directions, would correct, 
 
ORDINAEY CORPORATION IDEALS 11 
 
 if it could do so without much trouble or ex- 
 pense, what had iajured even one in two hun- 
 dred millions, and also whether the railroad 
 had a policy of receiving and tabulating sug- 
 gestions of other kinds, reasonable and un- 
 reasonable, so as to maintain closer touch with 
 the public. In a larger sense the railroad is 
 ours. We may own shares in it, we travel on it, 
 we see its trains go by, and we must feel either 
 friendliness or hostility towards it, and friend- 
 liness is a tremendous asset for any corpora- 
 tion. 
 
 On a Friday I bought a night ticket from 
 New York to Lewiston, Me. I missed the train. 
 It was nearly midnight. I resolved to take 
 the midnight train to Boston. Ticket of&ces 
 for both sleeping car and train refused to re- 
 deem my tickets. I was told I would have to 
 send them to New Haven. To me it made no 
 difference, but What about some poor fellow 
 trying to join a ship at Portland, stranded 
 in New York at midnight, unable to get his 
 money back until the following Tuesday? 
 
 I wrote the general passenger agent, an 
 old friend. He answered that it was not cus- 
 tomary to redeem tickets except through head- 
 quarters, that he knew of no railroad which 
 did, but he also told me that if I had called 
 him up at midnight by 'phone he would have 
 
12 A BACKGROUND FOB THE PICTTJEE 
 
 fixed the matter for me. This was delightful. 
 I was not thinking of myself. I was thinking 
 of those less independent and without friends 
 at court. 
 
 There may be good reasons for many exas- 
 perating regulations, promulgated with a sole 
 eye to the convenience of the railroad. System 
 is necessary, but the more perfect the system 
 the more need is there of a broader spirit and 
 interpretation. One of the great Chicago mail- 
 order houses was spending $85,000 a year to 
 keep a record of all shipments. It f oimd that 
 it refunded on complaints about $25,000. It 
 abolished the $85,000 ofl&ce and assmned that 
 all complaints were weU founded. It was a 
 cheaper method and also very soothing to those 
 who made complaint. 
 
 A great department store had one rule as 
 to all complaints — ^the customer is always 
 right. Is it not on account of this attitude to- 
 wards the public that there is so little hostility 
 towards department stores 1 Small tradesmen 
 in small towns would like to suppress them, 
 but the grea.t public they serve is distinctly 
 friendly. 
 
 Early this spring I found it necessary to 
 make an emergency run in shortest time from 
 New York to Pasadena. I secured tickets on 
 the Pennsylvania Special with one-half hour 
 
OEDINAEY COKPOEATION IDEALS 13 
 
 for connection across the city of Chicago to 
 the Santa Fe Number 9. The Pennsylvania 
 Eailroad is probably the most thoroughly sys- 
 tematized corporation in existence and makes 
 every effort to run its 18-hour special on time, 
 nevertheless I wired to the general manager 
 telling him of the great importance the connec- 
 tion at Chicago would have for me and the 
 appreciation I would feel if the usual Pennsyl- 
 vania record were maintained, the disappoint- 
 ment I would feel if any untoward occurrence 
 should make the train late. 
 
 The manager might have considered my wire 
 impertinent, he might have answered that the 
 Pennsylvania always ran its trains to the best 
 of its ability, he might have made me feel that 
 he would not even consider such an insignifi- 
 cant unit as one of a hundred-thousand passen- 
 gers. Instead, as I stepped on the train at Man- 
 hattan Transfer, the conductor came to me, 
 asked my name, told me he had a message from 
 the general manager to assure me that notice 
 had been sent out over the whole main line of 
 the special importance of maintaining the 
 schedule. Up to Fort Wayne the train ran on 
 time, but after that, by a lame fast train ahead, 
 was delayed to such an extent that the connec- 
 tion would be missed. The train officials came 
 to me, told me of the messages they had re- 
 
14 A BACKGROUND FOR THE PICTURE 
 
 ceived, said they had arranged to wire to the 
 Santa Fe asking that road to hold its fast train 
 the few minutes necessary for me to cross the 
 city. As we passed Englewood there was the 
 New York Central Twentieth Century equally 
 late. Beaching Chicago we were met by a Penn- 
 sylvania official, who had a taxicab reserved, 
 who was ready speedily to transfer baggage, 
 who opened private gates and we were wheeled 
 across the city, the Santa Fe train being held 
 fifteen minutes to accommodate two unnamed 
 passengers. 
 
 It was important to me to make the connec- 
 tion, but that two of the greatest railroads in 
 the world should have made my little afEairs 
 their own, should have extended me their ex- 
 ceptional solicitude, filled me with admiration 
 and affectionate gratitude. Were either cor- 
 poration to be attacked, even justly, my feeling 
 would be : "Nevertheless, they do care for their 
 patrons." 
 
 A wee woman hurrying from Boston to De- 
 troit, when the train stopped at a junction, 
 walked up to the engine to see what kind of a 
 man she was entrusting her life to. The big 
 engineer smiled out of his cab at the little bit 
 of humanity looking up scrutinizingly at him, 
 she smiled back and enquired whether he 
 would take the train safely through on time. 
 
ORDINARY CORPORATION IDEAIiS 15 
 
 He, whose run stopped 500 miles short of De- 
 troit, assured her that he would, that she need 
 have no fears, and, reassured by the thought 
 that the big man was personally competent 
 for his work, she returned peacefully to sleep 
 the night away. It is not only these kindly 
 acts; it is the spirit back of the acts that en- 
 dears. 
 
 Railroads are indispensable ; they do a great 
 work fast and economically. The business of 
 railroads is transportation; this is what they 
 manufacture with a smaller percentage of 
 waste or loss than any other manufacturer. 
 Other manufacturers buy raw material, add 
 to the value, and then seU again. This was 
 originally the function of transportation. 
 Slavers bought human beings cheaply in 
 Africa and sold them dear in America. The 
 business was distinctly one of transport alone. 
 The shrinkage and waste was terrific. Until 
 the railroads were built most merchants trans- 
 ported their own goods. It coidd hardly be 
 determined whether the transportation was in- 
 cidental to buying and seUing or the buying 
 and seUiug were incidental to transportation, 
 but by camels on the desert, in merchant ships 
 at sea, and in freighting wagons on the plains, 
 transportation was the more important func- 
 tion. 
 
16 A BACKGKOTJND FOB THE PICTUEE 
 
 Railroads are as fine and as necessary as 
 the great ocean liners; but just as surely as 
 either, in operation or in their relations to 
 their employees, to the public and to the com- 
 monwealth, do not apply the ethical princi- 
 ples, they court disaster. 
 
 It is, of course, easier to criticize than to 
 put into effect upbuilding initiative, but one 
 wonders why railroads antagonized trolley 
 lines instead of seizing on them as valuably 
 supplemental to, not rivals of, their own trunk 
 system; one wonders why railroads were not 
 the first to use auto-trucks to distribute and 
 to collect freight, making for this purpose 
 house-to-house calls; one wonders, when one 
 sees how admirably, the Hudson Terminal sys- 
 tem serves principally the Pennsylvania, but 
 also other roads, that similar methods of per- 
 fecting the delivery and collection of pas- 
 sengers were not long ago developed. One 
 wonders that the railroads have not to a 
 greater degree realized that up to the present 
 there has been a race between their own 
 growth and that of the country, and that the 
 country has grown faster ; but just as soon as 
 the rate of progress of the country begins to 
 slow down, the railroads will face a crisis, 
 which is already dawning. When there is no 
 more land the price of farm produce will rise ; 
 
ORDINARY CORPORATION IDEALS 17 
 
 every other manufactured product will be- 
 come dearer only as the supply of raw ma- 
 terials is exhausted; but railroads are 
 essentially like ships, which must earn enough 
 during their short lives to pay for their re- 
 placement. 
 
 The assets of the Cunard Company are to- 
 day their existing ships, not ships long ago 
 obsolete, nor has the Cunard line been able 
 to capitalize the lanes of the sea; but rail- 
 roads are now expected to rebuild and re- 
 equip throughout and then to furnish better 
 service for less than they formerly charged. 
 Why ? Because troUey cars and perhaps auto- 
 trucks on good roads can afford to carry all 
 but the lowest-grade long-distance tonnage at 
 present railroad rates. 
 
 There is a railroad in the United States that 
 perhaps more than any other has applied to 
 its operation and management both practical 
 and ethical principles, that has both kept in 
 the forefront of modern railroad practice and 
 also secured the friendship of the community 
 it serves, of its patrons and of its employees. 
 This railroad is ethically as well as physically 
 strong, but it is both physically and ethically 
 strong because it had been molded and de- 
 veloped by a great leader of men. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF GREAT PERSONALITY 
 
 N one of the finest modern build- 
 ings in the world, the great 
 memorial haU at Pittsburgh, 
 hangs an immense painting, 
 so lighted that in this one 
 great building, one great haU, 
 it is the one great creation. The central figure 
 in this battle picture is a boy on a charging 
 white horse. The boy's sword is pointing to 
 heaven ; he is calling to, cheering on, his regi- 
 ment. Between his face and his uplifted 
 hand, far in the background, wave the tattered 
 stars and stripes. The boy, the horse, the 
 sword, the flag, all in action, tell the story. 
 The hero of this picture is Colonel Schoon- 
 maker, now vice-president of the Pittsburgh 
 & Lake Erie Railroad. 
 
 At that time, when only twenty years old, 
 "at a critical period in the battle of Win- 
 
20 COLONEL J, M. SCHOONMAKER 
 
 Chester, gallantly leading a cavalry charge 
 against the enemy's left line, which was pro- 
 tected by earthworks, he drove the enemy out 
 of his works, the last defenses, and captured 
 many prisoners."* 
 
 A whole cavalry regiment is thundering up 
 following the leader. To the left are the 
 trenches from which cannons roar and des- 
 perate men shoot. From the immediate front 
 the enemy has disappeared; the road is open 
 for the charging leader — obstacles, rifle bul- 
 lets, bayonet and sword thrusts do not exist 
 for him; his courage and dash have carried 
 him ahead of the flag, ahead of his followers, 
 above the immediate, out of the present, into 
 the beyond. 
 
 How comes it that a boy of twenty is colonel 
 of a cavalry regiment ? How comes it that in 
 months, almost in weeks, he has advanced as 
 others are content to let the slowly passing 
 years bring honor? Out of the several mil- 
 lions who enlisted, why was he the youngest 
 colonel appointed in the Union Army, perhaps 
 the youngest soldier ever promoted to a col- 
 onelcy for merit done? Was it circumstance 
 that gave him advancement, or was it person- 
 ality ? Did the flag make him, or did he uphold 
 and add glory to the flag? 
 
 *Eeport by General Sheridan. 
 
COLONEL SCHOONMAKER LEADING A CAVA 
 From the painting by T. De Thuls 
 
CHARGE AT THE BATTLE OF WINCHESTER 
 In the Memorial Hall, Pittsburgh 
 
A GREAT PEESONALITT 21 
 
 The boy is father of the man, and the spirit 
 that ruled fifty years ago still rules. The 
 success of the boy as a leader foreshadowed 
 the success of the man. What was he before 
 the battle of Winchester, what was he after 
 the battle of Winchester? 
 
 A Pittsburgh boy of eighteen, he enlisted in 
 the Union Army as a private; he could not 
 begin lower. He had a hard time of it, for 
 the colonel of the regiment was a martinet of 
 the old school, strict and harsh and cruel. The 
 soldier's duties were hard, made harder by 
 the inhumanity of man to man, and many 
 times was the boy exasperated almost to the 
 breaking point; but instead of turning either 
 backwards in retreat, or to the right or to the 
 left, seeking an easier path, he strove steadily 
 ahead. He mastered and performed all the 
 routine duties of his positions, and from this 
 solid foundation he rose, because he intuitively 
 seized the great opportunities. 
 
 A Confederate army was on both sides of 
 a river; a wooden bridge connected the two 
 halves. One dark night the boy secured per- 
 mission to destroy the bridge. He and his fol- 
 lowers stole along the river bank, hiding their 
 horses as they neared the bridge; the men 
 crept forward and piled hay on the abutments ; 
 then aU the others fell back to the horses while 
 
22 COLONEL J. M. SCHOONMAKER 
 
 Schoomnaker waited for the moment when the 
 pacing sentry turned away, to light the fire 
 that, flaring up in the night, destroyed the 
 bridge. There was only one road to safety — 
 straight down the main road through the en- 
 emy's camp; and along this road the little 
 troop galloped, their boldness leading the Con- 
 f erates to believe they were part of their own 
 force. For attention to duty, for competence 
 in its performance, by deeds of boldness, the 
 private rose in thirteen months to be a second 
 lieutenant. 
 
 His brilliant work brought him to the atten- 
 tion of the Secretary of War and he was called 
 to Washington. 
 
 With the splendid faith and confidence of 
 youth, believing that all things are possible, 
 he imagined he was to be consulted about the 
 plans of the campaign, about the conduct of 
 the war; and great was his disappointment 
 when he learned that it was only his promotion 
 to a colonelcy that was being dubiously con- 
 sidered. The Secretary felt that his youth 
 was against him ; but the boy, tall, handsome, 
 hopeful, self-reliant, courteous, spoke up, 
 called attention to the fact that he had learned 
 and achieved, that he had not failed in the 
 past and did not expect to fail in the future. 
 Another ordeal came with the Governor of the 
 
A GREAT PEESONALITT 23 
 
 State, who also was dismayed (not to say 
 amused) at the presumption of youth; but 
 here also his confidence and courtesy and 
 charm, backed up by his unassailable record, 
 won out. 
 
 The war was over; the soldier's life on the 
 frontier was not enough for the 23-year old 
 colonel's ambitions. The boy had lived and 
 built in intensity as few others of his age, 
 but all his man's life was yet before him, and 
 army life in times of peace runs in a restricted 
 groove. So Colonel Schoonmaker resigned 
 from the military army he had entered as 
 a private and left as a colonel, and re- 
 enlisted in the lowest position, that of clerk, 
 in the industrial army. Three years later he 
 was in the coke business, at that time one 
 of the great nascent businesses of the indus- 
 trial United States, and at the age of 41 he 
 was one of the few at its head. He had mas- 
 tered it in detail and in vision, he knew how 
 to handle the coal miners, the coke burners, 
 and he knew what coke meant in quality and 
 the importance of prompt supply to the great 
 iron and steel industry. Distribution was more 
 important than production, so he allied him- 
 self with those who were building a new rail- 
 road along the banks of the Ohio and Monon- 
 gahela rivers from the coke fields south of 
 
24 COLONEL J. M. 8CH00NMAKEK 
 
 Pittsburgh to a junction, at Youngstown, with 
 the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Rail- 
 road with its lake ports. As investor, as direc- 
 tor, he promoted and counseled the little rail- 
 road, in mileage one of the least in the United 
 States. When both a crisis in railroad busi- 
 ness and a vacancy by death occurred in the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie management, he was 
 asked to assume the vice-presidency. 
 
 A railroad has all the action of war, even 
 to its disasters; it has all the intensity of 
 what we erroneously call industrial peace. 
 Colonel Schoonmaker had not been trained in 
 railroad work ; he had been trained in war and 
 in peace; but a railroad's activities are those 
 of both war and peace. 
 
 We were in the private office of the man 
 who fifty years before was the dashing young 
 colonel; we were out with him where he met 
 his old comrades. To all, to railroad associ- 
 ates and employees, to old soldiers, there was 
 the same unfaUing, heart-born courtesy, the 
 same comprehension of the other man's feel- 
 ings, the same eager desire on the part of 
 others to accept him as a leader, to play the 
 game with and for him. As a consequence 
 he has made good. 
 
 He had risen to leadership in war because 
 of certain qualities ; he had risen to leadership 
 
A GKEAT PEE80NALITT 25 
 
 in peace, and because of the same qualities lie 
 has attained leadership and success in railroad 
 management. 
 
 In a recent number of Harper's Weekly was 
 published a chart showing how forty-nine rail- 
 roads expend each dollar received, as to the 
 proportion available for betterments, divi- 
 dends, surplus. The little railroad, the Pitts- 
 burgh & Lake Erie, is in a class by itself. 
 There is no second. 
 
 This little railroad in relative earning power 
 is the foremost of all the railroads in the 
 United States. What were the qualities, the 
 enduring qualities that had enabled this man 
 to make this railroad successful, when other 
 railroad magnates attempting to do the same 
 thing in the same territory, had miserably 
 failed, spending $35,000,000 and not succeed- 
 ing, whereas the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie had 
 built success for a fraction of this amount? 
 
 In railroad building it is not surv^ey and 
 location, not roadbed and equipment, that 
 mainly count — ^but personality, that personal- 
 ity which in art enables the artist to convert 
 the contents of oil and color tubes into battle 
 pictures. It is personality that enables the 
 great leader to build a nation out of human 
 units as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln did, 
 as Cavbur and Bismarck did — the personality 
 
26 COLONEL J. M. SCHOONMAKER 
 
 that enables the bom leader to cheer on his 
 regiment, to develop the coke industry, to 
 make a success of one of the most difficult 
 problems, railroading, in one of the most dif- 
 ficult localities in the United States. 
 
 The fundamentals of good personality are 
 health, intelligence, honesty and industry. If 
 to these can be added enthusiasm, courtesy, 
 imagination, dependableness, initiative, cour- 
 age, sense of justice, love of humanity, con- 
 sideration for others, desire to serve, experi- 
 ence, knowledge and judgment, we have the 
 kind of man the world needs. 
 
 How did Colonel Schoonmaker test as to 
 these qualities ? For as yet we were not study- 
 ing him as a man whose continued success 
 had given him fame, but as a man whose per- 
 sonality was the main element in making a 
 railroad great. 
 
 From the world's beginning to the world's 
 end, whatever their race or status, it has been 
 guided by three types of man : — ^the priest, who 
 plans; the king, who enjoys; and the soldier, 
 who achieves. 
 
 To which type does Colonel Schoonmaker 
 belong? 
 
 Tall, alert, erect, perfect in his bearing, his 
 brown eyes, windows of the soul, liquid with 
 kindness, we knew we were in the presence of 
 
A GREAT PERSONALITY 27 
 
 the soldier, the soldier in appearance, the sol- 
 dier in all his courteous instincts, a soldier with 
 all the qualities of leadership. 
 
 Yet he had proved himself a soldier who 
 had ideals and standards, who knew how to 
 plan. He had proved himself a soldier with 
 the king's gift of personality, of humanity. 
 
 American industrial organization, including 
 that of railroads, has been crude ; it has shown 
 the instincts of the animal which converts the 
 elemental impulse of brain and feeling im- 
 mediately into action. 
 
 It is only among the higher races of man 
 that acfion is delayed until thought and feel- 
 ing have had time to modify, to round out, 
 to make active, wise and perfect. It is there- 
 fore worth while to study a railroad in the 
 leader of whose organization thought and 
 feeling have been combined with strenuous 
 action. 
 
 Railroads are operated to earn money for 
 their owners. The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie was 
 not making much money for its owners when 
 the vice-president assumed direction. Neither 
 were other railroads making money. Costs 
 always depend on a combination of quantity 
 and quality. Quantity is more obvious, more 
 tangible, than quality; therefore, quantity of 
 money spent, not quality obtained, has always 
 
28 COLONEL J. M. SCHOONMAKER 
 
 troubled railroad owners, and consequently 
 also railroad directors and railroad executives; 
 but Colonel Schoonmaker recognized the 
 value of quality; he made the Pittsburgh & 
 Lake Erie, in motive power, in rolling stock, 
 in roadbed, the pioneer of all that is best. 
 In its operation, in its immense loads, in its 
 relation to the public, to shippers, and to 
 employees, it is as good as in its equipment 
 and physical condition. 
 
