Chapter XII: The End of the Story

For six or seven years after it had secured possession of the property, the New York Central continued the operation of the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh as a separate railroad, to a very large degree, at least. Gradually, however, the individual executive officers of the leased road ceased to exist; in some cases berths with the parent road were found for them; in others, they were glad to retire to a life of comfortable ease. The separate corporate existence of the R. W. & O. as well as that of the Utica & Black River and the Carthage, Watertown & Sackett's Harbor, was continued, however, until 1914, when the Vanderbilts made a single corporation under the title of the New York Central Railroad of some of their most important properties; the New York Central & Hudson River, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern and the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh, chief amongst them. That step taken, the R. W. & O. had ceased to exist--legally as well as technically. Yet the work that it had done in the development of a huge community of communities could never die. It was to live after it; for many years to come.

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On the 20th of May, 1891, within three months after the leasing of the Rome road, its headquarters were moved back to the place where originally they had been located, and from which they never should have been removed--Watertown. The entire property was then consolidated into a single division, and Mr. McEwen brought over from Oswego to become its Superintendent, with Mr. Jones his assistant at Oswego and Mr. Hammond in a similar capacity at Watertown. Mr. P. E. Crowley was, also, promoted at this time to the position of Chief Despatcher of the division. This arrangement did not long continue, however. Charles Parsons already was interesting himself in the New York & New England, and presently he called to that property, as superintendents, Mr. Bowen and Mr. Jones, who established their offices at Hartford, Conn. Soon afterwards Mr. Hammond followed them. There had come a real change in _regime_.

The R. W. & O. division of the New York Central & Hudson River, as the old property then became known, stretched all the way from Suspension Bridge to Massena Springs and was, I believe, with its 643 miles of route mileage, the longest single railroad division in the United States at that time. To run that division was a man's job, and only a real man could survive it.

Yet into that grimy old station at Watertown there came, one by one, a succession of as brilliant railroaders as this country has ever known--Van Etten, Russell, Moon, Hustis, Christie. These were men tested and tried before they were sent up into the North Country--it was no place for novices up there. Once there they made good, by both their wits and their energies. Success on that division called for almost superhuman energy. And when once it had been won; when down in the Grand Central they could say that "X--had been to Watertown and made good there," it meant that X--had taken, successfully, the thirty-third degree in modern railroading.

There were a few men between these five, who did not make good--but somehow that was never charged against them. Other jobs were found for them; headquarters felt that perhaps the mistake in some way should rightly be charged against it.

After seventeen years of operation of the R. W. & O. as a single division it was recognized at headquarters that the test was not a fair one; and the famous old road was divided into two divisions, with Watertown Junction as the dividing point and the divisions named, the St. Lawrence and Ontario, with Watertown and Oswego as their respective division headquarters. Just why the system was divided in that way no one seems to know. It would have been more logical to have made the former Rome road, east of Oswego, a single division with headquarters at Watertown, and have split the old Lake Ontario Shore into the main line divisions of the western part of the state. Yet this is history, and not a criticism. The men who have run the New York Central have generally known their business pretty well.

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Edgar Van Etten came to the railroad game by way of the historic Erie. He is a native of Port Jervis, New York, a famous old Erie town, and it was just as natural as buttering bread for him to go to work upon that road, rising in quick successive steps, freight conductor, to-day, trainmaster to-morrow--oddly enough there was a little time when he was Superintendent of the Ontario division of the R. W. & O., in the days of the Parsons' control. Then we see him as Superintendent of the Erie at Buffalo, finally General Manager of the Western New York Car Association, in that same busy railroad center. From that task the Vanderbilts picked him for an even greater one--taking that newly merged, single-track 643-mile-division of the R. W. & O., and putting it upon their operating methods and discipline.

