cident and we have never had to pay more than $5,500 for a death claim-in or out of court. We never let a case go to court unless we believe from our knowledge of the facts that the claimant wants more than justice. Then we fight. Our freight claims average only three tenths of 1 per cent. of the gross revenue as compared with more than 1 per cent. on the old railroad, and while it had an average of 1,200 claims unpaid, we have an average of only 240.

I

"However, the important side is not so much the speed of settlement as the efforts of the men to prevent claims from arising. Every one is heart and soul in the safety first campaign for employees. The road is divided into group sections for safety work, with committees of employees for each section. These men meet regularly and every accident is taken up from the standpoint of seeing how a like accident can be prevented in the future. Of course the management is behind the safety program, as all forward looking managements are to-day, but the men are now really ahead of the management. A careless man is considered a menace by his fellows and, if he will not take ordinary precautions, no crew will work with him.

"We are trying to get the safety first idea over to the public; it is not an easy thing in these days to prevent crossing accidents, for a certain number of motor car drivers seem to be just plain crazy. Most of our crossings are at grade, and it will be a long time before we can afford to eliminate them, but I have never been able to understand why an automobile driver will try to beat a train to a crossing -but they do try it every day in the week. The men join in our propaganda and especially in the safety rallies we hold in the towns along the road. These rallies are affairs-town holidays.

"We start the show off with a paradethe mayor, the chamber of commerce, all the local organizations which will turn. out, and the railroad employees march about town behind the best band we can find. The business streets decorate and the farmers come in from the country just

as they do for the circus. The parade ends at the biggest hall in town and there we have a first-class entertainment with good music and plenty of speakers. We wind up with a motion picture showing how and why accidents happen. The old idea was that a railroad was something to graft money out of; now I believe most of the people want to help us and our men to give service.

WE

ACCIDENTS ARE RARE

WE HAVE accidents involving personal injury to passengers, but they have been few and no one has been killed-in fact, no one has been really seriously injured. Every accident, serious or otherwise, is reported instantly, and we have a man on the ground at once to settle claims and take releases. We do not wait for the claim-we reach the people first. It is the duty of the man who goes to the scene to question every one on the train and settle the whole case on the spot. But there was one case where we could not get the signature of every passenger-one man escaped! Here is how it happened.

"Train Number Five, running at a fair rate of speed near Cornwall, Ohio, went off the tracks-nobody knows just why-and turned over. Forty passengers were on the train, but when the mess was untangled only one man was found to be at all seriously injured-the others had only cuts and bruises. One of our agents was on the ground within the hour, ready to settle claims. The train crew had already taken the names of every passenger who said he was injured or who looked as though he might be injured. Three passengers each assessed their damages at ten dollars. None of the others found themselves more than five dollars the worse for wear. The seriously injured man was not in condition to make a settlement at once. would not have been fair to try. A few days later, when his case had been diagnosed, we took his figure of three hundred dollars as just to both sides.

It

"One passenger escaped. He was the first man out of the wreck, and the last

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the train crew saw of him he was racing across the fields as fast as a pair of long legs could carry him-jumping and zigzagging like a man dodging rifle bullets. He may have been hurt and again he may not-that is what we had to know. We found out who he was and where he lived and some days later an agent started off to see him. But he never did. He suddenly changed his mind about wanting to see him. For, as he got up into the Kentucky hills where the man was said to live, the reputation of the ex-passenger was not so good. As the agent got deeper into the hills, not only did the roads become worse, but also the reputation of the gentleman he hoped to visit.

He was an all-around

bad man, so it appeared, a killer and a moonshiner, whom both the county and the revenue officers had been after for years.

"You'd better not try to find him,' explained a hill country storekeeper, 'because, although your intentions seem all right, he won't know about them in advance. Nobody has ever wanted to see him except to put him in jail. He'd be sure to see you first and he's a good shot. I don't know what he was doing on your railroad. I guess it was the first time he was ever on one. I guess he thinks they're dangerous.'

"Our agent thoughtfully weighed the value of his own skin with that of the mountaineer's and came home. So we have one potential claimant still at large!

THE MAN WITH A BROKEN

OF

HEAD

F COURSE we have a few fake claims. Take the man I shall call John Brown-a great brute of a fellow with overhanging brow, beady eyes, and prominent jaw. We found him lying unconscious beside a moving train apparently suffering from a fractured skull and a dislocated shoulder. His face and head were smeared with blood and he was evidently in a very serious condition.

"The trainman called an ambulance, but before it arrived the man had regained consciousness. He was very surly, refused to give the attendant any details,

and finally jumped out of the ambulance. Later a policeman found him seated on a street curb and persuaded him to go to the hospital for treatment. Here he so frightened the attendants that he got very poor attention.

"Our agent began to get suspicious. He found the man had been registered in the same hospital a number of years before, suffering with identically the same injuries. Then we looked further and found he was a fraud who had collected in settlement for his supposed injuries. It was also found at this time that he had a peculiar faculty for producing a flow of blood which made the fake injury seem even more realistic.