 A railroad is judged, not always fairly, by 
 the ratio of all operating expenses to gross 
 earnings. Any ratio under 75 per cent is con- 
 sidered good; extraordinarily favorably situ- 
 ated or well operated roads have shown as 
 low as 50 per cent. In 1909, from July to 
 November, the ratio of the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie was under 40 per cent, averaging for the 
 five months 37.5 per cent. In October the 
 ratio was as low as 33.67 per cent. This 
 aroused coroment and skepticism, and the 
 colonel was accused of improper distribution 
 of expense. He smilingly repudiated all tech- 
 nical knowledge of railroad accounting, said 
 he hoped official instructions from head- 
 quarters were being carried out, and suggested 
 that skilled auditors be sent to check up every- 
 thing and put him right. This was done ; the 
 books were overhauled, and the final report 
 was that the ratio was reaUy lower than re- 
 
A GREAT PERSONALITY 29 
 
 ported, as some items ordinarily chargeable 
 to capital had been charged as an operating 
 expense. 
 
 The low ratio was attained not by strenuous 
 and penurious economy, but by wise expendi- 
 ture. 
 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is a railroad of 
 so few miles that it can be clearly grasped as 
 a whole, yet it does business on so big a scale 
 in a great industrial center as to illustrate 
 most American railroad problems. 
 
 It is not an easy task to analyze any rail- 
 road, and particularly is it dangerous and mis- 
 leading to make any comparisons with other 
 railroads. The railroad from Manitou up 
 Pike's Peak runs a few trains daily, six 
 months in the year, charges $5.00 for a trip 
 of 8.75 mUes, and through barren wastes 
 climbs above the clouds, if there be any clouds 
 in Colorado above which to climb. The sub- 
 way in New York runs 24 hours a day, every 
 day in the year, carries millions of passengers 
 over distances up to 17 miles for 5 cents each, 
 and rumbles along underground because there 
 is no room on the densely populated surface. 
 
 Railroads so diverse in type cannot be com- 
 pared. If, therefore, operating facts as to the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie and operating facts as 
 to other railroads are used, it is for the pur- 
 
30 COLONEL J. M. SCHOONMAKER 
 
 pose of showing that the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie is, either by reason of fortunate location, 
 more fortunate trafl&c concentration, or most 
 fortunate administration, an unusual railroad. 
 
 There are several railroads besides the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie running into Pitts- 
 burgh, many divisions of the Pennsylvania, the 
 Wabash, the Baltimore & Ohio, the Wheeling 
 & Lake Erie, the Western Maryland, and those 
 that are interested in comparisons can delve 
 into the statistics available in the Interstate 
 Commerce Commission reports. 
 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is the smallest 
 railroad in the great New York Central sys- 
 tem; yet except in the matter of mileage it 
 stands as an operating unit highest on the list. 
 
 We cannot compare the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie physically with the Pike's Peak railroad 
 or the Interborough in New York City, but 
 we can always compare ideals and principles ; 
 and it is not solely or even primarily because 
 of location that the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 has succeeded ; it is primarily because of ideals 
 and principles infused into all the details of 
 the management and operation by its vice- 
 president. 
 
 What is the ideal that should inspire all rail- 
 roads, all business corporations? The one 
 great ideal is service, and service is of three 
 
A GREAT PERSONALITY 31 
 
 kinds: — service to the public under whose 
 franchise the railroad was incorporated, serv- 
 ice to those who have furnished the money to 
 build it and put it in operation; service to 
 those who give their best powers to its man- 
 agement and operation. 
 
 Service, whether to the public, to the in- 
 vestor or to the worker, takes three forms. 
 
 As to the public, there must be progressively 
 better service at progressively lower price in 
 order that volimie of business may grow. 
 
 As to the investor, there must be progres- 
 sively better security, progressively larger in- 
 come, progressively greater opportunity for 
 investment. 
 
 As to the worker, there must be progres- 
 sively higher rate of pay per hour, for less 
 arduous and less dangerous service, and em- 
 ployment must broaden in volume, quality and 
 intensity. 
 
 When the universe has no more wealth- 
 producing secrets to reveal to the inquiring 
 and investigating mind of man, then and not 
 before shall we have reached the limit in vol- 
 ume of business, in volume of invested funds, 
 in volume of employment. 
 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie, more than 
 most railroads, has steadily fulfilled the great 
 
32 COLONEL J. M. SCHOONMAKER 
 
 ideal of service in its three divisions— to the 
 public, to the investor and to the worker. 
 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is distinctly a 
 Pittsburgh road, built to further the interests 
 of Pittsburgh's great industries — ^to anticipate 
 them, rather than to follow. So when the 
 great plants to which this railroad had en- 
 trance began to expand, they found that the 
 track extensions were there before them ; when 
 cars were needed, cars were furnished; and 
 all this without legal or other technicalities, 
 millions on both sides being invested in faith 
 that the golden rule was more potent than a 
 statute, a mandamus, or an injunction. This 
 courtesy on an immense scale between rail- 
 road and manufacturer extends down to the 
 relations between the railroad and a foreigner 
 buying a ticket. 
 
 It was not on the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 that I saw railroad employees heartlessly re- 
 joice over the frantic excitement and despair 
 of a poor southern Italian they had purposely 
 misdirected, who in consequence missed the 
 train on which his family was. 
 
 Not only have wages of employees risen, 
 which was inevitable, but the conditions of 
 living and of safety have been ameliorated — 
 not in obedience to law, but because of an 
 ideal. 
 
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A GEEAT PERSONALITY 33 
 
 All the improvements have resulted from 
 the pursuit of definite ideals, realized by ap- 
 plying, often definitely and consciously, some- 
 times unconsciously, the various principles 
 that underlie all efficiency: — ^to the quality, 
 cost and volmne of the service to the public ; to 
 the quality, cost and volume of the service to 
 the investor; to the quality, cost and volume 
 of benefit to the worker. 
 
 But ideals of service, principles to guide 
 thought, plans and action, Colonel Schoon- 
 maker first applied to himself. The railroad 
 he has directed and developed is the aura of 
 the man. The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie reflects, 
 in its length, in its broad diversity, in its in- 
 tensity of well-doing, the personality of the 
 man at its head. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 SELECTION THROUGH INDIVH)TJAIi APTITUDE 
 
 OW does Luther Burbank de- 
 velop new flowers, new fruits, 
 new plants? He carefully 
 looks over individual flowers, 
 fruits, plants, and saves and 
 cultivates the best. 
 In the United States the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie Railroad has one of the best records for 
 good service to the public, good relations with 
 its employees and phenomenally low operating 
 costs. 
 
 Whether the result of fortunate accident, 
 or of conscious effort, or both, what is to be 
 learned from the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie as 
 to satisfactory railroad operation ? What fun- 
 damental truths of ideals, of personality, of 
 organization, of operation by men and equip- 
 ment has it hit upon ? Not wherein is it sim- 
 ilar to other railroads, but wherein has it dif- 
 
36 BUILDING THE ORGANIZATION 
 
 fered? The difference between success and 
 failure, between hitting the target and miss- 
 ing it, between winning a race and losing it, 
 may be very small, therefore it is not the 90 
 per cent of similarity between one railroad and 
 another that is important and interesting, but 
 it is the 10 per cent difference really differen- 
 tiating them that we ought to study. 
 
 It is from this point of view that we con- 
 sider the ideals, the personality, the organiza- 
 tion, the operation by men and equipment of 
 any successful railroad. 
 
 Ideals are brought down to earth and made 
 practical by setting up definite standards for 
 attainment. The attainment of these stand- 
 ards must be entrusted to personality. Per- 
 sonality must be supplemented by organiza- 
 tion. Organization must consist of a 
 well-designed machine in which materials, per- 
 sons and equipment, all perfect in their way, 
 make up a complete operating whole. With- 
 out a perfectly operating organization, per- 
 sonality, however able, is balked ; without per- 
 sonality there are no standards, and without 
 standards, ideals remain vague. But ideals 
 may change, often very suddenly, and with 
 the change of ideals standards also change. 
 At the other end materials, persons and equip- 
 ment are also continuously changing. The 
 
SELECTION BY INDIVIDUAL APTITUDE 37 
 
 essential remaining is personal organization; 
 personality that can accept any ideal and 
 evolve standards for it, organization that can 
 give personality the needed control over ma- 
 terials, men and machines. 
 
 Ideals change, often very suddenly, since 
 long periods of routine are ended by brief 
 and intense periods of change, which in turn 
 merge into long periods of routine: This is 
 true of everything in the universe. 
 
 All life grows, reaches maturity, and then 
 the decay of old age sets in, resulting in death, 
 unless the cells are washed free from their 
 poisons; unless they are placed in a new and 
 better medium ; but if washed, if given a new 
 and better medium, not only will life continue 
 forever, but it wiU become continuously more 
 vigorous. What is true physiologically is also 
 true physically. Ideals run their course, stag- 
 nate and die, and if there is to be growth and 
 everlasting life, there must be new ideals. The 
 rejuvenated cell cares nothing about the past, 
 and it eagerly accepts the new, but those who 
 have accepted new ideals make them retro- 
 active, those who are still living in the routine 
 of the past find it exceedingly hard to accept 
 the new. 
 
 In the years gone by private gain was the 
 ideal, but now the ideal is service. When 
 
38 BUILDING THE ORGANIZATION 
 
 Joseph and Pharaoh had advance information 
 on the years of plenty to be succeeded by the 
 years of famine, they utilized the knowledge, 
 not to help the people, but to enrich them- 
 selves by enslaving the people. It was in ac- 
 cordance with the ideal of that age, but it was 
 in that instance particularly atrocious since 
 neither Joseph nor Pharaoh had in any way 
 contributed to the years of plenty, nor had 
 their researches given them knowledge as to 
 the years of famine. It is probable that the 
 story of the dream was an afterthought ; that 
 Joseph and Pharaoh having gone long of the 
 market on grain, deliberately brought about 
 the years of crop failures by supplying poor 
 seed or by diverting, controlling or regulating 
 in some way the overflow of the Mle. 
 
 In the progress of the ideal of service, the 
 Courts at present have no hesitancy in assur- 
 ing railroads that they must operate for the 
 convenience of the public, whether they pay 
 dividends or not, and that they must pay ade- 
 quate compensation to the workers whether 
 they earn dividends or not. 
 
 In the meantime investors demand better 
 security, not poorer security, and for equal 
 security they expect at least equal earning 
 power, not through the new ideals of the age, 
 which are acceptable, but by governmental 
 
SELECTION BY INDIYEDTJAL APTITUDE 39 
 
 operation. But our Government is inherently 
 incompetent at the present time to operate, be- 
 cause its organization is defective. We are 
 drifting towards Government owned and oper- 
 ated railroads, of which the building, owner- 
 ship and operation of the Panama Canal may 
 be the type, an enterprise costing twice the 
 original estimates, to be operated arbitrarily 
 with haughty disregard of international 
 amenities and without any reference to remu- 
 neration. 
 
 It is not of the boldness of the Government 
 that we complain, it is not with the exactions 
 of labor that we find fault, nor with the timid- 
 ity of investors, but that all, without full vision 
 and failing to realize their interdependence, 
 have in fact no ideals and no standards. 
 
 The interdependent ideals of railroad opera- 
 tions are in reality very simple. 
 
 That railroad which gives progressively bet- 
 ter service to the public, wiU exact progres- 
 sively less toil from its employees ; it will give 
 progressively better security to aU its share- 
 holders. 
 
 That railroad which gives progressively 
 cheaper service to the public will also give 
 progressively higher wages per hour to its 
 employees, and progressively better security 
 to its bondholders and shareholders. 
 
40 
 
 BUILDING THE ORGANIZATION 
 
 That railroad which gives progressively a 
 larger volume of service to the public will also 
 progressively widen the field for employment 
 and borrow progressively more money from 
 investors. 
 
 No railroad has been attaining ideals if it 
 has not been continuously advancing along 
 these different lines. 
 
 It is by these ideals we first analyze the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie, comparing two dates 
 far enough apart to note progress or retro- 
 gression, the first date corresponding with the 
 advent of the present vice-president as an 
 official director. 
 
 SBaiVIOB TO PUBLIC 
 
 1895 
 
 1911 
 
 GAIN 
 PER CENT 
 
 (a) Equipment 
 
 
 
 
 Number of locomotives 
 
 107 
 
 231 
 
 106 
 
 Number of passenger cars. . . 
 
 60 
 
 105 
 
 75 
 
 (b) Costs in cents 
 
 
 
 
 Earnings per ton mile 
 
 1.06* 
 
 0.77 
 
 13 
 
 Earnings per passenger mile. 
 
 1.95 
 
 1.72 
 
 13 
 
 (c) Quantity of service 
 
 
 
 
 Total million ton miles 
 
 613 
 
 1,732 
 
 183 
 
 Total million passenger miles 
 
 25.8 
 
 88.4 
 
 243 
 
 SERVICE TO WOEKEKS 
 
 
 
 
 (a), Tons carried per employee 
 
 
 
 
 killed 
 
 934,887 
 
 2,178,760 
 
 331 
 
 (b)t Average wages per hour 
 
 $0.21 
 
 $0.27 
 
 29 
 
 (o^ ^iirnhpT PTiTDloved 
 
 2,781 
 
 7,245 
 
 160 
 
 
 
 *1881. 
 
 f Hours of service have decreased in case of yardmen from 
 12 to 11 hours. In case of engineers from maximum of 40 
 
SELECTION BY INDIVIDIIAL APTITUDE 41 
 
 Even in the past the new ideals of service 
 were realized because the man at the head had 
 vision, had personality, and was so far in the 
 lead as to outstrip the slow following change 
 in puhKc opinion— and this is the meaning of 
 vision, to rise above the fog and steer a course 
 by the stars. 
 
 Ideals must first exist before there can be 
 standards, but what limit must we impose on 
 standards ? 
 
 When shall progress stop, youth come to an 
 end? When shall stagnation prevail, matur- 
 ity be reached? When shall decay begin, sen- 
 ility set in? Life's analogy answers — 
 NEVER! 
 
 By successive cuttings and plantings a gera- 
 nium may live forever; by successive wash- 
 ings and food betterment it is apparently pos- 
 sible to make parts of the human body, per- 
 haps, indeed, whole organs, live forever. Shall 
 similar laws of growth not hold true also for 
 railroads ? 
 
 If a railroad betters and cheapens its serv- 
 ice, there will be more freight and passengers ; 
 if it secures better employees and improves 
 the conditions of work, the wages per hour can 
 go up indefinitely, since higher quality of serv- 
 
 hours to maximum of 16; full comparative records are not 
 available. 
 
42 BUILDING THE ORGANIZATION 
 
 ice means lower operating cost, and if it offers 
 better security to investors, it can borrow more 
 money at a less rate and therefore stiU further 
 cheapen the service and increase wages. But 
 what is the limit to this progress? 
 
 Where is the point of saturation, since prog- 
 ress will automatically stop when saturation 
 occurs? A sponge can hold only so much 
 water ; a living body can absorb only so much 
 food. But man is not a sponge, nor is there 
 a limit to his ambition. Whether we go back 
 ages of time in the life of the race, or only 
 to the beginning of the life of an individual, 
 we find that humanity starts with a body less 
 organized than that of a worm, feeding on 
 and feeling only the soil in which it lives, but 
 from this small beginning it has developed to 
 the marvel it now is; yet it is stiU pressing 
 ahead, revealing unlimited ability and capac- 
 ity to absorb for its own benefi.t the limitless 
 resources of a limitless universe. Therefore, 
 the point of saturation is beyond question il- 
 limitably distant. 
 
 When all human beings are as perfect in 
 some power as any single individual has ever 
 been in any single power, we shall have made 
 only the first step. 
 
 Greater men will devise better equipment 
 and better materials, and with this better 
 
SELECTION BY INDIVIDTJAL APTITUDE 43 
 
 equipment and these better materials, greater 
 men will realize more for hmnanity. 
 
 There can therefore be no turning back. If 
 the public calls for a larger volume of service, 
 rates will fall and facilities wiU be better, even 
 though the rate of progress be slow; if the 
 workers by their health, intelligence, honesty 
 and industry progressively lessen the costs per 
 unit, wages will steadily rise, conditions stead- 
 ily ameliorate, more men wiU be employed; 
 if the securities are better, more money will 
 be offered, interest rates wiU fall and greater 
 improvement will be remunerative. 
 
 Personality conceives ideals, but it also sets 
 standards — ^and without personality there are 
 no standards. 
 
 Standards are the key to all efficiency. An 
 ideal is what might be, a standard is what 
 can be and ought to be. Efficiency is the rela- 
 tion between what is and the standard. With- 
 out standards nobody knows where to go. 
 With standards everybody can advance, slowly 
 or rapidly, circuitously or directly towards the 
 ideal. Men had driven trotting horses for 
 about 500,000 years, but the development of 
 the stop watch made it possible to lessen the 
 time for a mile from three minutes to two in 
 about 80 years. Men had been shooting at 
 marks for 500,000 years. Even as late as the 
 
44 BUILDING THE OEGANIZATION 
 
 time of Napoleon, soldiers with muskets were 
 scarcely able to hit houses a few hundred yards 
 away; but the setting up of standards made 
 American battleship marksmanship 1,200 
 times more effective in 1912 than in 1898. 
 
 Personality is one of the greatest forces in 
 the world. There were thousands of Israelites 
 in Egypt, but only one Moses ; millions of Hin- 
 dus, but only one Buddha; millions of Mon- 
 golian boys, but only one Jenghis Khan, whose 
 triumphant advance 700 years ago drove the 
 Turks westward into Europe, whence they are 
 now being expelled; there were millions of 
 Japanese, but only one Hideyoshi ; there were 
 millions of Frenchmen, but only one Napoleon. 
 
 But all these were greater because they 
 trusted not to their own powers, but to that 
 wonderful device called organization. Hercu- 
 les was more picturesque than Moses; Peter, 
 the Hermit, preaching the futile crusades, 
 more startling than Jenghis Khan, who cre- 
 ated the greatest Empire the world has ever 
 seen ; Joan of Arc, Maid of Orleans, was a won- 
 derfully beautiful, tragic and inspiring child, 
 but Queen Elizabeth inaugurated the great- 
 ness of England; Paul Jones was a hero of the 
 sea, but Thomas Jefferson, not as an individ- 
 ual, but as President, made possible the future 
 greatness of the United States. 
 
SELECTION BY INDIVIDTJAL APTITUDE 45 
 
 It is through organization that great per- 
 sonalities have lastingly created and pro- 
 gressed — ^the more wonder that the science of 
 organization is still so backward. If we wish 
 to learn chess, to open the game scientifically 
 and move wisely the 32 pieces, there are many 
 books; for bridge whist there are also many 
 manuals, but where are the world-renowned 
 books on organization? 
 
 Yet the science is very old, so old that the 
 social insects have prospered using its funda- 
 mentals, so old that the delta and littoral of 
 the Nile, no better than the delta and banks 
 of the Mississippi, at a very early period, and 
 with astonishing rapidity, became the seat of 
 a powerful empire which lasted four thousand 
 years. 
 
 There can be only one best type of organi- 
 zation for any purpose. If that purpose is 
 to operate a battleship, the organization is so 
 standardized that an American captain could 
 pass to a Turkish or a Greek or a Chinese or 
 a Japanese or a British battleship and in a 
 few hours find himself. The organization is 
 standard in every sea under every flag. 
 
 Why is it that two parallel American rail- 
 roads, the Southern Pacific and the Santa Pe, 
 have different types of organization? Why is 
 it that British, French, German and American 
 
46 BUILDING THE ORGANIZATION 
 
 railroads have organizations so different that 
 operating officers rarely, if ever, pass from 
 one to the other? 
 
 What secret of organization was applied by 
 the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad? 
 
 The Egyptians 5,000 years ago understood 
 that to control humanity, to direct it, to have 
 perfect balance, the three different types of 
 directing force must be combined — the mind 
 great in thought, the heart great in vital sym- 
 pathies, the body great in action — ^for if any 
 one of these is lacking the organization loses 
 power, 
 
 American organizations of all kinds have 
 peculiarly lacked balance. In our national and 
 State governments the mental type has pre- 
 dominated — ^lawyers ; in our city governments 
 the vital type has predominated — ^the glad 
 hand politician without ideals ; in the railroads 
 and other great businesses the motive type has 
 predominated to the exclusion of ideals and of 
 human sympathy. 
 