Only an Edgar Van Etten could have done the trick. A lion of a man he was in those Watertown days, relentless, indomitable, fearless--yet possessing in his varied nature keen qualities of humor and of human understanding that were tremendous factors in the winning of his success. It was but natural that so keen a talent should have been recognized in his promotion from Watertown to the vastly responsible post of General Superintendent of the New York Central at the Grand Central Station. In those days the position of Operating Vice-President of the property had not been created. Nor was there even a General Manager. The General Superintendent was the big boss who moved the trains and moved them well. If he could not, the Vanderbilts discovered it before they ever made him a big boss.

Mr. Van Etten's final promotion came in his advancement to the post of Vice-President and General Manager of their important Boston & Albany property; a position on that road corresponding to the presidency of almost any other one. Here he remained until 1907, when ill-health caused his retirement from railroading. He moved across the continent to California, where he is to-day an enthusiastic resident of Los Angeles.

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E. G. Russell was cast in a somewhat gentler mold than Van Etten. Thorough railroader he was at that, a man of large vision and seeking every opportunity for the advancement of the property that he headed. For remember that in all these years at Watertown these men were virtual General Managers of a goodly property, in everything but actual title. Upon their initiative, upon their ability to make quick decisions--and accurate--in crises, to handle even matters of a goodly size the huge division rose or fell. Theirs was no job for the weakling or the hesitant.

Mr. Russell was neither a weakling nor hesitant. On the contrary he risked much--even the friendship of the organized labor of the road--when he felt that he was right and must go ahead upon the right path. Eventually his policies in regard to labor forced his retirement from the R. W. & O. division. He went, capable railroader that he always was, to Scranton where he became General Superintendent of the Lackawanna. From there he went to one of the roads in lower Canada, and finally to Michigan, where he met his tragic death late at night on a lonely railroad pier in the dead of winter.

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After Russell, Dewitt C. Moon; a man with an unusual genius for placating labor and getting the very best results out of it. Mr. Moon succeeded Mr. Russell as Superintendent at Watertown, April 1, 1899, leaving that post September 1, 1902, to become General Manager of the Lake Erie & Western, a Vanderbilt property of the mid-West. He had been schooled in that family of railroads, starting in as telegraph operator on the old Dunkirk, Allegheny Valley & Pittsburgh, which was gradually merged, first into the Lake Shore and then into the parent reorganized New York Central of to-day. Before that reorganization, he had become General Manager of the former Lake Shore in some respects the very finest of the old Vanderbilt properties--at Cleveland. At Cleveland he still remains, as Assistant to the Vice-President of the New York Central in that important city. He is a railroader of the old school, trained in exquisite thoroughness and with a capacity for detail, not less than marvelous.

Moon's great forte, however, was and still is, cooperation. Men like him. He likes men. A big and genial nature, a quick sympathy and understanding have proved great assets to a railroad executive. These assets Moon has possessed from the beginning. Upon them he had builded--and upgrown.

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Still another of this famous quintette to whom the running of a 650 mile railroad division was as but part of a day's work--James H. Hustis. More than any of the three who preceded him Hustis is in every sense a thorough graduate of the Vanderbilt school of railroading. He was born to it. His father, too, was a veteran New York Central man. "Jim" Hustis entered that school in 1878, as office-boy to the late John M. Toucey, then General Superintendent of the New York Central in the old Grand Central depot. He rose rapidly in the ranks, filling several superintendencies in the old parent property before he went to Watertown, in the late summer of 1902.

He left there on October 1, 1906, to assume executive charge of the Boston & Albany. And it was soon after he left that the old division was broken into two parts and the R. W. & O. ceased to exist, even as a division name. Mr. Hustis is to-day President of the Boston & Maine Railroad. He holds the unique distinction of having headed the three most important railroads of New England. After leaving the office of Vice-President and General Manager of the Boston & Albany--as we have already seen the ranking position of that property--he was for a time President of the New York, New Haven & Hartford, before going to his present post with the Boston & Maine. That he is a thorough railroader, hardly needs to be said here--if nothing else said that, the fact that he spent four successful years in full control at Watertown, of itself would tell it.

