Page:Fagan (1908) Confessions of a railroad signalman.djvu/64

48 employees and managers. We may continue to work over and reconstruct our rules and to multiply our safety devices until we compel trains to creep from station to station; yet the problem will remain unsolved, the needless and disgraceful sacrifice of life will continue, until trainmen, enginemen, and managers put their heads together and agree to adopt, a new code of railroad morals. My meaning when I allude to railroad morals should be clearly understood.

On nearly all railroads a given rule is obeyed at one point and disregarded at another, on account of different sets of conditions. This conduct leads to accidents when men who have habitually disobeyed the regulations at points where such action is harmless undertake to behave in the same way under conditions when a strict observance of the rules is vitally important. Generally speaking, managers are cognizant of this state of affairs, and thus in a measure they are morally to blame for it; but I do not think that they realize the extent of the evil, for the reason that any organized out-of-door supervision is unknown, and thus the report of an accident, that is to say, the result of these practices, is usually the first and only information on the subject that reaches the manager’s office. The blame for accidents that happen in this way cannot be said to rest upon any particular class of employees