 Congress and the Supreme Court and the 
 President are viewed with distrust by the 
 whole coimtry because we, the workers, are 
 being subjected to theories, to protection and 
 to free trade theories, to the theory that big 
 combinations and mergers are inimical to the 
 public welfare, to the theory that the opera- 
 
SELECTION" BY INDIVIDTJAL APTITUDE 47 
 
 tion of the Union Pacific Eailway and of the 
 Southern Pacific Railway as a unit is an evil— 
 although the Southern Pacific is paralleled 
 from end to end by the Santa Fe — ^although 
 the Union Pacific is paralleled from end to 
 end by Gould lines — ^although there are five 
 other competing transcontinental lines, two of 
 them beyond the borders of the United States ; 
 although there is the competing Tehuantepec 
 ocean and rail route through Mexico ; although 
 the all- water route via Panama is almost com- 
 pleted. 
 
 When Galveston faced one of the gravest 
 crises that ever confronted a city, it dismissed 
 its vital type councilmen and appointed a com- 
 mission of five in whom the mental and motive, 
 the combination of mind and action, prevailed. 
 The results for good were so instantaneous 
 that the commission form of government is 
 hailed as the solution of our city problems. 
 
 Yet the results were not due to any inher- 
 ent excellence of mental and motive types over 
 vital types, but to the substitution of high 
 ideals for low ideals. 
 
 Seattle is not only the healthiest city in the 
 United States, not only the healthiest city in 
 the world, it is the healthiest city that ever 
 existed. Why? Because the man at the head 
 of the health department was an experienced 
 
48 BUILDING THE ORGANIZATION 
 
 politician; he knew how to obtain what he 
 wanted, because he had ideals — ^the lowest 
 death rate in the world — and because he was 
 a trained physician and knew how. 
 
 There was balance of the three qualities — 
 of the vitality that wanted people to be well, 
 of the mentality that knew what ought to be 
 done, of the motivity that achieved. The 
 means were extraordinarily simple: pure 
 water, pure milk, no flies, isolation of the con- 
 tagiously sick. 
 
 In the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad 
 there is balance. That is part of the reason 
 for its success. 
 
 Its Vice-President is not a one-sided man, 
 splendidly and predominatingly motive — even 
 as a boy soldier he was consumed with ideals, 
 not only mental, but deeply human; and this 
 balance has enabled him to build up his or- 
 ganization with men markedly of the different 
 types each supplementing the other. 
 
 But on the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie another 
 fundamental principle of strong organization 
 has been applied, the principle of the imit of 
 authority and responsibility. The principle of 
 the unit is best illustrated in the commander 
 of the modern battleship. The battleship is 
 under the control of a imit to whom aU power 
 is delegated, from whom all authority ema- 
 
SELECTION BY INDIVIDUAL APTITUDE 49 
 
 nates, so that even the ship's time cannot be 
 set to accord with the sun until the captain 
 has made it so. That captain is most success- 
 ful who supplements his own human type 
 whether mental, vital or motive by what he 
 lacks. Desertions are less frequent on ships 
 carrying chaplains who by their sympathy and 
 ideals supply what the captain often lacks, 
 and that organization is stronger in which 
 fewer desertions occur; that organization is 
 weaker in which more desertions occur. 
 
 Whether outwardly in its roster the Pitts- 
 burgh & Lake Brie differs in organization 
 from other roads is of small moment. In spirit 
 it is controlled by a unit of command in whom 
 ideals and action are combined with human 
 sympathy, and this theory of unit of organi- 
 zation extends to each department. The in- 
 fluence of the commander is everywhere felt, 
 not seen. When the president of the New 
 York Central thought it impossible that the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie's operating ratio 
 should be lower than 35 per cent, Colonel 
 Schoonmaker refused to know anything about 
 details. He had issued the standard practice 
 instructions to his qualified officials and from 
 his point of view the records of necessity must 
 be correct — ^and so it proved, for his great 
 spirit of honor, not the spirit of petty and 
 
50 BUILDING THE ORGANIZATION 
 
 meddlesome control, had prevailed, and when 
 there was question as to any detail of this 
 operating expense, it had been counted against 
 a good showing. 
 
 This fundamental principle of the unit, so 
 old and so valuable, has also been singularly 
 lacking in American administration. The unit 
 principle is not to be confounded with arbi- 
 trary authority and delegated responsibility 
 which usually result in anarchy all the way 
 down the line. The well known principle of 
 the unit authority is expressed in the Old 
 World doctrines of the divine right of kings, 
 the infallibility of the pope and in the stand- 
 ing armies. 
 
 The mere mention of these Old World the- 
 ories arouses antagonism in an American, yet 
 they could never have lasted through so many 
 centuries had there not been immense value in 
 them. Not the principle of authority, but the 
 abuse of authority deserves condemnation. 
 
 Instead of modernizing these fundamental 
 principles of authority by increasing respon- 
 sibility, as England did politically and as Ger- 
 many has more recently done industrially, the 
 fathers of our country, fearful of concentrated 
 power, took a backward step, cut loose from 
 individual ability and created a Une of author- 
 ity without responsibility and only by accident 
 
SELECTION BY INDrVlDIJAL APTITUDE 51 
 
 competent! To whom is our Supreme Court 
 responsible? Not even always to common 
 sense ! To what permanent ideals is Congress 
 responsible ? Not even to national power and 
 progress! To what is the President respon- 
 sible ? Not even to the ideals of the party that 
 elected him! 
 
 With such a makeshift National Govern- 
 ment organization as a model, naturally our 
 cities, our industrials and our railroads have 
 gone astray since they did not have before 
 them any living, growing, changing ideal, no 
 balance of personality, no unit of responsi- 
 bility. 
 
 But in practice the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 has broken away from misleading models, and 
 under the authority of balanced personality 
 has established the unit of responsibility, units 
 of responsibility, men with line authority, but 
 each supplemented with staff knowledge. 
 
 It is not enough to delegate responsibility. 
 To the captain of the battleship all power and 
 commensurate responsibility have been dele- 
 gated, but he is supplemented with all the 
 available knowledge in the universe and at his 
 peril does he disregard this knowledge. 
 
 A striking example of staff knowledge at the 
 service of line authority occurs occasionally on 
 submarines. These boats carry cages of mice. 
 
52 BUILDING THE ORGANIZATION 
 
 Mice vociferously object to the poisonous gases 
 arising from leaking gasoline or escaping hy- 
 drogen. The shrill squeaks of the mice call 
 attention to the danger and the commander 
 who neglects the warning renders himself 
 liable to court martial. Yet the mice exercise 
 no authority and the commander has no per- 
 sonal knowledge. It isf staff counsel acted on 
 by line authority that conquers the danger. 
 
 The great difficulty in imperfect organiza- 
 tion, the kind most railroads possess, is to pre- 
 vent line from acting on its Own limited and 
 faulty knowledge, to prevent staff from usurp- 
 ing authority. As a result we have incompe- 
 tent line, impatient of all advice, or we have 
 disorganizing staff disrupting all line author- 
 ity. In the unstandardized condition of Amer- 
 ican organizations it requires the personality 
 of the great leader to make line officials so 
 draw on staff officials as to keep them up to the 
 highest output of knowledge; to make staff 
 officials so stimulate line officials as to keep 
 them up to the highest practicable attainment 
 of result. 
 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad is 
 permeated with line and staff ideals even if 
 they are not always recognized by these names. 
 When I asked a line official about some prac- 
 tice I was immediately put in touch with a staff 
 
SELECTION BY INDIVIDUAL APTITUDE 53 
 
 specialist who knew all about the subject ; but 
 if I asked the staff official about operation, 
 back I was referred to the line. 
 
 The brain is the man. He can lose his limbs, 
 but the man is still there ; he can be dying of 
 a mortal wound, but the man is stiU there if the 
 brain is clear. When the brain is impaired 
 there is nothing of value left. Yet the brain 
 is shut up in a bony box with very small and 
 specially guarded openings. This wonderful 
 brain, this head of the line and staff, this 
 thing that is the man, receives all its current 
 information and advice from staff advisers, 
 from the ears and the eyes and the nose and 
 the mouth and the muscles. Then the staff- 
 advised brain sends out its orders to its line 
 servants, to the hands and teeth and feet, and 
 they act. The brain is a splendid executive, 
 a model head of "staff and line. 
 
 Good line and staff also work together as 
 do brain and stomach. The digestive organs 
 tell the brain what they prefer as food, the 
 brain gives them, if it can, what they want. 
 Whatever it gives them, they do the best they 
 can to make useful ; and the brain and hands 
 in turn use what is available for strength as 
 best they can. 
 
 Colonel Schoonmaker and his line give his 
 staff f uU opportunity to connect with the uni- 
 
54 BUILDING THE OEGANIZATION 
 
 verse and to make available for line action all 
 that the stafE derives from the universe. 
 
 With ideals, with balanced personality to 
 define standards, with units of authority and 
 responsibility we are now ready for an organ- 
 ization in which materials, persons and equip- 
 ment are each predetermined for their partic- 
 ular functions. 
 
 Everybody recognizes that for any given 
 purpose some materials are better than others, 
 that for certain responsibilities some persons 
 are better than others, and that for perform- 
 ance certain equipment is better than others. 
 They have not always recognized the funda- 
 mental truth that the practical value of ma- 
 terials, of equipment and of persons increases 
 faster than the market cost. A steel costing 
 $0.80 instead of one costing $0.14 per pound 
 may be capable of being shaped into a tool 
 doing a thousand times more work; a 
 machine costing $20 instead of $1.00 might 
 comparatively be worth $30,000 ; a man draw- 
 ing a yearly salary of $10,000 might earn for 
 his company $300,000, while the man drawing 
 $1,000 might cost three times the amoimt he 
 was paid. 
 
 In building up its own organization the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie has consistently 
 recognized the truth that quality is cheaper 
 
SELECTION BY INDIVTOTJAL APTITUDE 55 
 
 than quantity. It has always striven for qual- 
 ity, recognizing that in the three terms : 
 
 QP Quantity multiplied by price of materials; 
 
 TW All the hours multiplied by rate of wages per 
 hour; 
 
 tR Hours in period multiplied by equipment ex- 
 pense rate per hour of operation ; 
 
 it is Q and T and t that are important, in much 
 less degree P and W and R, and that selection 
 of Q and P should be made in which QP is a 
 minimum, that selection of T and of TT in 
 which TW is a minimum, and that selection of 
 t and R in which tB is a minimum. This has 
 been consistently striven for on the Pitts- 
 burgh & Lake Erie Eailroad. 
 
 Best materials, best equipment and best men 
 are secured because there is conviction that 
 they are the cheapest, and there has been un- 
 usual aptitude in selecting them. 
 
 In the usual run of industrial plants a fair 
 amount of attention is paid to materials, yet 
 how many concerns have analyzing chemists 
 and testing laboratories? In the usual run of 
 industrial plants some attention is paid to 
 equipment, yet in how many are the makers' 
 guarantees realized? In the usual run of in- 
 dustrial plants from the top to the bottom at 
 least three-quarters of the positions are filled 
 with men who, however willing, however 
 
56 BTJILDING THE ORGANIZATION 
 
 healthy, intelligent, honest and industrious, 
 are men not horn with the special aptitude re- 
 quired for the positions they fill and no 
 amount of experience can ever make up for 
 the deficiency. 
 
 In the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad 
 organization more than in other railroad or- 
 ganizations the value of predetermination of 
 aptitudes has been recognized, not only as to 
 materials and equipment, but also as to men. 
 
 With due allowance for favorable location, 
 in the center of the great iron and coke region 
 of the United States ; with due allowance for 
 the great general uprising of business, never- 
 theless the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad 
 has, to a greater extent than most railroads 
 and than most industrial plants even in the 
 same region, built with the essentials of sound 
 organization. 
 
 It had ideals. 
 
 It was guided by balanced personality. 
 
 The ideals were crystallized into practical 
 standards. 
 
 The immense economy of quality was recog- 
 nized and quality was predetermined. 
 
 The standards were attainable through bal- 
 anced personal units made strong by staff 
 advice. 
 
SELECTION BY INDIVIDTJAL APTITUDE 
 
 57 
 
 Balanced umts, administration, became ef- 
 fective through management, and management, 
 using principles, directed operations. 
 
 Yet aU these theories without which the 
 highest success could not have been attained 
 would in themselves have been as useless as a 
 moored battleship. The organization was from 
 the start in action and remained in action, and 
 the kind of action justified the theories. 
 
XI 
 
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CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE PAST PLAYED BY SUPREMELY GOOD 
 EQUIPMENT 
 
 N individual has legally every 
 right and liberty not denied to 
 him by law. A corporation has 
 no rights except those specific- 
 ally granted to it by provision 
 of law. 
 
 Mr. Louis Brandeis has emphasized and put 
 into practice the theory that a corporation 
 should not only be permitted but encouraged 
 to earn larger and larger dividends, provided 
 it ^ve the public an improving service at a 
 lessening cost. 
 
 The corporation can do this in two ways; 
 first by eliminating the wastes in manufac- 
 turing the service, and second by increasing 
 the number of service imits produced, so that 
 a decreasing profit on each of many units shall 
 
60 SELECTION OF MATERIAL 
 
 aggregate more in proportion to investment 
 than a high profit on fewer units. 
 
 Secretary of Commerce Eedfield and also 
 Mr. Brandeis have emphasized that what the 
 worker expects and demands is permanence of 
 employment with better conditions, at an in- 
 creasing wage, both for the individual as he 
 grows older and for the class as the years roll 
 by, with wider opportunity for himself and his 
 children. It was the hopeless outlook for their 
 children, not any Utopian ideas about the 
 rights of man, that made the French fathers 
 not only welcome but carry out the Revolution 
 of 1789. 
 
 The corporation as weU as the individual can 
 safely meet these demands of the workers only 
 by granting to the workers a portion of that 
 gain which, as we have already seen, must be 
 made by eliminating wastes in operation 
 through greater fidelity of the workers and 
 through increasing the volume of business. 
 
 Mr. A. Barton Hepburn, in the Journal of 
 Commerce, speaking for bankers and inves- 
 tors, sets up the ideals of greater security, 
 greater uniformity and greater permanency of 
 rates even though they be lower. 
 
 The investor, therefore, without whom no 
 great undertaking can be started, developed 
 and carried on, is in return for greater per- 
 
INFLUENCE OF SUPREMELY GOOD EQUIPMENT 61 
 
 manence and security willing to take less 
 profit, making the task easier for those who 
 must from year to year give the public better 
 service at less cost, give the worker greater 
 business morality, more pay for less toil. 
 
 These are problems which only the wisest 
 and farthest-seeing have been able to discern, 
 to meet, and to solve successfully, helped in the 
 difficult task by the fact that in the United 
 States they were working in a growing and 
 developing country. These were the real 
 problems which the eonceivers and builders 
 and operators of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 Railroad had to solve. 
 
 A railroad, like a work of art, is created in 
 the mind before it is surveyed. Who and what 
 created the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie? South 
 of Pittsburgh are vast coal fields, the finest 
 opened coal fields in the world. The southern 
 part of these fields is of coking coal. At Pitts- 
 burgh the Ohio River starts, with its several 
 thousand miles of course through wealthy 
 States and past prosperous cities before its 
 waters meet the Gulf of Mexico. North of 
 Pittsburgh lies Lake Erie with possibilities of 
 water transportation westward, eastward, 
 northward. 
 
 Colonel Schoonmaker, after his return from 
 the Southwest, had become a leading coke pro- 
 
62 SELECTION OF MATERIAL 
 
 ducer and shipper. He knew the river route 
 well, but in winter this route was closed by ice, 
 in late summer by low water, and in the spring 
 often by high water. This made the marketing 
 of coke and coal by the river route intermittent 
 and uncertain; so he with others resolved to 
 build a railroad from the coke region, through 
 the coal region, past the great industrial plants 
 of Pittsburgh, to a rail outlet— northwestward 
 to Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago, eastward to 
 Buffalo, Canada, Central New York and New 
 England — ^a rail outlet to a water route on 
 the great lakes. Thus could coke and coal and 
 the iron and steel products of Pittsburgh be 
 transported every day in the year northward ; 
 thus could the incoming ores and lumber and 
 foodstuffs from the Northwest be brought in 
 return load to Pittsburgh. 
 
 The diagram shows the location of the Pitts- 
 burgh & Lake Erie. One branch starts in 
 the Connellsville coke district, another in the 
 Klondike coke district. They meet at McKees- 
 port, and the main line runs north to Youngs- 
 town to a jimction with the Lake Shore Rail- 
 road, which in two branches runs northeast to 
 Ashtabula on Lake Erie and to Buffalo, north- 
 west to Cleveland and to Chicago. 
 
 To conceive the plan and induce investment 
 is the first great task. Then comes the man 
 
INFLUENCE OF SUPREMELY GOOD EQUIPMENT 63 
 
 
 \ 
 
 V 
 
 N 
 
 AshtalnilaC 
 
 
 I 
 t 
 I 
 I 
 
 
 TV 
 
 T Hkadtan Tard 
 
 SolMLbu H 
 Dottea Line 
 
 tU>, AL C. 
 mL. S. ilL S. 
 
 UcKees Eocke, 
 Shops and Xaid 
 
 ) Fittsbureh 
 I UicKeesport 
 
 KlondSke Coke 
 Btsttict 
 
 NemdlXBid 
 
 GliiBgport Ye6 
 
 Jacobs Creek £ 
 
 Haven Yards 
 
 y Oonnellsville 
 Coke 
 Distxiob 
 
 The EAgtnefrtng ifagatim 
 
 DIAGEAM OF THE PITTSBUKGH &, LAKE EEIE AND ITS CON- 
 NECTIONS 
 
64 SEILECTION OP MATERIAL 
 
 able to cope with the legal difficulties of in- 
 vaded private and corporate rights, real and 
 imaginary. 
 
 The great Pennsylvania Railroad was al- 
 ready entrenched in the region, the Baltimore 
 and Ohio was also there as well as other and 
 smaller roads. By comparison only can we 
 appreciate what the incorporators and their 
 leaders accomplished. At the rate hearing in 
 "Washington, before the Interstate Commerce 
 Commission in November, 1910, Mr. Joseph 
 Ramsay, president of the Wabash during its 
 attempt to gain an entrance into Pittsburgh, 
 bitterly said that it had cost his road $35,000,- 
 000 to accomplish what the Pittsburgh & 
 Lake Erie was able to do better for $4,000,000. 
 
 After ideal creation in the mind, legal crea- 
 tion by franchise, private negotiation and 
 court decisions, the next great step is to plan 
 to divert existing traffic to the new road, to 
 plan to create new traffic as yet unborn. 
 
 In 1879 (the year the road was opened) its 
 revenue ton-miles of freight were 21,109,620; 
 in 1912 this total had grown to 2,030,299,504, 
 nearly one hundred times as much. 
 
 The cost of railroad transportation consists 
 legitimately of four main elements, and (ex- 
 cept as noted below) only four. They are : the 
 terminal costs of gathering freight, the vary- 
 
INFLTJENCE OF SUPREMELY GOOD EQUIPMENT 65 
 
 ing risk appertaining to different kinds of 
 freight, the cost of transportation, and the ter- 
 minal costs of delivering freight. We might 
 add a fifth — ^that more recent and new element 
 of cost, caused by the sometimes wise, but very 
 often unwise and oppressive, interference by 
 legislatures, executives and courts. 
 
 In the case of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 Railroad most of the freight is bulky and 
 heavy raw material — coal, coke, iron ore, or the 
 heavy first products of manufacture, iron and 
 steel. Therefore the variable risk of diversi- 
 fied freight was not important, but the other 
 two great questions remained — ^reduction of 
 terminal gathering and distributing charges, 
 and, of equal importance, reduction in trans- 
 portation charges. 
 
 The history of a railroad, like the analysis 
 of a man's character, can be read with con- 
 siderable accuracy from any reliable and con- 
 tinuous record. An impressive record is the 
 revenue tons per train mile per year for thir- 
 ty-four years. This diagram (page 66) falls 
 into four parts: 
 
 1879-1888, continuous and regular growth. 
 1889-1898, a sudden jump due to the double- 
 tracking of the road in 1889, but 
 without further growth for ten 
 years. 
 