"Brown, upon being released from the hospital, refused to see the railroad surgeon, but demanded an examination by a chiropractor to prove the injury he had suffered. The agent consented, but led the injured man to the company doctor. His skull fracture was of many years standing and he could throw his shoulder out of place at will. We tried to arrest him, but he fought his way out. We have since learned that he has been committed to an institution and is still suffering with a fractured skull!

TAKING NAPS ON THE RAILS

Mout its effect on railroading. Along

OONSHINE whiskey is not with

the D., T. & I. it seems to engender the odd delusion that a railroad track is a nice, comfortable place on which to take a nap the head on one rail, the feet on the other. In a period of eight months three men were killed sleeping in this fashion, while in a number of other cases the engineers sighted the lodgers just in time to stop their trains. The three men who were killed preferred to rest just around the bend of a curve-where an engineer could not see them in time to stop.

"Freight claims are due to some one's carelessness some one in the employ of the shipper or of the railroad. The railroads of the country have cut their freight damages in half during the last three years and we have cut ours by

more than two thirds. We have been working in two directions-the one with the goods themselves and the manner of packing, and the other with the handling of trains. There is a lot more to stopping a train than is imagined. For instance, it is quite common practice to throw on the air force quickly, say, when a train is moving slowly, as at ten miles an hour. There is a great deal of slack in a freight train, and, if the engine comes down quickly from ten to five miles an hour, the rear cars will still have the ten mile speed and come crashing forward. We find that the engineers and the trainmen are taking pride in trying to start and stop without unnecessary bumping and smashing.

"The agents, too, are acting on their own initiative and not just passing things on. They work with the individual shippers for better packing and, if a car comes to us in bad condition from a connecting line, the agent will refuse to receive it unless there is some way of relieving our company from the responsibility of sharing in the inevitable loss. One agent came across a shipment of seeds that had been placed in leaky sacks. It was entirely the shipper's fault and the shipment should not have been received in the first place by the connecting railroad. This agent, under the circumstances of the case, could not refuse to receive the goods, so he just bought new sacks-thereby saving us a claim that would have run to $200 at least. It is the little things like this that the men do themselves and on their own responsibility which combine to make the big savings."

AUDITING MADE SIMPLE

panies operate with a minimum of accounting and it is all centralized so as to be accomplished with the largest number of mechanical aids and the least number of clerks. The old D., T. & I. had a building full of clerks at Detroit and about a hundred men in various offices down the line exclusively engaged in clerical matters. Now all the accounting is in two rooms at the River Rouge plant and not more than a dozen men are needed to get all the necessary facts. This was very simply brought about by the auditor cutting the dead wood off the old accounting tree.

"Four years ago," he said, "we had an unpruned accounting tree. The organization was made up of many nearly independent branches. The superintendent had an accounting office, so did the chief engineer, so did the master mechanic, and so did the storekeeper. Each office kept its own time, made its own payrolls, issued invoices and vouchers, made labor and material distributions, gathered statistics, rendered reports, and carried on correspondence in perfectly independent fashion. Then each month each of these departments made a report to a fifth office-that is, to the accounting department where all their work was consolidated into statistics, reports, and statements for the entire railroad. That is, we had four departments of what might be called original entry, and a fifth to check up their work. But that is not all. Each station-and there are about fifty of them-was also an independent accounting unit which made up its own balance sheet and forwarded it to the accounting department.

"Our first move was to take the accounting away from the four major

Railroads have a great deal of accounting; much of this is prescribed by the Interstate Commerce Commission and by the various state commissions, but because railroading is an old business, shot through and through with traditions and customs, some of the prescribed accounting has been just superimposed on the old accounting. The Ford com

in the accounting department. Then the duplications began to show up, for in each of these major divisions some of the work overlapped, while the work of the accounting department itself was in a large measure the same work which the departments had already done. The main work of the superintendent, the chief engineer, the master mechanic,

134

and the storekeeper ought to be the running of the railroad; the time they gave up to accounting was only so much time taken from their important duties. Thus we increased their efficiency.

"Then we studied the station accountting and as a result took actual accounting away from the agents and left them free to attend to their business of receiving and delivering freight. They now have only a few printed forms to fill out daily for the information of the accounting department.

CENTRALIZING THE STATISTICS

WE

E EXAMINED every report and every kind of statistic and statement which had been regularly prepared as a matter of course. We examined them to discover if they were of any real use and about half of them proved to be of no practical service whatsoever they were just nice things to look at, which went into the files and never came out again. Now we have all the accounting we need and all the reports we needand none at all which we do not need.

"This centralizing of the accounts took away a large part of the duties of the traveling auditor, whose usual duties are to travel from point to point and check up the accounts. That is ordinarily the beginning and the end of his duties and, according to railroad custom, if he mixes into anything else he is apt to get his fingers burnt. Everything else on a road is supposed to be looked after by other inspectors who check up on their own particular departments. Our traveling auditor has no specific duties; he has to check all the accounts and to see that the station office work is being done according to instructions and that all the station records are properly filed.

