Little David & the Diesels

After 15 years of argument, a railroad dispute came to a head last week: 18,000 firemen walked off the job on four of the country's biggest railroads.

The roads struck were the Pennsylvania west and north of Harrisburg, the New York Central west of Buffalo, the Southern, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, plus, at week's end, 100 miles of Santa Fe track in California used by the Union Pacific. By this kind of piecemeal attack, the firemen tangled up the nation's heartland without causing a national emergency that might have brought the President into the fight.

The Third Man. The argument began around 1935 when imperious, pint-sized David Robertson, boss of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen,* woke up to a new fact of industrial life. Oil-burning diesel engines, which railroads were using in increasing numbers, were being operated with only one man, an engineer. A lot of firemen were going to be out of work. Robertson demanded that a fireman be put on every diesel (to tend no fires, but to make an occasional check in the engine room, keep an eye on gauges, and help the engineer look out the window). The railroads agreed.

Then the firemen reached out for another concession--a second fireman in every diesel engine crew. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers had been trying to get in on the deal, arguing that there should be a second engineer. The railroads turned both brotherhoods down, on the ground that their demands were out & out featherbedding. Over a period of six years three presidential boards had a careful look at the facts, decided that the brotherhoods were unreasonable. Railroads estimated that adding a third man would cost them at least $40 million a year.

Two Sides. But it was going to take more than presidential boards to stop 74-year-old Davey Robertson. As wheels stopped moving on the four struck roads, ticket agents sweated out the chaotic task of rerouting stranded passengers over other routes. Buses and airlines were clogged with suddenly shifted loads. Freight piled up in yards, railroad towns took on a Sunday quiet. In Altoona, Pa., at the base of the Pennsylvania's climb over the Alleghenies, almost two-thirds of the town's workers were idle.

It was not a popular strike; some 200,000 men were unwillingly out of work. By week's end, all four railroads were moving some passengers, some freight behind diesels manned by supervisory personnel, regular engineers and in some instances even by regular firemen. In Chicago, negotiators for the two sides had holed up in separate hotels, arguing with each other through exhausted federal mediators. This week the two sides reached an agreement and the strike ended. The union, said the railroads happily, had given up on the third man, and other issues would be arbitrated later.

*Not to be confused with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, although Robertson's enginemen also drive engines.

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