66 
 
 SELECTION OF MATERIAL 
 
 1899-1902, anotlier progressive jump and ad- 
 vance for a period of four years. 
 
 1903-1912, another jump and progressive ad- 
 vance for ten years. 
 With the exception of the jump in 1889 the 
 
 advance is regularly progressive down to 1898, 
 
 nssEmsssn 
 
 n?i*-B>* 
 
 REVENUE TONS PER TRAIN MILE, 187S TO 1912 
 
INFLUENCE OF SUPEEMELT GOOD EQUIPMENT 67 
 
 and then instead of slowing up as might be 
 expected there is suddenly a stimulated and 
 progressive increase strikingly apparent in 
 the chart. 
 
 Eighteen hundred and ninety-seven marked 
 the division between the initial period of con- 
 ception, creation, growth, the babyhood and 
 youth, and the sudden advent of adolescence 
 and maturity. From 1879 to 1896, eighteen 
 years, the total annual revenue traffic had in- 
 creased 590 million ton-miles. 
 
 Colonel Sehoonmaker became vice-president 
 of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad in the 
 middle of 1896. 
 
 The Bessemer & Lake Erie Railroad was 
 completed in 1898 and diverted from the Pitts- 
 burgh & Lake Erie all the ore and other lake 
 traffic, in and out, of the great Carnegie steel 
 interests, not yet consolidated into the United 
 States Steel Corporation; but in spite of this 
 diversion and of the duU business year of 1907, 
 there was a marked increase in tonnage, and 
 between 1896 and 1912, seventeen years, the 
 total annual revenue ton-miles increased 1,420, 
 or nearly three times as much as in the previ- 
 ous half of the company's existence. 
 
 The vice-president's problems were two: to 
 create and secure tonnage, to handle it with 
 necessary economy when secured. The hand- 
 
68 SELECTION OF MATERIAL 
 
 Kng of trafl&c is subdivided into collection-dis- 
 tribution and into carriage. His method of 
 remedying the conditions as to collection and 
 distribution will be first considered. 
 
 Railroads have classification yards. They 
 are points to which all cars are hauled in mixed 
 trains, and there distributed to through trains. 
 Obviously, and therefore erroneously, the cen- 
 tral point on the road, McKeesport, in the 
 early history of the road, was selected as the 
 classification point. To this yard from the 
 South all the gathered local cars of coke and 
 coal and steel were hauled; to this yard from 
 the north came all the mixed trains of empty 
 coke cars, empty coal cars, loaded ore and Imn- 
 ber and food-product cars, making the south- 
 bound stream. The result in both directions 
 was long local hauls and a congestion and 
 blockade at the meeting point. The central 
 point in the road is not the best point. There- 
 fore, soon after Colonel Schoonmaker became 
 executive ofl&cer, the old yard was aban- 
 doned, dismantled, and six new classification 
 yards were established. At the Dickerson Run 
 yard and the Newell yard the loaded coke cars 
 were assembled from all the different ovens, 
 gathered into through trains, and started for 
 destination in train units for Youngstown and 
 beyond. At the Scott Haven and the Glassport 
 
INFLUENCE OF SUPKEMELY GOOD EQUIPMENT 69 
 
 yards the coal cars collected from the local 
 mines were similarly made up into through 
 trains beyond the road. At the Haselton yard, 
 near Yoimgstown, the incoming cars were 
 stopped and classified, the empty coke cars 
 made up into through trains for ConneUsviUe 
 and Klondike, the empty coal cars made up 
 into through trains for the coal mine, the cars 
 of ore made up into trains for the big steel 
 plants, cars of lumber and food stuffs sorted 
 into trains for Pittsburgh, No wonder rev- 
 I, enue tons per train mile (which had increased 
 165 tons to 360 before double-tracking, and 100 
 tons more to 468 in consequence of double- 
 tracking, but then had not increased for ten 
 years), increased 715, to 1,215, in consequence 
 of the new ideas. 
 
 But the possibility of long, solid through 
 trains immediately suggested to Colonel 
 Schoonmaker the advantage of a heavier loco- 
 motive to haul these heavy slow trains. 
 
 The theory of locomotive design is very sim- 
 ple. A locomotive is a friction drive, the 
 steam-pushed pistons turning glass-smooth 
 wheels on glass-smooth rails, the ability to 
 haul load depending on the friction be- 
 fore slipping between wheel and track. 
 The convenient friction drive has to date 
 not been found satisfactory for automo- 
 
70 SELECTION OF MATERIAL 
 
 biles, so a clutch and multiple-speed device is 
 used; but between the locomotive drivers and 
 the track 50,000,000 horse-power is available 
 for transmission. The friction increases with 
 the weight; therefore put all the available 
 weight not on idle wheels but on driving 
 wheels, and put enough steam behind a large 
 enough piston so as just not to overcome the 
 friction between tire and rail. The first loco- 
 motives had only two big driving wheels, very 
 small weight, small pistons. They could make 
 speed but could not puU a heavy load. In 
 1896 the characteristic type of heavy freight 
 locomotive was the ten-wheeler with four 
 wheels in the truck, thus carrying 21 per cent 
 of the weight on undriven wheels. There were 
 six driven wheels of about 5-f eet diameter. 
 
 If the weight could be taken off the truck 
 wheels and put in the drivers, if the load on 
 each wheel could be increased from 13,200 
 pounds to 16,000 pounds, if the number of 
 drivers could be increased from six to eight, 
 if the stroke of the piston could be made longer 
 and its diameter large and the steam pressure 
 be increased 30 pounds per square inch, then 
 such a locomotive could drag 2,500 tons instead 
 of 1,500 in each train. 
 
 Colonel Schoonmaker, the soldier, the ship- 
 per of coke down the river, could not see much 
 
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INFLUENCE OF SUPKEMELY GOOD EQUIPMENT 71 
 
 difference between a long row of coal barges 
 guided by a slow working and very powerful 
 sternwheel boat, and a train of coke cars pulled 
 by an equally slow, very heavy and powerful 
 locomotive. But no railroad man and no loco- 
 motive builder had either his vision, his faith, 
 his originality, or his courage, and they would 
 neither design nor build for him what he 
 wanted until he personally assumed the risk, 
 and Mr. L. H. Turner, his superintendent of 
 Motive power, cheerfully and skilfully de- 
 signed and built in the railroad shops the fa- 
 mous 121, weighing 70 tons, with 90 per cent 
 of its weight on four driving axles, with 7,200 
 poimds of steam pressure on the piston instead 
 of 4,850, and an 80 per cent longer stroke. 
 This was the first consolidation locomotive 
 built of so great weight and with so large 
 cylinders. 
 
 The Bessemer & Lake Erie Railroad was 
 a rival road; nevertheless Colonel Schoon- 
 maker cheerfully lent it his famous 121 for a 
 test with the old type Mogul, with three pairs 
 of drivers. Both started from Lake Erie with 
 trains of the same weight, made up of similar 
 cars in equal number, similarly loaded. The 
 Mogul had a pushing locomotive to help it over 
 the Greenville Hill up from the lake to the 
 Ohio River watershed, but it nevertheless 
 
72 SELECTION or MATERIAL 
 
 stalled on the grade. The following 121 
 stopped on the grade, uncoupled, and pushing 
 the Mogul's train over the grade, came back, 
 hitched on to its own train, started it, and took 
 it over the grade without help. This settled 
 for all time the power of the new type and 
 many more were immediately built. The 
 heavier locomotives contributed to the jump 
 of 30 per cent in tonnage per train mile, be- 
 tween 1898 and 1899. We are here, however, 
 reminded of the old story told by our grand- 
 fathers about the woman who bought a new 
 center table, and in order to match up, had 
 to refurnish the parlor, then the whole house, 
 and finally to build a new house. 
 
 Heavier locomotives require heavier track, 
 heavier bridges; long trains require long 
 sidings; heavier trains require lower grades 
 and wider curves, and bigger and stronger 
 cars. 
 
 But revenue per train mile, after paying 
 for all these stupendous improvements, would 
 increase faster than train-mile expenses, even 
 if rates fell. The diagram on page 66 shows 
 the increase in tonnage in the four years be- 
 tween 1898 and 1903. 
 
 In 1903 further steps were taken in addition 
 to the general improvements of better track 
 and heavier motive power. 
 
INTLTJENCB OF SUPREMELY GOOD EQUIPMENT 73 
 
 Steel cars were substituted for wooden cars. 
 Not the first steel car patent, but the first steel 
 car with steel body bolster ever built, was also 
 designed and made in 1898 for Colonel Schoon- 
 maker and for his superintendent of motive 
 power. 
 
 STEEL OARS COMPARED TO WOODEN CARS 
 
 Total Ca- Per cent Load 
 
 Weight pacity Load per Axle 
 
 1889 Wooden 26,800 50,000 65 19,200 
 
 1898 Steel 35,000 80,000 69 28,875 
 
 1911 Steel 46,600 110,000 70 39,150 
 
 These steel coal and coke cars are self- 
 clearing and one laborer can unload five of 
 them in a day. 
 
 The weight of each car has been increased 
 74 per cent, but the capacity has been increased 
 120 per cent. The same number of wheels 
 carry more than twice the weight. 
 
 With heavy locomotives and heavy cars at 
 their disposal, the operating department di- 
 rected that locomotives should be given fuU 
 trains and that cars should be given full loads. 
 These two principles are a power for economy 
 in the hands of a wise general manager with 
 a competent organization. They are two of the 
 most dangerous principles that can be applied 
 when the manager is not wise and when the or- 
 ganization is inefficient. 
 
74 SELECTION OP MATERIAL 
 
 On other roads I have known carloads of 
 perishable freight to be delayed, waiting until 
 a full train load could be made up; partial 
 carloads to be held and held until the car 
 could be fuUy loaded. Even as the painter's 
 colors are mixed with brains in order to make 
 pictures, so any theory or principle, especially 
 in railroading, must be mixed with brains first- 
 ly, lastly and continuously. It is not the recog- 
 nition of the principle that calls for admira- 
 tion; it is the standardization of all condi- 
 tions, the standardization of all operation, that 
 made the application of principles possible. 
 
 Theoretically the table shows the difference 
 between heavy locomotives pulling heavy 
 loaded cars in fuUy loaded trains and weak 
 locomotives pulling 80 per cent trains of 80 
 per cent loaded cars. 
 
 
 Load on 
 
 Load on 
 
 Power of 
 
 End 
 
 
 car 
 
 train 
 
 locomotive 
 
 result 
 
 
 per cent 
 
 per cent 
 
 per cent 
 
 per cent 
 
 Standard . . . 
 
 100 
 
 100 
 
 100 
 
 100 
 
 Actual 
 
 80 
 
 80 
 
 50 
 
 33 
 
 Since theory showed that loads could in- 
 crease from 32 per cent of standard to 100 
 per cent, we begin to understand how wise 
 executives, wise organization, wise manage- 
 ment, and wise operation made them increase 
 from 453 in 1896 to 1,215 in 1912. 
 
INPLTTENCE OF SUPREMELY GOOD EQUIPMENT 75 
 
 But heavy locomotives pulling heavy trains, 
 and freight cars carrying heavy loads con- 
 tinuously, require special care ; so on the site 
 of the old classification yard, unusually exten- 
 sive and well equipped shops were located, to 
 which further reference will be made later. 
 The cost of maintaining both locomotives and 
 freight cars per mile run were (on account 
 of the excellent facilities and splendid man- 
 agement of these shops) lower than on most 
 railroads in the United States, setting stand- 
 ards of cost which I have used as an ideal 
 for other railroads to aim at. 
 
 The soul of a locomotive is its boiler, and 
 bad water is fatal to good locomotive opera- 
 tion. Dirty water goes in, distilled water goes 
 out in the form of steam. In a short time, 
 imless cleaned, the whole boiler is fuU of 
 sludge, mud, incrusting scale, which prevents 
 the transmission of heat, causes the sheet and 
 tubes to leak at the joints and to bum out. 
 The water along the Une of the Pittsburgh & 
 Lake Erie is particularly bad, filled with cor- 
 roding acids and incrusting sediment. 
 
 As a corrective and paUiative, purifiers were 
 erected at the various water tanks; but in ad- 
 dition a complete system of washing out the 
 dirty water and filling the boilers with fresh 
 and clean water was installed, so that the 
 
76 
 
 SELECTION OF MATERIAL 
 
 washing could be done well in half an hour 
 without destructive cooling of the boiler. The 
 dirty water is forced into a tank, the heat is 
 used to distill some of it, the clean condensed 
 water is superheated and passed back into the 
 boiler. The engineer and fireman often re- 
 main in the cab, the fire is often not drawn. 
 Not only is much time saved, but what is of 
 much more value, the deterioration of the loco- 
 motives is prevented ; they do not require cool- 
 ing down and thorough washing oftener than 
 once in six weeks. 
 
 Terminal classification yards resulted in big 
 train possibilities, big trains required big loco- 
 motives, and big cars and hard operation re- 
 quired a big and well equipped shop; bad 
 water required purifiers and water-changing 
 installations ; but the locomotives were becom- 
 ing heavier and heavier. 
 
 LOCOMOTIVE TABLE 
 
 Total weight, tons 
 
 Weight on drivers, tons . 
 Per cent, on drivers. . . 
 
 Cylinders, inches 
 
 Steam pressure, lb 
 
 Tons load 
 
 1896 
 
 1897 
 
 PODR- 
 WHSKLEB 
 
 121 
 
 50 
 
 70 
 
 39.6 
 
 63 
 
 79.2 
 
 90 
 
 18 by 24 
 
 10 by 26 
 
 150 
 
 180 
 
 1,500 
 
 2,500 
 
 1912 
 
 FBB8BNT 
 TTPB 
 
 96 
 
 85 
 88.6 
 21 by 30 
 200 
 5,300 
 
 Why is a railroad? What is the ideal of 
 any good road of any kind? The one chief 
 
INFLTJENCB OF SUPREMELY GOOD EQUIPMENT 77 
 
 ideal is smoothness, and after that comes the 
 qualities of grades and of curves. The Eng- 
 lish, who built the first railroads, realized these 
 qualities from the first, and English railroads 
 constructed at immense expense were so built, 
 even eighty years ago, as to give an absolutely 
 smooth rolling surface. American roads were 
 more economically and flimsily built. I am 
 acquainted with an American pioneer railroad 
 that simply followed a moose trail up to a 
 mountain gap and down again on the other 
 side. It used any weight of rail from 12 
 pounds up; it used anything for ties; it was 
 completed and in operation before it was sur- 
 veyed. Nevertheless it was a good railroad, 
 for it paid for itself in the first three months 
 of operation. The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie un- 
 doubtedly bmlt similar paying spurs to coke 
 ovens and to coal mines in its infancy, but 
 with, the heavy locomotives and heavy cars 
 and heavy axle loads and long trains the whole 
 main line had to be rebuilt with standard road- 
 bed, stone ballast, best ties, heaviest rails, few 
 and easy curves, low grades, heavy bridges and 
 long sidings. 
 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie, its roadbed, 
 track and equipment, its facilities for taking 
 care of both equipment and trafl&c, a splendid 
 operating machine, was complete. 
 
78 SELECTION OP MATERIAL 
 
 But a machine is nothing without the man 
 to run it, and the better the machine, the better 
 must be the men to run it. It is the hope and 
 coming glory of the future that the perfected 
 machine will caU for and make imperative the 
 highest type of men for its operation. 
 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie was conceived, 
 built up, managed and operated by men, men 
 as logically and carefully selected as were the 
 different parts of the machine. 
 
 At Pittsburgh is a model station for pas- 
 sengers, topped by a model office building for 
 the officials; at Youngstown there is a model 
 Y. M. C. A. building for the men at the end 
 of their run. 
 
 At Pittsburgh, one of the dirtiest cities in 
 the world, the offices are without dust, the air 
 is filtered and cooled or heated according to 
 the season. It was in these offices in quiet, 
 dignity, harmony and friendliness that we met 
 the men who had made this railroad, under 
 the inspiration of the soldier, coke producer, 
 man of affairs, who had dropped into railroad- 
 ing from the top, not worked his way up from 
 the bottom as he had done in the army. 
 
 He brought to them the vision, the inspira- 
 tion, the hope and the large ideals of a world 
 greater than railroading; they brought to him 
 the technical knowledge, skill and experience 
 
INFLUENCE OF STJPREMELY GOOD EQUIPMENT 79 
 
 required for the different parts of the organi- 
 zation. The man is greater than the maehiae, 
 but the perfect organization standing for, re- 
 sponsible for, the whole, is greater than any 
 single man, because the organization can give 
 to each the strength of aU. 
 
 Later we shall take up again the manifest, 
 although often unconscious, application of 
 principles to the various problems; but the 
 next chapter will attempt to show what man- 
 ner of qualities were required for the different 
 executive positions, and the extent to which 
 men with aptitudes were selected, tried, and 
 not found wanting. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PART PLATED BY SUPREMELY GOOD PERSONNEL 
 
 Special acknowledgment is made to Dr. Katherine 
 M. H. Blackford as the author of this chapter. It was 
 written by her after two visits to Pittsburgh, made for 
 the express purpose of ascertaining the fundamental per- 
 sonal qualities of executive and staff — qualities that, more 
 than location and grade, more than roadbed or equipment, 
 have made the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie what it is. 
 
 OME years ago I studied an or- 
 ganization of salesmen. There 
 were between fifty and sixty 
 men on the force who came 
 under immediate observation, 
 Man after man was met and 
 talked with and their great similarity im- 
 pressed me, None had been with the institu- 
 tion for any great length of time. All were 
 nervous, high-strung, sensitive, quarrelsome, 
 talkative, egotistical, notional and erratic. 
 
 They were jealous of each other, jealous of 
 their chief, alternately expanding with blind 
 
82 THE STAFF 
 
 optimism and chiUing shiveringly with unrea- 
 sonable fear. It seemed as if almost every 
 man was an extremist or fanatic on some sub- 
 ject, religious, political, dietetic or economic. 
 
 The organization, as may be supposed, was 
 in a high state of irritability, inharmony and 
 consequent inefficiency; there was no one cen- 
 tral ideal common to all, and very little com- 
 mon sense either in the plans of the organiza- 
 tion or in their application by the individual 
 members. 
 
 No one seemed willing to take counsel, be- 
 cause each man regarded himself as the 
 original fount of wisdom. 
 
 There was little or no thought of the fair 
 deal except in an extreme highly theoretical 
 and fanatical way. 
 
 Of discipline in the organization there was 
 apparently none. The men came and went as 
 they chose, did their work as they wished, and 
 reported to headquarters or not, as it pleased 
 their ever-changing moods. 
 
 All this time the executive who selected and 
 "managed" this unmanageable crew had not 
 yet appeared, but I had a very distinct and 
 clear mental picture of him. When finally 
 he returned to his office from a trip, I had an 
 opportunity to study him personally. He was 
 wildly enthusiastic and desperately depressed 
 
INFLUENCE OF SUPEEMELY GOOD PERSONNEL 83 
 
 by turns ; he was spasmodic, erratic, fanatical, 
 egotistical, jealous, fuU of fears and misgiv- 
 ings, sensitive, irritable, quarrelsome, irre- 
 sponsible and as unstable as the weather. I 
 was not surprised. 
 
 This is an extreme case, but it is typical. 
 Everything about a man indicates his charac- 
 ter. This includes not only the men whom he 
 selects and with whom he surrounds himself, 
 but also the man for whom he finally and per- 
 manently works. To know the chief is to know 
 every man in the organization. To know the 
 organization is to know the chief. 
 
 All the faults of the chief whom I have de- 
 scribed were reflected in his men. All his vir- 
 tues of energy, aggressiveness, fineness of feel- 
 ing and ideals were also reflected in them. 
 