"But that is only the beginning, not the end of the duties; he is expected to report on everything, just as though he were the president of the road making a tour. For instance, he is supposed to know how the agent gets along not only with the shippers of the neighborhood, but also with all the people who use or might use the railroad, whether there

are too many or too few men employed about the station, and how they do their work and what equipment they have; sometimes he acts as an adjuster for personal injury and freight claims.

"This would rather give the notion that we appointed the auditors as a general busybody. That is far from the truth. When men are all working together, there is no room for a busybody-at least if I am right in thinking of a busybody as some one who goes after trouble for its own sake. In fact, every one in our employ is an inspector. Each trainman, for instance, is in effect made an inspector of grade crossings. of grade crossings. Each month he is. given a card containing these questions:

(1) Do all signal bells ring on your run? (2) Have you reported any defective signals to the signal department?

(3) Are crossing watchmen performing their duties properly?

(4) What is the most dangerous crossing on your run and what further protection do you advise?

"These cards simply carry out the policy of making every man on the road an inspector of everything that comes within his notice."

The D., T. & I. goes out after business— none of the Ford industries sits still and waits for business to turn up. Every employee is expected toobe a solicitor

and to make sure that he is a solicitor in fact as well as in theory he is expected to be able at all times to answer these four questions:

Do the merchants with whom you trade specify the D., T. & I. on their routing instructions whenever possible?

Do your friends use D., T. & I. service when they are shipping?

Do you follow up tips about prospective shippers?

Do you boost your road in the Board of Commerce and other local organizations?

"It is not nearly so hard to get business as it is to keep it," said the superintendent when we were discussing this part of the road's affairs, "and that is one reason why we are trying to make salesmen out of all the employees, for then the

part that operations play in the keeping of business will be brought home to every one of them. Suppose some man in contact with a shipper makes a promise regarding delivery-most new business is obtained on such promises, the time element is one of the big factors in transportation. The man who makes the promise cannot alone fulfill it; he has to have the coöperation of a great many other men. A section hand a hundred miles away who shirks some small duty or a train dispatcher who is not thinking clearly may prevent that promise from being fulfilled-which may mean the end of that particular shipper's business.

THEY ALL PULL TOGETHER

UT unless that section hand or that

output, the lowest wage, and the least profits. Dirt is clogging, wherever it is found. Bad years or good years, money or no money, the care of tangible wealth is the first sign of a good business man.

"Surprising results may be obtained by turning attention to cleanliness in times of dull business. Cleaning up the property may result in so clearing up the mind that new business will be discovered where none was thought to be. The tradition that disorder and rushing business go together has nothing to it. Industry has commonly believed that time spent in tidying up is time wasted. Yet for every example of disorder there can be found an example of inefficiency. To know the condition of a thing, clean it up and keep it clean. Dirt and dis

around to the salesman's viewpoint, they cannot be made to realize that what to them is only a detail may be a very big affair indeed for the railroad. Specific duties and titles all tend toward

may be lying unused. Wealth may be accumulating in junk piles, awaiting discovery."

KEEP EVERYTHING CLEAN-MONEY SAVED

work which is going on and of which their work is only a part. That is the reason we do not have formal subdivisions of work; if a man has responsibilities beyond the exact limits of his job he will soon learn the relations of his job to the whole work.

"Whenever a man has nothing else to do he is supposed to clean something. Every day is a clean-up day. There is no more reason for the presence of unclean and unpolished material on a railroad than there is for a right-of-way not being clear. When dirt is removed, it is possible to have close inspection for defects which might otherwise escape notice and do serious damage. A layer of rust may do more damage than a year of wear."

System, orderliness, and tidiness are fundamental with Mr. Ford. As he As he once told me: "The poorhouse atmosphere cannot exist about an industry which expects its employees to take pride in it and their work. Industries with the greatest degree of physical disorderliness invariably show the lowest

HE surest way of keeping anything clean,"

dent, "is to finish it in such a manner that even the slightest speck of dirt will show out prominently. We spend about $500 per engine nickel-plating the cab fixtures, railings, number plates, monograms, piping, and so on-and we find that it pays. We are trying to make the cabs just as attractive and comfortable as the office of the business executive. As I said, all of the brass work is nickeled, the floors are laid with aluminum, and we have worked out an aluminum chair with a leather seat and a nine inch spring, so that the engineer and fireman can be just as comfortable as though they were riding in an automobile.

"The change in the finish of the locomotives has made necessary a new set of tools. The heavy hammers and monkey wrenches have all gone and in their place is a neat tool box with each tool especially designed for a definite utility. Instead of a sledge hammer, the engineer now has lead and copper hammers. He has exactly the right tools to make any repair which he could make on the road,