And yet with all of this wretched system, or lack of any system whatsoever, those little railroads of yesterday had many, many things in their favor. Their very individuality was an asset. The fact that they were owned and operated by men who lived upon their lines or very close to them was a still greater asset. The railroad executive of those days understood from first-hand knowledge and intimate personal contact the problems as well as the opportunities of the communities that he was trying to serve. And a third and still greater asset was the close personal relationship that he might enjoy with his employees. On a railroad owning from twelve to twenty locomotives he might know, and almost invariably did know, not only each of those engines individually but the men who ran them. In fact in those days it was customary for a locomotive to be named and to be assigned to a permanent crew of engineer and fireman, who immediately began to take a surpassing pride in the upkeep of their craft--in keeping her boiler black and shiny and her brasses and her nickel-work gleaming like new.
In these days the brass and the nickel and all the rest of the former gay trimmings have departed from the locomotive. Its boiler is no longer shiny. On the average American railroad, locomotive upkeep has become an all but forgotten art. The names and the individuality have gone from its engines. They are assigned to crews out of the roundhouses in a very systematic and utterly unsentimental way. Yet something very definite has been lost.
You could scarce expect a modern railroad president whose system may own three or four thousand locomotives to know any considerable number of the men who operate them. Yet here is the loss. On that little road of yester-year the president not only knew his engine crews by name--generally calling them by their first names--but his conductors, his station-agents, his telegraphers too. And knowing them, understanding them, working with them in almost every case, there was no labor-union problem to confront him. There were no unions then for the simple reason that there was no necessity for them. The labor-union upon the railroad with all of its problems for the management came definitely as an effect of its super-consolidation. And the railroad tradition began to fall.