 One of the most common mistakes in choos- 
 ing executives is to select men having, in vari- 
 ous degrees, the faults and virtues exemplified 
 by the man described. This brilliant, aggres- 
 sive, energetic, driving, optimistic type of man 
 often rises high by the exercise of these very 
 qualities, but these are not the qualities which 
 wiU attract and build up a line and staff of 
 stable, dependable, loyal, thorough, careful, 
 common-sense, teachable, weU disciplined, har- 
 monious, kindly men, therefore an efficient 
 organization. 
 
84 THE STAIT 
 
 On the other hand, a chief with these quali- 
 ties will select, develop and bring into per- 
 manent, loyal and harmonious relations with 
 himself men of like character. 
 
 This is exemplified in the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie Railroad. 
 
 In the second chapter of this story the char- 
 acter of Colonel Schoonmaker, the vice-presi- 
 dent of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad, 
 is described. The qualities found in him are 
 health, intelligence, honesty and industry — 
 the fundamentals — and to these are added en- 
 thusiasm, courtesy, imagination, dependable- 
 ness, initiative, courage, sense of justice, love 
 of humanity, consideration for others, desire to 
 serve, experience, knowledge and judgment. 
 
 His staff, his heads of departments, are 
 twelve men. It is the purpose to show how 
 these men reflect the character, methods and 
 ideals of their chief, and how they are there- 
 fore exemplifying, in their various depart- 
 ments, and in their co-operation with one an- 
 other, the fundamental principles of efficiency 
 which have made the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 Railroad without a superior in service and 
 profit making. 
 
 What first strikes the observer as he meets 
 the heads of departments in this staff is the 
 spirit of active harmony and co-operation. 
 
THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE PITTSBURGH & LAKE ERIE 
 RAILROAD, AND HIS STAFF 
 
INFLUENCE OF SUPREMELY GOOD PERSONNEL 85 
 
 Harmony in an organization is both a cause 
 and a result of clear and definite ideals, of 
 common sense, of willingness to seek and to 
 accept competent coimsel, of that fine "spirit 
 of the organisation," which is the most potent 
 factor in good discipline, of the fair deal given 
 to himself and to all the rest by each member 
 of the organization, and of the certainty of 
 an efficiency reward, not only monetary, but 
 psychical. 
 
 All twelve of these men are country or vil- 
 lage-bom, so that their early life was in the 
 open, giving them an opportunity to develop 
 breadth of vision and freedom of action, and 
 to make firm the fundamentals of health, in- 
 telligence, industry and honesty. These fun- 
 damentals are the backbone of character and 
 achievement. 
 
 Unusually marked in all of these men, as 
 well as in tiieir chief, is the quality of stabil- 
 ity. Each of them has been with the road for 
 fifteen or more years. All of them have grown 
 up inside the organization. 
 
 Colonel Schoonmaker, being a stable, far- 
 sighted, fair-dealing executive, selects and 
 develops his men for higher positions within 
 the organization instead of rushing out to 
 other railroads or other institutions with a 
 sudden spasmodic infatuation for someone 
 
86 THE STAFF 
 
 who at a distance looks better than those close 
 at hand. Six years ago the purchasing agent 
 of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie was Colonel 
 Schoonmaker's stenographer. He was chosen 
 because he manifested the aptitudes of com- 
 mon sense, fairness, high principle and a keen 
 financial, analytical mind. Whatever develop- 
 ment has come to the Pittsburgh & take Erie, 
 therefore, is not the result oi spasm, but of 
 evolution. 
 
 Because the chief has stability, and because 
 this quality is common to all his staff, the 
 whole institution is stable. The quality is in 
 evidence everywhere — ^in the permanent build- 
 ings, in the low grades and heavy track, in the 
 big locomotives, big freight cars and long 
 trains. Stability is shown by the fact that in 
 all the history of the road not a passenger has 
 been killed. 
 
 Like his chief, every man on the staff is 
 blessed with the high quality of initiative — 
 not the initiative of volatile, erratic change- 
 ableness, but the initiative bom of courage. 
 
 Under the application of the principles of 
 common sense, standardized conditions, stand- 
 ardized operations, the fair deal, and efficiency 
 reward, one of the most necessary personal 
 qualities is courage to break away from tra- 
 dition — ^to do differently what had always 
 
INFLUENCE OF STJPREMELY GOOD PERSONNEL 87 
 
 been done, to do what had never been done 
 before. 
 
 It has already been shown how much has 
 been 'done on the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Rail- 
 road. It is because the chief and his staff 
 have the initiative bom of courage. 
 
 Under the application of the principle of 
 competent counsel, courage is needed to ac- 
 knowledge mistakes, to listen to wisdom from 
 others and to profit by it. As one member of 
 the staff said: "No matter how lowly the 
 man's position, I can get an idea out of him." 
 This is the spirit of the whole staff. 
 
 The application of the principle of ideals, 
 the fair deal, discipline, ef&ciency reward, 
 standardized conditions, aU demand that men 
 should have a true sense of values, and we find 
 this quality common to the vice-president and 
 to all the heads of departments of the Pitts- 
 burgh & Lake Erie Railroad. Men with this 
 quality weU developed do not become inflated 
 with success and go to extremes of expansion, 
 nor do they become unduly depressed by criti- 
 cism or failure and go to the opposite extreme 
 of panic-stricken retrenchment. 
 
 Indispensable to the application of the prin- 
 ciples of ideals, common sense, competent 
 counsel, discipline, the fair deal, and efficiency 
 reward, is the quality of a desire to serve. 
 
88 THE STAFF 
 
 Service is the fundamental ideal of any suc- 
 cessful business. Service is the only com- 
 modity a railroad has to deliver to those who 
 pay over money. The more and better the 
 service, therefore, the more willing are patrons 
 to pay, and to pay well. 
 
 This desire to serve is shown in these men 
 first of all in their absolute loyalty to their 
 chief, to each other, and to the institution 
 they represent. 
 
 The general manager told me: "I love to 
 class myself as the first lieutenant, or as the 
 shortstop on the Colonel's ball team. Loyalty 
 to our leader filters down through the whole 
 organization from the top. The one question 
 uppermost in the minds of all of the men is, 
 'Can we help?' When our chief wants any- 
 thing done it is every man's business until it 
 is accomplished." 
 
 The same spirit was shown by the auditor, 
 who said: "There is no need to give orders. 
 The men ask to help. My men don't work for 
 me; they work for the Company. There are 
 no sharp departmental lines drawn when it 
 comes to service, but any man in any depart- 
 ment is not only ready and willing, but eager 
 to do the thing needed." 
 
 The general passenger agent said: "We 
 caught the spirit of building for the future 
 
INFLTJENCE OF SUPREMELY GOOD PERSONNEL 89 
 
 from our chief. We have cohesion of co- 
 operation. We have selected competent men, 
 delegated responsibility to them, and hold 
 them accomitable for results. If there is a 
 weak spot in the system we don't criticize, 
 complain and find fault, but we aU turn in 
 and patch it up to tide us over until a per- 
 manent cure can be effected." 
 
 The purchasing agent said: "My work is 
 a hobby with me. I don't work for my de- 
 partment; I work for the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie Railroad, so that my department is a 
 part of every other department, and I will 
 say that we have the nicest bunch of boys you 
 ever saw." 
 
 The superintendent of the road said: "The 
 secret of the success of the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie is that Colonel Schoonmaker selects care- 
 fully his lieutenants, holds them responsible, 
 and then doesn't meddle with their work. We 
 settle our difficulties, if we have any, amicably 
 between ourselves, and don't bother the Col- 
 onel with them." 
 
 The real estate agent of the road said: 
 "Every man on the staff knows what every 
 other man is doing, so the most important 
 thing is done first. We are all willing to work 
 and to co-operate to that end, not fighting each 
 other, but, if necessary, fighting everybody 
 
90 THE STAFF 
 
 else." This man was deeply affected when he 
 told me of the good qualities of his chief. 
 
 Thus did these men simply, naturally ex- 
 press their loyalty, to each other and to their 
 chief — ^loyalty resulting in a desire to realize 
 the fundamental ideal of service, a desire in 
 its turn stimulating loyalty. 
 
 A more eloquent expression than any spon- 
 taneous words is the work they do in the co- 
 operation of leader and men, of department 
 with department, resulting in the efficiency 
 and excellent service of the road. 
 
 Another evidence of the desire to serve, and 
 one of the most natural and easily observed, 
 is the service actually rendered, first, to the 
 owners of the road; second, to the public; 
 third, to the employees. The fact that these 
 men have placed the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 Eailroad in a class by itself as to net earnings 
 is sufficient evidence of their service to the 
 owners of the road. 
 
 Service to the public on the Pittsburgh & 
 Lake Erie is so broad that it would be impos- 
 sible in a chapter of this kind to describe it 
 all. A few typical cases wiU show the spirit 
 of these twelve men and their chief. 
 
 The enormous tonnage of the road has been 
 built up by heavy trains over heavy tracks on 
 easy grades, but if the Pittsburgh blast fur- 
 
INFLUENCE OF SUPREMELY GOOD PERSONNEL 91 
 
 naces are short of ore and a laden ore steamer 
 arrives at Ashtabula from Duluth, the ore is 
 forwarded even if the tonnage suffers. 
 
 If a Syrian pack peddler swings his burden 
 through the door of a baggage car and takes 
 his seat in the smoker he is treated just as 
 courteously, and his few cents' fare is accepted 
 just as graciously, his broken English in- 
 quiries are answered just as carefully, and his 
 baggage is given just as much consideration 
 as if he were a millionaire paying for a special 
 over the whole length of the road. But such 
 service costs no more than contempt and bru- 
 tality. When that Syrian brings his family to 
 Pittsburgh he thinks of no other road than the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie. 
 
 If patrons of this road have special needs 
 in the way of car service, these needs are met 
 even to the extent of building special cars for 
 the accommodation of their freight. 
 
 In dealing with the public there is every- 
 where simplicity, directness and frankness. 
 In the claim department the ideal expressed 
 by the auditor is: "Settle while the claimant 
 is stUl kicking." 
 
 All of these staff men are democratic, kind- 
 ly, sociable, and one of the most appreciated 
 items in their service to the public is their 
 accessibility. Anyone who has been shunted 
 
92 THE STAFF 
 
 around from one subordinate to another, re- 
 ceiving satisfaction nowhere, can appreciate 
 what it means to have a general manager, an 
 auditor, a superintendent, a general freight 
 agent, or a general passenger agent ready to 
 receive him and deal with him frankly and 
 directly. 
 
 These are, as I have said, but typical ex- 
 amples of service to the public. They show 
 the spirit of the twelve men who form the vice- 
 president 's staff. 
 
 Service to each other and to employees they 
 show, first in the loyalty and co-operation I 
 have described; then in the treatment of sub- 
 ordinates by the chief and everyone of the 
 staff. 
 
 As already stated, employees in all positions 
 of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie road are select- 
 ed from within the organization. Practically 
 aU new blood is taken in at the very bottom. 
 The superintendent of motive power expressed 
 it thus: "We don't go outside of our depart- 
 ment for men to promote, and never have we 
 had to reduce a man who has been promoted." 
 The method of promotion is unique. A man's 
 superior officer, having watched his work care- 
 fully, steps to his side some day, compliments 
 him highly, urges him to do his best, and sug- 
 gests that promotion may be in store for him. 
 
INFLUENCE OF STJPEEMELT GOOD PERSONNEL 93 
 
 The man is then watched carefully for a few 
 weeks longer. If he buckles in and does more 
 and better work than ever before he is ad- 
 vanced. If, on the other hand, he loses his 
 head and shows that he cannot stand success, 
 he is not only not advanced, but unless he im- 
 proves he is finally eliminated from the or- 
 ganization. 
 
 Every employee is chosen not so much for 
 the immediate position which he first fills as 
 for some higher position towards which it is 
 intended to develop him. The general coal 
 and ore agent said : "In selecting an office boy 
 I ask myself the question, *WiU he make a 
 general freight agent?' " Every man on the 
 road and in a position of importance has an 
 understudy. He knows that another man is 
 ready to take his place, but he also knows that 
 he himself is being developed to take a higher 
 place. 
 
 Service to employees is shown in the excel- 
 lently equipped Y. M. C. A. buildings, where, 
 as one of the stafE told me, they intend to give 
 the men everything they can get in a saloon ex- 
 cept the whiskey and malt — ^to take better 
 care of their men than any road in the United 
 States. Every effort is made to keep the 
 men healthy and happy. The superintend- 
 ent of motive power said : "We do everything 
 
94 THE STAFF 
 
 possible to keep our men free from worry, 
 both as to their jobs and as to their private 
 affairs. The best man can be quickly made 
 worthless through worry." 
 
 Distilled water is used everywhere on the 
 road, not only for the public, but for em- 
 ployees. This is only one evidence of the 
 thoughtfulness and care given to this branch 
 of the service. 
 
 To sum up aU that I have been elaborating 
 in this chapter, the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 Railroad is a conspicuous success because of 
 the personality of its chief executive ; because 
 he gathered about him and developed men of 
 his own courageous, stable, dependable, kindly 
 qualities, and because he and they have built 
 up an organization in which every unit is 
 properly selected, carefully assigned to his 
 work, and intelligently and considerately man- 
 aged, so that the application of the Principles 
 of Efficiency, which are but natural laws of 
 success, is instinctive with this splendid body 
 of men. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 APPLICATION OF THKEE EFFICIENCY PRINCIPLES 
 
 Mr. George H. Shepard during a two-weeks investiga- 
 tion of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie, with great diligence 
 and care collected and prepared a vast amount of material 
 from personal observations, part of which Mr. Emerson 
 has used here, and for this he is greatly indebted. 
 
 HE white blackbird! Alfred de 
 Musset wrote a famous story 
 under that title. Why not a 
 white blackbird? All civilized 
 animals, even elephants, occur 
 in the white variety; therefore 
 why not a white railroad? 
 
 The blackest, darkest, dirtiest physical place 
 about most railroads and most industrial 
 plants is the blacksmith shop; but the Pitts- 
 burgh & Lake Erie has a white blacksmith 
 shop. The more unsanitary a locality like 
 Panama, the more necessity for supreme effort 
 to make it healthy, and the Isthmian Canal was 
 primarily made possible by sanitation. The 
 
96 IDEALS, COMMON SENSE, COUNSEL 
 
 darker and blacker a shop, the more necessity 
 for making it light and clean. Usually the 
 windows in blacksmith shops are carbon in- 
 crusted, the air is contaminated with sulphur- 
 ous acid and carbon monoxide, so that even the 
 leather belting which ought to last fifty years 
 corrodes and goes rotten in a few weeks. In 
 the Pittsburgh & Lake Brie blacksmith shop 
 the interior walls are painted and repainted 
 white so that they are always white, the forges 
 are whitewashed outside and in, and main- 
 tained white, a work requiring a few hours 
 once a week; the panes of glass are as clear as 
 in a careful housekeeper's home — ^all with one 
 exception, that one near an oil-splashing bear- 
 ing, which made the cleaning a dangerous oper- 
 ation, to be done only when the machinery was 
 not running. 
 
 It is little things that reveal the character of 
 a child, of a man, of a railroad, of a nation, 
 and when it comes to a choice between trouble 
 and cleanliness, the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is 
 clean; but when the choice is between endan- 
 gering human life and immaculate cleanliness, 
 dirt is to a minimum extent and with explana- 
 tions and apologies tolerated. 
 
 There are other qualities besides physical 
 whiteness to this blacksmith shop. It is also 
 industrially white. The forge master from his 
 
THREE LEADING EFEICrENOT PRINCIPLES 97 
 
 seat in his glass office, where every worker can 
 see him and he can see every worker, super- 
 vises the work going on. When he assigns 
 work he knows how long it ought to take, pro- 
 vided everything is as it ought to be— condi- 
 tions, instructions, operations, including the 
 skill and diligence of the worker — ^and he notes 
 down the time for completion. From time to 
 time he makes the round of the shop to help 
 out with advice and authority if there is any 
 fall-down in quality or quantity; a real fore- 
 man, competent and scrupulously reasonable 
 and just, for the white blacksmith shop is 
 morally white, carrying out the ideals of the 
 superintendent of motive power even as he is 
 carrying out the ideals of Colonel Schoon- 
 maker. 
 
 The fundamental cause of the extraordinary 
 cleanliness of the blacksmith shop is the special 
 MeCaslLn blacksmith forges, fitted with ex- 
 haust hoods and stacks running clear through 
 the roof. Although these forges have only 
 natural draft in the stacks, it is so good that 
 aU sparks, smoke, etc., pass immediately up 
 into the hood and out through the stack, in- 
 stead of polluting the atmosphere as in an ordi- 
 nary blacksmith shop. In conseq'uence the 
 body of the interior is kept white by paint and 
 whitewash and occasional cleaning, as shown 
 
98 IDEALS, COMMON SENSE, COUNSEL 
 
 in the photographs, and the windows are kept 
 as clean as any ordinary office or store window. 
 The result is a very superior daylight illumi- 
 nation of the interior, which must produce its 
 results in superior quality of workmanship. 
 
 In addition to the above advantages, these 
 forges provide places for all coke, coal and 
 water, and there are not the usual barrels and 
 boxes of these materials standing about; the 
 result is free space and convenience to oper- 
 ators. 
 
 On the erection of the blast-pressure system 
 of this shop the builders put up a blast pipe 
 with an elbow between the vertical and hori- 
 zontal parts of the pipe, but when the blast was 
 turned on the elbow was blown clean off. Mr. 
 McCaslin then replaced this elbow by a 12-foot 
 bend, thereby increasing the blast pressure 1% 
 ounces. 
 
 In this shop the maximum blast pressure is 
 15 ounces, which the individual workman can 
 regulate at the forges to any desired lower 
 pressure by means of dampers. Blacksmith- 
 shop blast pressure is ordinarily between 7 and 
 8 ounces. The advantages of the high blast- 
 pressure are as follows: 
 
 When a piece of metal is approaching weld- 
 ing heat, the strong blast will begin to blow 
 off sparks from the corners before the body of 
 
THE WHITE BLACKSMITH SHOP, AND A 
 FEW OF ITS FORGES 
 
THREE LEADING EFFICIENCY PKINCIPLES 99 
 
 the metal is burned, thus giving warning to 
 the blacksmith before his work is injured. It 
 is possible to get a higher temperature in the 
 metal because, under the ordinary blast, as 
 steel or iron approaches welding heat, it is apt 
 to conduct away the heat as fast as the fire can 
 put it into it. The workmen can regulate the 
 fires better with a heavier blast, as they have 
 a wider range of control. The forges can work 
 to a greater capacity and this removes one of 
 the standard excuses of the individual work- 
 man (*. e., he "cannot get a blast") and there- 
 by enables the foreman to insist on having 
 work turned out at a proper rate. 
 
 The stack for an oven in this shop gave 
 trouble by getting red-hot and endangering the 
 roof. Mr. McCaslin opened the stack, simply 
 separating two parts at a joint by a few inches. 
 The inertia of the blast carries the hot gases 
 past the opening and sucks in enough cold air 
 to keep the stack cool. This was a rather dar- 
 ing means of doing away with this trouble, as 
 one would ordinarily expect the opening in the 
 stack to destroy the draft. 
 
 On the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie it is con- 
 firming to observe all the principles of effi- 
 ciency continuously applied, although there 
 was no consciousness of any except ideals and 
 competent counsel. But one of the Colonel's 
 
100 IDEALS, COMMON SENSE, COUNSEL 
 
 strongest qualities is Ms common sense; I can- 
 not imagine him otherwise than fair, and as 
 private and ofl&cer he knew the value of disci- 
 pline. 
 
 The principles of efficiency are so inter- 
 woven that none is complete without the others 
 and a beginning can be made with any one. The 
 white blacksmith had ideals, he had common 
 sense, he was open to suggestion and welcomed 
 advice, his discipline was admirable, he was 
 fair; his conditions and his operations were 
 standardized, his instructions definite; he 
 planned the work ahead, he set up standards 
 of effort, quality, time and cost, he despatched 
 almost to the minute, his records were reliable 
 and immediate, and he recognized and recom- 
 pensed merit. It all seemed so natural and so 
 obvious, and that was its beauty, for in reality 
 it is one of the few white blacksmith shops in 
 the world. 
 
 But all the rest of the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie is similarly white, with here and there a 
 smoky pane tolerated for the sake of safety. 
 
 In earlier chapters we called attention to the 
 fact that the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie had 
 never killed a passenger, that public and em- 
 ployees alike had access to all officials, that 
 office boys were selected with the hope that 
 they would rise to be general officers, that per- 
 
THREE LEADING EFFICIENCY PRINCIPLES 101 
 
 manence of employment was one of the ideals 
 realized. 
 
 It is organization, administration and man- 
 agement that are the real danger spots in 
 American life, but the visible e:ffects of wise 
 organization, administration and management 
 are more dramatically apparent in the motive 
 departments than in the executive and mental 
 departments. 
 
 We shaU check up the various departments 
 according to the principles of efficiency, be- 
 ginning with Ideals. 
 
 IDEALS 
 
 As has been repeatedly stated, a great man- 
 agement should have the ideals of contentment 
 and safety for public, for investor and for 
 worker. Less cost and better service to the 
 public, greater returns and higher safety to 
 the investor, higher wages for better condi- 
 tions and permanence of employment to the 
 worker. The reward comes to the management 
 in greater and more friendly patronage, more 
 money at lower rates, better and more work- 
 ers with output at less cost per unit. 
 
 These ideals have been attained through the 
 clear recognition of subsidiary ideals. 
 
 Throughout all the railroad there was con- 
 sciousness of four ideals : 
 
102 IDEALS, COMMON SENSE, COUNSEL 
 
 (1) To keep the equipment always in first- 
 class condition. 
 
 (2) To secure and retain the best men. 
 
 (3) To attain expedition. 
 
 (4) To be economical. 
 
 No one of these alone is sufficient, they must 
 interlock. 
 
 One of the commonest causes of failures in 
 industrial life is intense devotion to a single 
 ideal, as perfect equipment, or good men, or 
 expedition or economy, not supplementing the 
 one ideal with the others. When the equipment 
 is in such fine condition there is bitter disap- 
 pointment when blame comes for dUatori- 
 ness and wastefulness. The whiteness of the 
 blacksmith shop is an aesthetic ideal not pri- 
 marily for the sake of beauty but for the sake 
 of efficiency, for the sake of better conditions, 
 better operations. 
 
 It has required courage, as it always does 
 to f oUow ideals. In the panic of 1893 working 
 hours were reduced from 10 to 8 and many 
 men were laid off, but the next annual inspec- 
 tion showed the need of extensive firebox re- 
 pairs so the shops went back to 10 hours. 
 When business revived, other competing roads 
 throughout the country were not able to handle 
 it. A large blast-furnace operator and direc- 
 tor in a competing road appealed for help to 
 
THEEE LEADING EFFICIENCY PRINCIPLES 103 
 
 secure coke. He was told that regular and 
 permanent customers must be served first. He 
 transferred his business and became a perma- 
 nent customer. Owing to its preparedness the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie secured enough com- 
 petitive business to pay a himdred times for 
 the cost of adhering in panic times to the ideal 
 of equipment maintenance. The Pittsburgh 
 & Lake Erie has had vision, it has so looked 
 ahead and anticipated the needs of customers 
 that big industries along its tracks between 
 Pittsburgh and Youngstown are several times 
 as dense as along competing roads. It is this 
 kind of vision that is the most important factor 
 in increasing the value of ties and rails usually 
 called a railroad. No physical valuation is 
 complete that takes into account merely the 
 market value of materials, labor and equip- 
 ment; the selection of the initial route, the 
 encouragement of development along that 
 route, are each of them bigger factors. All 
 through the discussion of the other principles 
 we shall see ideals cropping out like flowers 
 from many stalks. 
 
 The modern principle of staff knowledge 
 supplementing line authority, has not been 
 fuUy carried out. The old plan still prevails 
 in each department or subdivision of making 
 its head fill the functions of both staff and line. 
 
104 IDEALS, COMMON SENSE, COUNSEL 
 
 Staff functions are, however, continually be- 
 ing performed, as in the encouragement to em- 
 ployees to discover and invent, in the open 
 door to outside inventors, and in the Commit- 
 tee on Safety. The main reliance for staff 
 seems to be in the development of an extra- 
 ordinary line, in which the individuals have 
 both line executive-ability and staff expert- 
 knowledge. If these two can be obtained in 
 the same man, the combination is, of course, 
 much stronger than any greater niunber of 
 individuals possessing the same qualities di- 
 vided among them; but this method of crea- 
 tion of staff will become continually more diffi- 
 cult with the passage of time. 
 
 Every man in the organization has an under- 
 study, who is ready to fill his place at any time. 
 
 The superintendent of motive power was 
 recently away for four months. On his return 
 he found that his office had run smoothly in his 
 absence, and that there was no accumulated 
 work for him. 
 
 The master car builder's office was recently 
 filled satisfactorily on three-days notice, when 
 the regular master builder was temporarily 
 transferred to help out elsewhere on the New 
 York Central lines. 
 
 Last winter the foreman blacksmith was in 
 the hospital for ninety days. During this time 
 
THEEE LEADING EPPICIENOY PKINCIPLES 105 
 
 the shop was run satisfactorily by his under- 
 study. The remarkable thing about this is, 
 that the understudy had never worked as a 
 blacksmith. His work had been in the shop 
 as clerk and assistant to the foreman. 
 
 In the shops at McKeesport are six foremen 
 of 25-years experience each, and each one was 
 selected because he was personally a superior 
 workman able to do whatever he asked should 
 be done. This is not the way we pick out the 
 leader of an orchestra; he is not expected to 
 be a master of every instrument but he knows 
 how it ought to be played. Nevertheless, the 
 plan of combining staff knowledge and line 
 authority in one man has worked well. 
 
 The company has neither secured nor re- 
 tained these men by offers of unusual wages ; 
 there have been other inducements that had 
 more weight. The certainty of tenure of office, 
 the stimulated interest in their own depart- 
 ments, stimulated through visits to other shops 
 (where usually conditions are not nearly so 
 good in spite of occasional higher pay) 
 makes for ambitious contentment. The motive 
 type of man is a doer, finds his pleasure in 
 accomplishment, even as an eagle finds his 
 pleasure in. soaring. The efficiency of salaries 
 and of wages is extraordinarily high on the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie. 
 
106 IDEALS, COMMON SENSE, COUNSEL 
 
 Any ideal logically followed gives better 
 results than the highest ideal not intelligently 
 carried into action. 
 
 SUPERNAL COMMON SENSE 
 
 Nowhere is this ideal more needed than in 
 the investigation and betterment of dependent 
 sequences, those hook-worms of industrial life 
 which sap its vitality. It is only because of 
 elimination of dependent sequences that we can 
 buy 10,000 pins for a dollar, while it would 
 cost $500,000 to make a single pin. That we 
 have any civilization, that human beings are 
 not a pack of ravening wolves, is solely due to 
 almost microscopic betterment along an in- 
 finite line of dependent sequences. There is 
 the three-term dependent sequence of ideals, 
 of organization and of operation ; there is the 
 seven subsidiary-term dependent sequence of 
 volume, of supply, of use, of price, of assign- 
 ment, of value, and of quality. As to every 
 item of material, of work or of charge, there 
 are subsidiary dependent sequences in each of 
 the seven terms— for instance, in use when the 
 cut overruns, is too slow, too fine and too shal- 
 low. If the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie does not 
 quite carry 1,000,000 pounds a mile for a dol- 
 lar it is far advanced beyond the old Yukon 
 rate of $0.60 a pound for 30 miles. 
 

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THREE LEADING EFFICIENCY PRINCIPLES 107 
 
 No problem has been considered alone; all 
 problems have been considered in their relation 
 to each other, as when an old bridge, acting 
 as a throttle on all the traffic, was replaced 
 by a new bridge which permitted fuU-speed 
 operation in both directions at all times. De- 
 pendent sequences were bettered when locomo- 
 tives with 40 tons on drivers and 150-pounds 
 steam pressure were replaced with locomotives 
 weighing 85 tons on drivers and 180-pounds 
 steam pressure. 
 
 Common sense was used when wooden cars 
 for hauling coke were replaced by steel cars. 
 I have always objected to production bonuses 
 as being destructive to equipment, demoraliz- 
 ing to men and wasteful of material. Rarely 
 have I found a better illustration than in the 
 treatment accorded the wooden cars by freight- 
 car-unloading contractors, who have on occa- 
 sion not scrupled to break holes in the bottom 
 of the cars, or in cold weather to build fires 
 under the cars and set fire to them, or to blast 
 out coal and ore with dynamite. In order to 
 stop such destruction the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie designed special coke cars of steel with 
 three dumping doors and the upper part of the 
 car in expanded metal. When loaded with ore 
 to limit of axle load the car is filled to the top 
 of the steel body; when loaded with coal, half- 
 
108 IDEALS, COMMON SENSE, COUNSEL 
 
 way up the expanded metal; and with coke, to 
 the top. These cars have carried 82,000 pounds 
 of coke. To facilitate wheelbarrow loading the 
 second expanded metal panel from each end of 
 car is cut down to 8 feet 6 inches above the 
 rail, and through this temporary opening a 
 wheelbarrow could be rim. The convenience of 
 loading and imloading has been so great that 
 consignees cry for them as children are sup- 
 posed to for castoria. A desire to meet the 
 needs of unloading contractors, of loading coke 
 makers, a desire to prevent wasteful destruc- 
 tion, has therefore evolved and put into use 
 a new type of car. 
 
 T^e EngineeHng iragaabne 
 
 6-Bcop DooT Operings 41^x 42^ 
 4-SHe Door Openings 24'^ Gl" 
 
 THE P. & L. E. STEEL CAR FOE COALj COKE OE ORE 
 
 The locomotive and car shops and their 
 equipment have been often described. Every 
 locomotive or car shop possesses some special 
 point of excellence and it is not upon these we 
 wish to comment, but on the working out of 
 principles. The car shop is probably the best 
 
THREE LEADING EFPICIENCT PRINCIPLES 109 
 
 equipped shop for steel-car repairs in the 
 world and repairs on a large scale are just be- 
 ginning on steel cars everywhere. 
 
 In one of the shops I was given a soft rub- 
 bery sheet which I criunpled up small and put 
 in my pocket. Taking it out it was iminjured. 
 This strange fabric is made up of many coats 
 of paint, the first applied to glass and the 
 others added. The many coats, fused into one, 
 are peeled off. This gives opportimity to test 
 in many ways as to imperviousness to water, 
 durability, resistance to heat or dryness, wear- 
 ing qualities. The paint shop is fuU of stan- 
 dardized materials, illustrative of standard- 
 ized conditions and standardized operations. 
 Paints were shown costing $0.30 a gallon, ap- 
 parently as good as $1.40 a gallon paint. 
 
 American industry is as a rule over- 
 equipped and imder-supervised. There has 
 been a mania for doing by machinery what 
 often could be done better by men. 
 
 At first steel cars were cleaned for painting 
 by a sand blast and it was assumed that this 
 method was the best, but when the sand equip- 
 ment gave out and hand work was resorted to 
 the excellent records showed that hand work 
 was cheaper and this method is now standard. 
 Four men clean eight cars a day and earn $2.20 
 per man. The men are unskilled foreigners. 
 
110 IDEALS, COMMON SENSE, COUNSEL 
 
 The cost per car is $1.10 as against $5.20 per 
 car for sand-blast cleaning. 
 
 Cars at the rate of 20 per day per man are 
 painted with air brush which uses less paint 
 and saves expense of brushes. The method of 
 doing the work has been standardized and dif- 
 ferent characters of paint and different 
 numbers of coats are used according to 
 drying quality of the weather. The usage of 
 the cars is so severe, often being loaded with 
 hot pig iron or hot slag, that sometimes the 
 paint does not last more than one loading, so 
 what is wanted is not fictitious durability but 
 a recurring painting performance of great ra- 
 pidity and low cost. Just as boxes have to be 
 filled with oil every few miles so also is paint- 
 ing a continuous item. The foreman painter 
 of the Pittsburgh & Lake Brie, like the white 
 blacksmith, is an interesting genius and car 
 painting becomes an art as full of surprises 
 and mysteries as, and a hundred times more 
 useful and sane than, cubist and futurist paint- 
 ing. 
 
 When several coats of paint are applied 
 the first dries fastest and the last more slowly 
 so they all dry together. Whole patterns and 
 warnings in words are printed by a dekalko- 
 mania process adapted from the method used 
 in ornamenting china plates. 
 
THREE LEADING EFFICIENCY PRINCIPLES 111 
 
 In the planing mill shavings are compressed 
 into bales, refuse wood is used for staves, and 
 the bales are sold for bedding for horses. 
 
 The reclamation of scrap is pushed further 
 than on most roads. 
 
 My own experience with belting has been 
 that good belting wears out very slowly. We 
 trimmed the edges of belts, cleaned them, re- 
 filled them and softened them, cemented the 
 pieces and had belting almost as good as new. 
 Iron and steel can be reshaped and ref orged. 
 The scrap pile of most railroads is a fortune to 
 those hmnble gentlemen of oriental ancestry 
 who deal in scrap. 
 
 COMPETENT COUNSEL 
 
 The last chapter showed the methods em- 
 ployed to secure and retain good men in the 
 executive departments. Similar solicitude ex- 
 tends all down the line. One of the main ideals 
 is to secure and keep good men in the operating 
 and maintenance divisions. 
 
 Reckless round-headed men do not care 
 whether their safety is looked after or not, but 
 men of this kind also do not care whether other 
 people are safe. As the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie has never lost a passenger it is not 
 manned by round heads, but by square heads, 
 and square heads are careful as to their own 
 
112 IDEALS, COMMON SENSE, COUNSEL 
 
 safety. Therefore the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 is safer than other roads in the same region, 
 and the State factory inspector of Pennsyl- 
 vania credits the road with the safest equip- 
 ment in the State for the employees. Con- 
 servative men are held by permanence of 
 employment. In slack times hours are tem- 
 porarily reduced, but the force is maintained. 
 There are trade schools, opportunities to at- 
 tend conventions, to visit other roads and 
 shops, the expenses of these trips being often 
 paid. 
 
 If men are attracted to other roads by higher 
 wages no obstacles are placed in their way; 
 the road does not pay higher wages. After a 
 flying experience elsewhere men often return. 
 Efficiency of wage rate is increased, only one 
 of a seven-term dependent sequence, by pro- 
 viding what wages alone however high cannot 
 give — encouragement, permanence, safety, 
 appreciation. As one foreman expressed it: 
 "If I quit the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie I shall 
 be done with railroading." 
 
 It requires open-mindedness to accept com- 
 petent counsel. When high-speed steels were 
 first developed the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 shops were open to any agent who thought he 
 had better steel than the quality in use. If on 
 demonstration the agent made good, his steel 
 
PITTSBURGH & LAKE ERIE RAILROAD BRIDGE OVER THE OKI 
 
ER AT BEAVER. PA.— A PRECEDENT IN BRIDGE ENGINEERING 
 
THREE LEADING EFFICIENCY PRINCIPLES 113 
 
 was bought ; if he failed he was requested not 
 to bother the road again. A similar course was 
 followed with pneumatic tools. Recently an 
 open competition for wrecking frogs was an- 
 nounced into which many makers entered. A 
 heavy engine was derailed and every frog 
 maker was given a chance to put it back on the 
 track. The frog that best succeeded was one 
 invented by an imdertaker. Other roads had 
 refused to accept it on account of its origin. 
 
 The rocks of the earth's crust are rigid and 
 when they slip a few inches, as in California, 
 there is a horrible earthquake. The sea is not 
 rigid, nor are the winds, nor the trees. It was 
 with fascination I once watched a willow tree 
 in a violent wind storm. As the blast struck 
 the flexible tree it contracted to half its area 
 and strung out its long branches parallel to the 
 direction of the wind. As the gust lulled the 
 tree expanded and drooped. It suffered no 
 harm. Flexibility is a very useful quality in 
 trees and in men, in tires and in belts, in fire- 
 boxes and in bridges. The chief engineer of 
 the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie has mounted 
 his largest bridge on phosphor-bronze ball- 
 bearings. Imagine a plank over a stream rest- 
 ing on a roller at each end. Bend down by 
 your weight the center of the plank and it 
 rolls on the rollers. Stretch a rigidly fastened 
 
114 IDEALS, COMMON SENSE, COUNSEL 
 
 wire as strong as the plank between two walls 
 and hang your weight on it, and it will either 
 break or puU the walls in. 
 
 The bridge mounted on slides of phosphor- 
 bronze balls is relieved of the severest strains. 
 These rolling segments reduced the secondary- 
 stresses from 20,000 pounds per square inch 
 to less than 3,000. 
 
 We cannot do better in closing these exam- 
 ples of the acceptance of competent counsel 
 than to quote the comments on this bridge 
 made by Henry S. Prichard, who praises as 
 he should the willingness of the line of author- 
 ity to accept staff counsel. 
 
 "The Ohio River railroad bridge, at Beaver, 
 Pa., is one of the great bridges of the world. 
 It is notable not only for its size, capacity and 
 safety, but for the foresight, care and skill 
 with which it was designed and constructed; 
 the originality and ingenuity by which some 
 of the problems presented were mastered; and 
 the complete success which rewarded the work 
 of the engineers who planned it and supervised 
 its fabrication and erection. 
 
 "The success achieved in anticipating and 
 providing in advance for the difi&culties to be 
 encountered in carrying out the plans and the 
 precision with which the work went together 
 were due to the large range of pertinent talent 
 
THREE LEADING EFFICIENCY PRINCIPLES 115 
 
 in the employ of the railroad and the contrac- 
 tor and the broad-mindedness of the chief en- 
 gineer and assistant chief engineer of the rail- 
 road, who exemplified the difference between 
 self-confidence and self-sufficiency by deriving 
 the full benefit of the talent at their command, 
 by keeping in touch and discussing important 
 points with other members of their profession, 
 and by keeping in their own hands the final 
 decision of all important matters. 
 
 "The bridge marks an advance in bridge en- 
 gineering and should be a precedent for other 
 large structures." 
 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie does all its 
 work as it builds its bridges — it uses brains to 
 realize ideals. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE LAST NINE PRINCIPLES OP EFFICIENCY IN 
 OPERATION 
 
 ISCIPLINE in its old-time 
 meaning refers to the spirit of 
 the organization. The Catholic 
 Church uses the word in this 
 sense when it speaks of the Dis- 
 cipline of St. Francis or the 
 Discipline of St. Dominic. There is a spirit of 
 organization on the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie. 
 Men Kve up to the spirit of the game, the spirit 
 of the road, the spirit of the department, the 
 spirit of the chief. 
 
 The superintendent of motive power told of 
 a machinist who asked for his money after 
 working half a day, stating as his reason, 
 "This place is too much like a Sunday-school 
 for me." This reminded me of the wonder- 
 ful discipline of a hospital at Seattle, con- 
 ducted by French Canadian sisters. They re- 
 
118 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 ceived volunteers on probation, would not al- 
 low them to take final vows until they had 
 proved that they had vocation. If the real 
 spirit was not there they were sent back into 
 the world. Both these instances illustrate, 
 however, one of the weaknesses of modem 
 employment methods. Why should the ma- 
 chinist who had no vocation for a steady reg- 
 ular life be employed even for half a day? 
 Was not the man wiser than the management? 
 Why should a girl work three years before 
 it can be determined that she is without voca- 
 tion? It is the one decaying apple that will 
 often spoil a whole barrel ; nay, a single apple 
 of a different color and kind will lessen the 
 value of a whole box. On the occasion of a 
 freight blockade at Buffalo, the general man- 
 ager called to break it first sent back to the 
 yards the crippled locomotives that had been 
 gathered in the hope that quantity of power 
 would solve the difficulty. In the emergency, 
 more than at any other time, the general man- 
 ager wanted quality, reliability — not quantity. 
 So with employees. 
 
 But the spirit of organization is not enough ; 
 it must be inculcated and stimulated daily by 
 example and precept. The foreman painter 
 therefore Hues up his men every morning and 
 reviews with praise the good work of the pre- 
 
NINE PRINCIPLES IN OPEEATION 119 
 
 vious day, condeirms with blame, often severe, 
 any shortcomings. It is little things that show 
 what the spirit is. I noticed a yoimg clerical 
 employee pick from the snow a stencil for let- 
 tering cars, placing it where the stencil gang 
 would see it and save it. Disloyal men cannot 
 last on this road. An apprentice boy who 
 joined an organization whose activities were 
 unfriendly to the railroad was told he would 
 have to choose between these two masters, that 
 he could not be loyal to both. 
 
 General Sherman said a number of years 
 ago that he would rather have an army made 
 up of railroad men than of any other class of 
 citizens. This is because self-sacrifice, disci- 
 pline, courage, self-reliance, willingness, initia- 
 tive, are part of the daily life of the railroad- 
 ers, and these almost universal characteristics 
 make the occasional infractions, the occa- 
 sional evidences of selfishness and disloyalty 
 all the more noticeable. 
 
 The difference between an army of merce- 
 naries who sell out to the highest bidder and 
 volunteer armies like ours in the civil war, 
 national armies like those of Germany and 
 France, is very great — a difference of soul, 
 not of uniform. The most disquieting symp- 
 tom in railroad operation is the inability of 
 railroad organization, administration, man- 
 
120 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 agement, to solve its own difficulties. For 
 months past the public has been an unwilling 
 witness of the disagreement between railroad 
 corporations and their employees. What fam- 
 ily can stand, what army can stand, what 
 church can stand, what corporation can stand, 
 what nation can stand, divided against itself? 
 Discipline is not of the highest kind if it 
 does not hold out boundless hope to the faith- 
 ful, impose severest penalties on the recreant; 
 and those are faithful who place duty above 
 self, those are recreant who place self above 
 duty. 
 
 THE FAIR DEAL 
 
 There can be no high discipline without the 
 Fair Deal, No one can govern others who 
 does not first govern himself. The Pittsburgh 
 & Lake Erie tells its employees the truth, 
 also enables them to find out the truth for 
 themselves. In the motive-power department 
 as in other departments any man has access 
 to his chief and receives a fair hearing. 
 
 No foreman can arbitrarily discharge a man. 
 The superintendent of this department, from 
 his temperament, supplemented by wide 
 knowledge and long and detailed experience, 
 is a good judge of a man's story and can quick- 
 ly detect romancing and fairy tales. 
 
NINE PEINCIPLES IN OPERATION 121 
 
 About eight years ago there was a threatened 
 strike anlong the painters in the McKee's 
 Rocks shops. The superintendent of motive 
 power was called and found that the men had 
 quit work. They wanted to parley; but he 
 refused and told them that they had quit work 
 and were no longer in the employ of the com- 
 pany, but that, if they returned to work, he 
 would hear any committee that they chose to 
 send over. 
 
 The men returned to work and soon sent 
 over their committee, who complained that 
 certain new piece rates were too severe. They 
 were told that the rates had been set by the 
 foreman painter, after a visit to the New York 
 Central's shops at Albany and careful study 
 of the work there, but that he himself would 
 go to Albany and look into the matter. 
 
 On his return he told the committee that he 
 would not change the rates, but that he would 
 send a delegation to Albany to investigate for 
 themselves. " Three painters were accordingly 
 sent as the representatives of the men. Their 
 expenses were paid and they received full 
 wages while they were away. On their return 
 they reported that they would accept the rates, 
 and would do better work than was being done 
 at Albany. No similar trouble has occurred 
 since. 
 
122 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 It is my belief, based on long and varied 
 experience, that where the fair deal prevails 
 a large part of the discipline can be left to men 
 and women employees. There i^ but one dan- 
 ger, that they will be too severe. It is a law 
 of life that there is sympathy for those differ- 
 ing in sex, age, condition from ourselves, but 
 not much pity or tenderness towards those who 
 are sharing our own work under equal condi- 
 tions. We understand and know too well who 
 the shirkers are ; children do not pity children, 
 women are hard on other women, men are se- 
 vere towards men, as one can see any day at 
 a baseball game. 
 
 On the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Eailroad 
 the spirit of Fair Deal has filtered down — ^no, 
 not filtered, but come down in an abundant 
 stream from the top. The head of the road has 
 been fair to patrons, to the public, to asso- 
 ciates, to employees; officials are fair in their 
 turn ; the foremen are fair to the men, the men 
 are fair in their work— more fair than is 
 usual ; and if they are not always wholly fair, 
 as in other troubles, I feel that there is stiU 
 some weak spot in the management; for we 
 judge the management hy the men. 
 
 PLANNING 
 
 Ideals, common sense, competent counsel, 
 discipline, the fair deal are ethical principles. 
 
NINE PRINCIPLES IN OPERATION 123 
 
 The practical principles begin with planning. 
 In railroad operation, more than in any 
 other business, it is necessary to plan in ad- 
 vance. A railroad is planned before it is be- 
 gun — ^planned as to finances, planned as to 
 location, planned as to grades and curvatures, 
 planned for volume and weight of trafl&c ; the 
 traflfic is planned for, the equipment and the 
 personnel are planned. Planning filters down 
 to every detail. 
 
 At Youngstown the round-house handles an 
 unusually large number of locomotives in pro- 
 portion to its stalls. The foreman has to plan 
 the work carefully. 
 
 STANDARDS AND SCHEDULES 
 
 After plans have been made standards must 
 of necessity be set up. Train time tables are 
 a bewildering array of standard times. In the 
 official railroad guide there are about 1,000 
 pages of time tables, and for the Pittsburgh 
 & Lake Erie Railroad, 820 time entries, so 
 that the total book contains about 800,000 
 standard times caref uUy revised every month. 
 These are for passenger trains only. Includ- 
 ing freight trains the number of railroad time 
 standards in the United States must aggregate 
 3,000,000. Yet the usual industrial shop balks 
 at the proposition to establish the few thou- 
 
124 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 sand time standards for the work passing 
 through the shop. A recent writer has said 
 that most people would rather lie down and 
 die than think. It is perhaps truer to say most 
 people would rather lie down and die than take 
 a little unusual trouble, especially trouble re- 
 quiring a combination of thinking and doing. 
 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie as to much of 
 its work is empirically supplied with very 
 good time standards. The foremen have been 
 so many years on their work of supervision, 
 the general tone of diligence is so high, the 
 superintendents are so urgent, that work is not 
 only planned, but standards of aU kinds are 
 set and adhered to. 
 
 In the locomotive shop at McKee's Rocks it 
 is claimed that costs are about 30 per cent 
 below average railroad practice. I did not 
 verify this. I know, however, that a few years 
 ago when I set up general standards for loco- 
 motive and car maintenance my standards as 
 to time and cost were half those actually at- 
 tained by the average of all the railroads of 
 the United States, but the actual costs at- 
 tained on the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie at that 
 time were lower than my standards. Since 
 then, on one of the heavy construction South- 
 ern roads I have been gratified to find* all my 
 cost standards not only realized but materially 
 
NINE PKINCIPLES IN OPEEATION 125 
 
 bettered by methods that will always attain 
 results, namely, the selection of good men, and 
 everlasting, insistent, continuous and close 
 supervision. The besetting American indus- 
 trial sin is undersupervision, for which no ex- 
 cess of equipment will ever make up. 
 
 The discrepancy between reasonable stan- 
 dards set, standards here and there attained 
 and surpassed, and actual results attained, is 
 the basis of my assertion, given very consid- 
 erable publicity by Mr. Brandeis, that the 
 wastes on American railroads through failure 
 regularly to attain rational standards amount 
 to more than a million dollars a day. The 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Eailroad contributes 
 very little to these wastes. 
 
 In the preceding chapter I described the 
 white blacksmith shop as being typical, not 
 only of absence of dirt, but of absence of other 
 physical and moral waste. I do not know all 
 the blacksmith shops in the world. I believe 
 the American naval vessels operate under the 
 best all-around example of management, ad- 
 ministration and organization in the United 
 States, and I am therefore not surprised to 
 learn that there are white blacksmith shops at 
 the Mare Island Navy Yard, at the Philadel- 
 phia Navy Yard, at the Portsmouth Navy 
 Yard. I am told that the reason is the oil- 
 
126 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 burning furnaces. In the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie shop I saw no smoke coming out of 
 the stacks ; the usual smoke was not polluting 
 the air, the windows were spotlessly clean, the 
 insides of the forge hood were whitewashed. 
 Although I doubt it, I hope there is somewhere 
 some whiter blacksmith shop, thus establishing 
 a higher and better standard, and if there is, 
 the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie forge master 
 will not rest content until he has attained and 
 passed it, for that is the spirit of the man, of 
 the shop, of the department and the road. 
 
 Eailroads have a hard time as to some stan- 
 dards. If their operating costs are high and 
 they ask for relief through increase of rates, 
 experts hasten to point out how wasteful these 
 costs are, and what is more, are abundantly 
 able to prove it ; but if the railroad, by intelli- 
 gent attainment of rational and scientific stan- 
 dards, lowers its operating ratio in comparison 
 with other roads, then it is attacked on the 
 ground that it is making too much money. 
 Railroad executives are compelled to balance 
 on a knife edge. They must earn dividends 
 or they are adjudged incompetent, and they 
 must not eliminate too much waste or their 
 company will be attacked. 
 
 It is but a repetition on a large scale of what 
 happened to the piece worker in Newark. Be- 
 
NINE PRINCIPLES IN OPERATION 127 
 
 ing a super-excellent man he was able to earn 
 $5.00 a day. His foreman jumped on him. 
 "See here — you — ^be moderate. Keep your 
 earnings down to $3.50. Every time you earn 
 $5.00 the whole office from president down 
 jumps on me on account of the extravagant 
 piece rates and calls for a general revision, 
 when you and I know that there is not another 
 man in the shop who can earn $3.00. Curb 
 your ambition, be moderate!" The foreman 
 confidentially told us that he had to discharge 
 unusually good piece-rate earners because they 
 made the management jump on him if he did 
 not lower the rate, and he drove out even med- 
 iocre men if he did. The management thought 
 it wanted efficient workers, but it did not. It 
 wanted to lull itself to sleep with the fallacy 
 that because nobody was earning much money, 
 therefore its work was costing little. 
 
 The public thinks it wants efficient railroads, 
 but it does not. If there is very little margin 
 between receipts and expenditures it flatters 
 itself it has cheap railroading. What,, for in- 
 stance, has physical valuation to do with 
 efficiency? Shall fanciful and extravagant 
 betterments be made the reason for higher 
 rates? Shall foresight, extraordinary skill in 
 organization, administration, management and 
 operation be penalized by lower rates? 
 
128 STANDAKDS OP PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 The superintendent of motive power on the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie attributes the low 
 shop-costs to the foreman's knowledge of what 
 constitutes a fair day's work and the require- 
 ment that the men shall deliver a definite fair 
 day's work for a fair day's pay. That these 
 standards are not reduced to written standard- 
 practice instructions violates another princi- 
 ple, but not that of standards. Some of the 
 standards are reduced to definite instructions 
 as to both materials and labor, as for example, 
 painting cost standards. 
 
 80,000 Capacity Steel Gondola 1,600 Feet Painted 
 
 SUEFACB 
 
 Clean inside and out $1.00 
 
 Three coats paint with machine 95 
 
 11.5 gallons black paint, at $0.49 per gallon 5.635 
 
 Stencil lettering, complete 45 
 
 11 per cent on all labor 26 
 
 5 per cent superintendence 12 
 
 Total $8,415 
 
 Same Cab Eepaintbd, 800 Feet Painted Surface 
 
 Dry-clean — outside body and trucks $1.00 
 
 Two coats paint with machine 30 
 
 5.5 gallons black paint, $0.49 per gal 2.696 
 
 Stencil lettering, complete 45 
 
 11 per cent on aU labor 19 
 
 5 per cent superintendence .07 
 
 Total $4,705 
 
NINE PRINCIPLES IN OPERATION 129 
 
 The 11 per cent on labor appearing in these 
 standards is the increase which has been made 
 on all piece rates since the standards were es- 
 tablished, in order to equalize to piece raters 
 the increase granted in hourly rates to time 
 workers. 
 
 Eailroad shops as a rule do not include any 
 overhead burden for power, maintenance, gen- 
 eral supervision and rent. In industrial shops 
 this usually amounts to about 100 per cent on 
 direct labor. It would not be so heavy in car 
 painting since there is very little power or ma- 
 chine equipment. Because of the omission of 
 overhead, it is never equitable to compare rail- 
 road shop costs with industrial shop costs. On 
 accoimt of the omission of overhead, railroad 
 shops are self -deceived as to their costs. 
 
 These examples have not been cited as ulti- 
 mate standards, but merely to illustrate the 
 existence of definite written standards. They 
 illustrate the application of the principle of 
 standards and its use in keeping costs down. 
 
 The blacksmith shop work is similarly oper- 
 ated to standards which, I regret, are under 
 the able foreman's hat, liable therefore at some 
 day, I hope long distant, to pass out of the 
 shop with him. Their tradition may and prob- 
 ably will survive in his successors, but what a 
 loss that they are not available to-day in re- 
 
130 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 corded form for the information and guidance 
 of all the railroad world! 
 
 The standard time for general repairs to 
 locomotives is as follows : 
 
 With firebox repairs 26 days 
 
 Without firebox repairs 20 days 
 
 Eush-order repairs 15 days 
 
 If there is no occasion for haste there is no 
 reason why work should be rushed, but I won- 
 der if railroad practice has not something to 
 learn from marine repair practice. 
 
 I have seen a modem steamer docked, seams 
 calked, sheathed at the bows with copper and 
 freed in three days. I have known extensive 
 repairs to be made to 70,000 horse-power ma- 
 rine engines in 18 hours, I have heard of an 
 enormous new circulating pump for an ocean 
 steamer being cast, machined and installed in 
 24 hours. I am not setting up any standards 
 of days for locomotive overhauling, but I won- 
 der to what number of hours the time could 
 be reduced if all the work were planned, sched- 
 uled and despatched with the object of making 
 a time record ! Ocean steamers are often worth 
 several thousand dollars a day and dry-dock 
 charges may be $0.50 a ton per day; some 
 steamers are of 30,000 tons. A good locomo- 
 tive may be worth $50 a day to its road, and 
 
NINE PEINCEPLES IN OPERATION 131 
 
 there are occasions when the gain in time might 
 be of more value than the labor cost. 
 
 It is impossible even to mention all the de- 
 partments in which standards were consciously 
 striven for on the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie. 
 Standards of tonnage behind locomotives, time 
 standards for washing out locomotive boilers, 
 standards of cost and time for making audi- 
 tor's statements, standards of operating costs 
 to gross, etc. 
 
 After work has been planned and standards 
 have been established, it is railroad practice to 
 despatch it, to start it at a definite time and 
 finish it in accordance with the standard. This 
 brings us to the principle of 
 
 DESPATCHING 
 
 All railroads despatch trains; not all rail- 
 roads despatch systematically any other work, 
 except perhaps monthly reports and pay rolls. 
 
 At the roundhouses at McKee's Rocks and 
 again at Yoimgstown are despatch boards for 
 locomotives and their crews. In the locomo- 
 tive machine shop the work is despatched in 
 every shop and department; each has its defin- 
 ite dates so that the whole work is completed 
 on time. 
 
 In the auditor's ofi&ce records are also 
 planned, scheduled and despatched. 
 
132 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 Despatching does not have as much effect on 
 costs as schedules. It may make no cost dif- 
 ference whether one man digs a ditch in twenty 
 days or twenty men dig the same ditch in one 
 day. It does make a great difference whether 
 each man, one or twenty, excavates one cubic 
 yard or three cubic yards a day. 
 
 Work cannot be despatched with any ac- 
 curacy unless conditions are standardized, and 
 as most conditions on the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie are unusually well standardized we would 
 have to describe all the road to illustrate the 
 application of this principle. Only a few ex- 
 amples can be given. 
 
 STANDARDIZED CONDITIONS 
 
 We have no desire to assume that in all re- 
 spects the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie has stan- 
 dardized conditions to a greater extent than 
 any other railroad. There is no railroad that 
 cannot show some excellent evidence of a stan- 
 dardized condition. There are many railroads 
 that show a great deal of standardized condi- 
 tion. No insidious claims are being made, nor 
 are the standards used acceptable as final. 
 What is evident is a very general and compre- 
 hensive effort to standardize all conditions. 
 
 One of the main ideals for railroad opera- 
 tion is reliability, which includes safety; an- 
 
NINE PRINCIPLES IN OPERATION 133 
 
 other main ideal is volume, a third ideal econ- 
 omy, and a fourth ideal human contentment 
 and happiness, and it is with these four ideals 
 in mind that we look at the standardized con- 
 ditions. Many business men have the sole ideal 
 of volume, hoping by means of volume to make 
 up for unreliability, waste and the sum of 
 human misery. 
 
 Beginning with the human element, men are 
 tremendously influenced by the conditions that 
 affect their daily lives. It does not pay to have 
 high officials whose salaries run into the thou- 
 sands placed in conditions where efficiency is 
 reduced to two-thirds or less of normal. It 
 does not pay to have workers, train men, come 
 in from strenuous runs and have no comfort- 
 able place to which to go. 
 
 At the central office in Pittsburgh the offi- 
 cials are housed in dust-proof rooms, ventil- 
 ated with purified air, warm or cool, as re- 
 quired. There is a peaceful surrounding, con- 
 ducive to best work. At aU important points 
 the company has provided Railroad Y. M. C. 
 A. buildings where there are clean and hy- 
 gienic surroundings, motive, vital and mental. 
 The food is good and low in price, there is 
 opportunity for amusement. This work is be- 
 ing extended. The employees are encouraged 
 to join these associations. 
 
134 STANDAEDS OF PKACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 The use of intoxicants and visiting saloons 
 whether on or ofE duty is prohibited. 
 
 The right of a company to set standards of 
 this kind for its employees is, I think, 
 clear. Certain habits and aptitudes are con- 
 sidered incompatible with the regular duties 
 of certain positions. There are many more 
 aptitudes than those of drinking proclivities 
 that incapacitate a man for a position and in 
 time these will be recognized as clearly as is 
 drinking today. There are other aptitudes as 
 positively beneficial as drinking is negative, 
 and these also in time will be given due weight. 
 Railroad men should be the finest selected body 
 of men in the United States. 
 
 SAFETY 
 
 There is a committee of fourteen on safety. 
 The superintendent of motive power is the 
 chairman. Each of the fourteen is chairman 
 of a sub-committee having particular charge 
 of some one branch of the work, and the whole 
 together covering all branches of railroading. 
 Every sub-committee chairman has the right to 
 caU in such others as he wants as assistants and 
 members of his sub-committee. 
 
 The road periodically gives a banquet to the 
 chairman and sub-chairman and to all mem- 
 bers of the committee, about one hundred and 
 
NINE PRINCrPLES IN OPEEATION 135 
 
 seventy-five in all. Colonel Schoomnaker 
 makes a practice of attending these banquets. 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie has a reputa- 
 tion among railroad men in its territory of be- 
 ing the safest road on which to work. 
 
 In the construction of the road conditions 
 are further standardized to secure reliability, 
 volume and economy. It looks almost as if 
 some man of great imagination and experi- 
 ence had in his mind outlined the physical re- 
 quirements of an ideal railroad and then real- 
 ized them. Any road above all other qualities 
 must be smooth. In four entirely different 
 ways men have eliminated the jolting of bur- 
 den in moving vehicles. , 
 
 One way is to make the road smooth. A 
 steel rail and the tread of the steel wheel give 
 as smooth a rolling contact between hard sub- 
 stances as is known. The flange, which made 
 it possible for the wheel to stay on the track, 
 is one of the few world-important inventions. 
 The present rails originated in flanges, the 
 flanges on the inner edge of a flat track, flanges 
 to keep on the track the unflanged 5-foot gauge 
 cart wheels. 
 
 The second way to lessen jolting is to inter- 
 pose springs between the load and the road, 
 the third is to run on air-inflated tires, the 
 fourth to fly in the air. 
 
136 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 The first locomotives did not have any 
 springs. The designers relied on the unyield- 
 ing smoothness of the rails. Curves and 
 grades were reduced to a minimum. This orig- 
 inal English standard of 80 years ago has as to 
 American practice been attained in the Pitts- 
 burgh & Lake Erie. The Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie is smooth, its rails are long and heavy, 
 its ties strong, big and near together. To keep 
 a road smooth it must be drained, moisture 
 being the greatest foe of aU roads. Therefore 
 stone ballast. 
 
 If heavy trains are to be pulled, grades and 
 curvatures become important. The maximum 
 grade on the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is 0.3 
 per cent; the standard curve, only in a few 
 instances not realized, is 3 degrees. There are 
 four tracks entirely protected by block signals. 
 This road is able to handle as heavy trains as 
 any railroad in the world. There are, how- 
 ever, some recent Southern railroads that are 
 evidently patterning after the Pittsburgh & 
 Lake Erie, and that it wiU pay to watch. They 
 are beginning where the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie now is, but as yet nothing better has been 
 done. 
 
 Riding from Pittsburgh to Youngstown I 
 saw on the opposite side of the river several 
 freight trains waiting their turn for their lo- 
 
NINE PEINCIPLES IN OPERATION 137 
 
 comotives to take water. The Pittsburgh & 
 Lake Erie has water taps train-lengths apart 
 so that several trains can water at once. 
 
 At Youngstown one of the switch locomo- 
 tives carries axle loads of 60,000 pounds, and 
 in spite of prediction of disaster on account of 
 short wheel base as well as high axle load, it 
 has made a record of minimum trouble. 
 
 At Youngstown locomotive work for several 
 roads is done at the same shop. On the Pitts- 
 burgh & Lake Erie locomotive parts are 
 standardized because the same officials have 
 been years with the road and have perfected 
 and carried out policies. One of the other 
 roads has had a succession of officials, each one 
 desirous of showing up the faults of his prede- 
 cessor, undoing much that went before. Is it 
 strange that one road— the Pittsburgh & Lake 
 Erie — showed almost the lowest, another road 
 almost the highest repair cost per locomotive- 
 mile in the United States? 
 
 Standardized conditions are conducive to 
 low costs. When a road anywhere shows loco- 
 motive repair costs of $0.06 a mile and another 
 road shows $0.12 or even $0.16 a mile, I look 
 at the officials and not at the locomotives for 
 explanation. 
 
 In the various Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 shop yards, cars are loaded and unloaded onto 
 
138 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 platforms, the same height as the car floor. 
 The scrap bins each contain a car load, the 
 tracks are depressed so that car floors are on a 
 level with bin floors. 
 
 The yards looked as if they had been 
 cleaned up, sanded and rolled for inspection. 
 There is no loose material lying around, but 
 there is also no attempt at beauty, no flower 
 beds, lawns. The ideal is not beauty, but clean- 
 liness, order and utility. Beauty may without 
 detriment some day extend from the station 
 surroundings which do have lawns and flowers, 
 to the yards, for beauty has the same effect 
 as other aesthetic standards. 
 
 The superintendent of motive power stated 
 that of two locomotives in identical physical 
 condition, the one clean the other dirty, the 
 crew of the clean locomotive could be counted 
 on to do better work. 
 
 The boiler-washing installations are among 
 the best anywhere in use. Time is saved, fuel 
 is saved and boiler wear and tear is saved by 
 the hot-water installation. 
 
 There is no limit to the standardization of 
 conditions. The tool limits the capacity of a 
 machine ; a dull needle on a phonograph spoils 
 the music of a whole orchestra. The machine 
 is for the sake of the tool, the man for the sake 
 of the machine, the foreman for the sake of the 
 
NINE PKINCIPLB8 EST OPERATION 139 
 
 worker, the shop for the sake of all. The best 
 shop, the best foreman, the best worker, the 
 best machine, is of little use if the tool is de- 
 fective; therefore the painting shop has the 
 best stencils and brushes, the blacksmith shop 
 the best formers, the machine shop the most 
 caref lilly designed, tempered and ground tools 
 of standard qualities. There are portable 
 pyrometers for the tool furnaces so as to limit 
 the eagerness of the workers who, unless 
 checked, would carry their ovens too hot and 
 bum the steel. Oxen, slow animals, have to 
 be goaded, thoroughbred horses have to be 
 held in. Why are we so slow to take hints from 
 nature? The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie sug- 
 gests a collection of human thoroughbreds. 
 
 STANDAEDIZED OPERATIONS 
 
 These become possible only when conditions 
 are standardized. Mark Twain's frog could 
 not jump when he was fiUed up with buckshot. 
 His condition was imstandardized. 
 
 It is the duty of of&cials to standardize con- 
 ditions. 
 
 It is the duty of every material, every man, 
 every machine, to operate in a standard man- 
 ner. Officials standardize conditions in order 
 to secure standard operation; therefore as con- 
 ditions are standardized from the top down- 
 
140 STANDAKDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 ward, beginning with the organization, oper- 
 ations become standard. 
 
 The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie burns in its 
 locomotives, many of them immensely heavy, 
 a soft bituminous coal with only 58 per cent 
 of fixed carbon. It is no easy task to fire these 
 locomotives without smoke, yet it is done. This 
 is perhaps one of the most patent tests of the 
 general excellence of railroad operation. If 
 soft-coal locomotives on a road emit smoke, 
 details are being neglected. The Pittsburgh & 
 Lake Erie attains its excellence, not by luck, 
 but by going after the details. The firemen 
 are instructed how to fire and they either fire 
 correctly or they do not stay. 
 
 The labor situation in the neighborhood of 
 Pittsburgh is difficult. Many of the workers are 
 foreigners. A few years ago great complaint 
 was made that these men could not be taught 
 because they could not understand English. It 
 proved easier to standardize operations and 
 show how work ought to be done than to tell 
 men how it ought to be done. It is astonishing 
 how readily and how much a man can learn 
 when shown. In one Pittsburgh shop the pay 
 roll showed a list of fifty-five different na- 
 tionalities. I have seen wild Navajo Indians 
 do fair work in round houses when they were 
 shown, but when they found the work becom- 
 
NINE PRINCIPLES IN OPERATION 141 
 
 ing monotonous they had an unstandardized 
 way of disappearing and going to sleep. They 
 did not carry watches and they measured fa- 
 tigue by the feelings, not by the hour. The 
 same Indians could when hunting run down a 
 deer in an aU day pursuit. As to the stimulus 
 of interest, there is much to be learned from 
 the Navajo. 
 
 The trouble with those Indians was not that 
 they could not be shown, but that they could 
 not understand why they should work when 
 they lost interest. Hold his interest and almost 
 any man can learn to work well! As part of 
 the plan of standardizing operation by show- 
 ing, in the blacksmith shop nearly all the prod- 
 ucts are exhibited on sample boards. The 
 worker is able to see in complete detail the 
 part he is to make. 
 
 These sample boards are in reality a form 
 of standard-practice instruction for workers 
 who sometimes cannot understand English, 
 cannot read blueprints. 
 
 Every railroad has standard-practice in- 
 structions, but they are uneven in extent. The 
 savages at Tierra del Fuego, the most southern 
 inhabited spot on the globe, can scarcely be 
 said to wear clothes. They use a small piece 
 of fur which they hang from their necks so 
 that it wiU be between the wind and their bod- 
 
142 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 ies. This is eminently practical and economi- 
 cal, the three ideals of protection, economy 
 and simplicity being admirably combined. Civ- 
 ilized people as to clothes have placed first 
 the ideal of protection. The application of 
 efficiency principles by most industrial organ- 
 izations, including railroads, reminds me of 
 the clothing of the savages. The most neces- 
 sary things have been evolved in spots. They 
 are the most important spots, it is true, but 
 there are large surfaces which are bare. For 
 a railroad organization the Pittsburgh & 
 Lake Erie is wonderfully well equipped with 
 the application of principles, but even on it 
 there are bare spots. Let us first mention some 
 of the nice pieces of fur. Safety first ! This 
 is the title of a big card printed in plain big 
 letters, containing suggestions for shop men 
 as to safety. Many of the rules I had never 
 before seen in print. This card opposite is 
 posted and displayed in five languages. 
 
 Another standard-practice instruction is on 
 the subject of economy. The second para- 
 graph reads: 
 
 One of the most practical forms of economy is 
 the elimination of avoidable injury to persons 
 and damage to property and to accomplish this 
 result the most hearty co-operation of all officers 
 and employees is essential. 
 
NINE PRINCIPLES IN OPEKATION 143 
 
 THE PinSBURGH & UKE ERIE RAILROAD COMPANY. 
 
 SAFETY FIRST. 
 
 SUGGESTIONS FOR SHOP MEN. 
 
 Never try to shift a moving belt by haod 
 
 Don't fool with electiicity It is dangerous. 
 
 Don't wear loose, baggy clothing where it is liable to be caught In machinery 
 
 Avoid walking on railroad tracks and before crossing ANY TRACK. "Stop^ 
 look, and listen." 
 
 Be sure you replace all guards when through repairing machine. Think about 
 the other fellow 
 
 It is your duty, as well as your protection, to report unsafe conditions to your 
 Foreman or Superintendent 
 
 A guard is placed on a machine solely for your protection Don't operate the 
 machine without guard in place. 
 
 Stop machine before oiling, wijnng, or repairing it, and don't try to operate a 
 m«rhin> you do uot Understand. 
 
 Don't swing sledge or hammer that you know is working loose on liandle, 
 thinking it won't come off 'till "next time." You may not be hurt, but what 
 about "the other fellow?" 
 
 Don't expect your helper to be as good a mechanic as you are. He isn't, oi he 
 wouldn't be a helper A little explanation as to the way the work is to be done 
 may save injury to one or both of you. 
 
 If you know of some machine not properly guarded, don't wait until some one 
 gets hurt and say, "I told you so." Tell man in charge of the shop before an 
 accident happens, and ask him to supply proper guard. 
 
 Avoid jumping upon moving cars or engines. Your work does not require it,>- 
 and you cannot aBord to take the risk. 
 
 Never strike tempered steel with hammer or other metal object Many eyes 
 are injured or destroyed from this cause every year. 
 
 GENERAL SAFETY COMMITTEE. 
 Approved, 
 
 J. B. YOHE, Gcncnl tiatagcz 
 Pittsbuigk Pa. October UaA 1911. 
 
 By their works ye shall know them. Let us 
 remember that the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
 has never killed a passenger, and that it is 
 safer for employees than other roads. 
 
144 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 Here is a direct practical test of the results 
 and value of efficiency. I do not have the sta- 
 tistics, but I am willing to assert that those 
 railroads which in operation come nearest to 
 the standards of cost will also show the fewest 
 casualties to employees in proportion to num- 
 ber employed or to pay roll. 
 
 On the other hand, much of the excellence 
 of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is inherited 
 tradition, a result of the policy of permanence. 
 
 Men who have been 25 years in the shop 
 cannot remember when things were not done 
 in a particular way. That we learn to speak 
 English at our mother's knee is no reason for 
 not having a dictionary in the house, and not 
 all the standard practices of the Pittsburgh 
 & Lake Erie have been reduced to writing. 
 This is a great pity. If they were available 
 I would suggest that other roads secure copies 
 and try to put some of them into effect, putting 
 up for comparison their own standard prac- 
 tices. At the time of the rate hearing case in 
 Washington it was, suggested that the Inter- 
 state Commerce Commission should become 
 constructively helpful by collecting for general 
 use," for comparison and interchange, the stan- 
 dard practices of all roads. It was suggested 
 that the roads might jointly retain a small 
 body of selected specialists to investigate, 
 
NINE PRINCIPLES IN OPERATION 145 
 
 analyze, select and approve, so that all rail- 
 roads might benefit. There is no credit to the 
 railroads in the fact that in two shops in the 
 same city identically the same work will vary 
 four-fold in price. 
 
 RECORDS 
 
 Standard-practice instructions difEer from 
 records. The former set up the ideals, the lat- 
 ter show the actual. There would be small fun 
 and very little progress made in shooting at a 
 target so small that it had only a t)ull's eye. 
 Targets are made large; the bull's eye is the 
 ideal, but when you shoot the outer rings are 
 used to make the record. Records to be valu- 
 able must be reliable, immediate and adequate. 
 The records of baseball games and of the play- 
 ers are of this kind. There is probably nothing 
 else of such general and universal interest in 
 the United States. The stock market quota- 
 tions are also reliable and immediate. 
 
 Records can be made very fascinating. 
 
 In the railroad time table are 800,000 stan- 
 dardized operations of passenger trains, but 
 as to each train the deviation from normal is 
 continuously known to the despatchers. The 
 records are there. 
 
 Costs are a small part of accounting, ac- 
 counting is only one kind of records. I have 
 
146 STANDARDS OF PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 found railroad accountants most helpful in 
 railroad efficiency work. They were even help- 
 ful when most exasperatingly critical. I re- 
 member one who made a report to a vice-presi- 
 dent on whose staff I was, to the effect that a 
 worker had earned 800 per cent bonus on one 
 of my schedules. 
 
 The report, as it proved, was strictly true 
 and it had consequences. Investigations, based 
 on current reliable records of every job the 
 worker had done in the month and the time 
 taken and bonus paid, showed that the total 
 bonus earned was $3.57, or about 5 per cent 
 on his wages, that $1.12 of the bonus had been 
 earned in half an hour, the wages for the same 
 time being $0.14. It developed that the sched- 
 ule on which the bonus was earned was a fair 
 average schedule for the usual run of work, 
 but on this particular occasion the foundry 
 casting had been extraordinarily accurate, so 
 that there was little finishing to do. The crit- 
 icism led to several results. We immediately 
 investigated to see whether the foundry could 
 not always turn out as accurate work. We 
 changed the whole bonus plan from special 
 jobs to averages of all jobs, total standard 
 time in month divided by total actual time, 
 and I also learned that accountants with very 
 narrow but long faces were extraordinarily 
 
NINE PRINCIPLES IN OPERATION 147 
 
 good as to details, but singularly lacking in 
 breadth and grasp. 
 
 Records do not in themselves correct any- 
 thing. They are not even a tool. They are, 
 however, the whetstone on which all tools, in- 
 cluding humans, can be sharpened. I like to 
 see high-speed emery wheels in a shop, but 
 they lose in interest if I never see a workman 
 near one of them. Records show whether 
 standard-practice instructions are realized, 
 and standard instructions are not realized un- 
 less operations are standardized, and these can- 
 not be standardized unless conditions have 
 first been standardized. Records may be 
 merely mental. 
 
 The forge master told me that he recently 
 received a visit from another railroad black- 
 smith foreman and spent about two hours 
 showing him about the place. At the end of 
 this time they returned to the shop and the 
 visiting foreman expressed surprise at finding 
 nearly every man with a heat on his anvil. He 
 remarked that if he were away from his own 
 shop for half an hour he would find nearly 
 every man idle on his return. To this the 
 forge master replied that the only way to pre- 
 vent that sort of thing was to know definitely 
 when jobs ought to be completed and to re- 
 quire the men to have them done by that time 
 
148 STANDAEDS OP PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 whether the foreman was in the shop in the 
 meantime or not. It is the function of records 
 to give this kind of information continuously. 
 Among all the many good records seen on 
 the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie, I was particularly 
 helped by those of the accounting department. 
 An investigator can in a few minutes call for 
 records it wiU take weeks of overtime work 
 to tabulate, but the auditor of the Pittsburgh 
 & Lake Erie in aU cases when I asked for 
 figures was able to say, "Yes, we have that," 
 and able to give it in an hour or two; or to 
 say, "No, we do not have such figures." 
 
 EFFICIENCY REWARD 
 
 The last of the principles of efficiency is 
 special reward. From the beginning of life 
 down, special reward has followed special ef- 
 fort. It is an ingrained expectation ; and when 
 men are working for pay, as most of us must, 
 special reward may very immediately and ap- 
 propriately take the form of an increased earn- 
 ing power. It is, however, true that the higher 
 the morals of an organization the less neces- 
 sary is a money reward. Colonel Schoon- 
 maker in the dare-devil charges of his boyhood 
 soldier days was stimulated by the highest 
 ideals, and to an unusual extent he has in- 
 spired his subordinates with these ideals. One 
 
NINE PKINCIPIjES IN OPERATION 149 
 
 of my best associates once said to me, "A man 
 will not do what he ought to do because it is 
 easier or because there is more money in it, 
 or because it is right, or for any other so-called 
 rational reason. He will do what you ask him 
 to do if he likes you, and he will not like you 
 unless you first like him." 
 
 Even though there is no bonus system in 
 vogue on the Pittsburgh & Lake Brie, the spirit 
 of efficiency reward is everywhere. Men are 
 praised for good work, they are promoted, 
 they are individually considered, their ambi- 
 tions are aroused. The best work is never done 
 for pay, but for some higher ideal; and that 
 is the reason that piece rates, a money reward 
 for production, not for efficiency, have been 
 so universally deleterious. 
 
 The locomotive engineer who was lent to the 
 rival road to pull the Colonel's and the super- 
 intendent of motive power's new type of con- 
 solidated, started his heavy train on the grade 
 not because any money was to be earned, but 
 because he just had to do his best, and the 
 Colonel's praise was the always remembered 
 efficiency reward. Although a particular form 
 of money efficiency reward is not given on the 
 Pittsburgh & Lake Erie, the principle as a 
 whole and in many of its highest ethical forms 
 is part of the spirit of the organization. 
 
150 STANDARDS OP PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 Efficiency is a new word. It has no equiva- 
 lent in Frencli, in German, or in Russian nor 
 in many other languages, but it means some- 
 thing that is as old as eternity, that underlies 
 all our modern conceptions of the forces of 
 the Universe. Humanity has always more or 
 less clearly recognized efficiency when it saw 
 it, even when with unaccountable blindness it 
 overlooked it and failed to apply it in its daily 
 work. 
 
 For those who do not have the inspiration of 
 efficiency it is easier to attain it by deliberately 
 following a few clear principles. Moses 
 cleared the moral atmosphere and set definite 
 tasks when he presented the ten command- 
 ments. He omitted some of great importance, 
 as "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and he ex- 
 aggerated the importance of others, not realiz- 
 ing that man was lord also of the Sabbath. 
 
 It has been of great value to me to have the 
 opportunity to study an unusual man direct- 
 ing the destinies of a part of one of our great- 
 est industries — ^railroading. I had studied 
 from afar the principles of efficiency as ap- 
 plied or neglected by nations, ancient and mod- 
 ern, by great organizations like the Catholic 
 Church, by men like Franklin, Napoleon, Jeff- 
 erson, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour, Lincoln, 
 von Moltke and Bismarck. 
 
NINE PRINCIPLES IN OPERATION 151 
 
 For the first time with the principles as 
 guides was I able to study a big man in a big 
 work. The whole universe fades back into 
 nothingness unless man is there to command 
 it and extend it. The Pythagorean theory of 
 the squares on the sides of the right-angled 
 triangle was never once applied for any prac- 
 tical purpose, until man seized upon it. There 
 was no evidence that it was a truth until the 
 Greek made it shine out in the light of his 
 thought. Logic, mathematics, philosophy, are 
 products of the human mind, but even they 
 are useless unless beyond the mind there is 
 character. 
 
 We have a right to compare the Pittsburgh 
 & Lake Erie with other railroads and for equal 
 time to ask where we can find its equal in serv- 
 ice to aU concerned, public, employee and 
 investor. We have a right to test its 
 organization, administration, operation and 
 management by each of the principles of 
 efficiency, and to find that they are sound be- 
 cause the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is sound, and 
 it practices them. And it is sound because it 
 practices them, as other institutions not rail- 
 roads, able to copy, could be sound if they 
 would practice them. Above all we find that 
 above both railroads and principles is the man 
 
)2 STANDARDS OF PKACTIOAL MANAGEMENT 
 
 I whom was born the ability to perceive and 
 ) on the largest scale what opportunity gave, 
 olonel Schoonmaker just had to do his best, 
 id his best is very good. 
 
 The End 
 
^mmuiM 
 
 m&.