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After Hustis, Cornelius Christie, the last of the executive Superintendents that were to supervise the operation of the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh as a single unit--why the folks down in the Grand Central did not create a general superintendency at Watertown, I never could understand. Christie, a huge six-foot-three man, big both physically and mentally, also was trained in the wondrous Vanderbilt school of railroading. Long service both upon the main line of the Central and the West Shore, equipped him most adequately for the arduous task at Watertown.

It was in Christie's day--in the summer of 1908--that the famous old division was divided into two large parts, as we have already seen; the Ontario and the St. Lawrence. For three years more, Mr. Christie remained at Watertown, as Superintendent of the St. Lawrence, being promoted from that post to a similar one on the busy Hudson River division between Albany and New York. He was succeeded at Watertown by F. E. Williamson, the present General Superintendent of the New York Central at Albany.

At the time Christie became Superintendent of the St. Lawrence Division at Watertown, Frank E. McCormack was set up in a similar job, heading the Ontario Division at Oswego. The genial Frank was R. W. & O. trained and bred. As far back as April 1, 1885, he was working for the property as night operator and pumper, at a salary of $25 a month. Some one must have recognized the real railroader in him, however, for but a year later his "salary" was raised to $30 and the following year he was transferred to the Superintendent's office at Watertown as confidential clerk and operator. From that time on his progress was steady and uninterrupted; despatcher, chief despatcher, trainmaster, and with one or two more intermediate steps, Superintendent.

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To attempt even a listing of the able railroad crowd that hovered around the old Watertown depot, in the years that measured the beginnings of the Vanderbilt operation of the old Rome road again, would be quite beyond the province of this little book. H. D. Carter, Frank E. Wilson, George C. Gridley, W. H. Northrop, Clare Hartigan, how the names come trippingly to mind! And how many, many more there are of them.

Yet I cannot close these paragraphs without singling out two of them--Wilgus and Crowley. Here are two more graduates of its hard, hard school, in which the Rome road may hold exceeding pride. Colonel W. J. Wilgus was with the old division for but four years--from 1893 to 1897--but they were years of exceeding activity in the rebuilding of the property; particularly its "double-tracking" and the extremely important job of raising the track-levels for many miles north of Richland so that the eternal enemy of the road--snow--would have a much harder time henceforth in endeavoring to fight it. From that job he went to far bigger ones; such as building the new Grand Central Terminal and installing electric operation on the lines that entered it, digging the Michigan Central tunnel under the river at Detroit and building the new station in that city. These and others. But none more interesting to him, I dare say, than the task that he laid out overseas in the Great War, building and arranging the rail lines of communication for the American Army in France. A job to which he brought all his experience, his great energy and his rare tact.

And finally, Patrick E. Crowley. Mr. Crowley's connection with the Rome road goes back to the Parsons' regime--even though before that day he had had eleven hard years of experience with the old Erie; in about every conceivable job from station agent to train despatcher. He was with the R. W. & O., however, almost an even year before its acquisition by the New York Central--as train despatcher at Oswego. In May, 1891, he was transferred to Watertown as chief train despatcher and later as train master. His stepping upward has been continuous and earned. To-day as Vice-President, in charge of operation, of the entire New York Central system he is recognized as one of the king-pins of railroad operators of all creation and is the same simple and unassuming gentleman that one found him in the old days at Oswego and Watertown.

That seems to be the mark of the real railroader, always. Ostentation does not get a man very far in the game. In the North Country it got him nowhere, whatsoever. In our land of the great snows and the hard years a very real and simple democracy plus energy and some real knowledge of the problems in hand were the only qualities that put a big boss ahead. Forever--no matter what the name or how long the division--the job up there was the survival of the fittest. The fit man might be here, there, anywhere. He might be a greaser in the round-house, a news-butcher upon the train, an office boy upstairs in the depot headquarters, an operator in a lonely country station. If he was fit he got ahead and got ahead quickly. Merit won its own promotion and generally won it pretty quickly.

Not that everything was always plain sailing. There is one pretty keen railroad executive in the land who remembers his joy at being promoted to Despatcher on the old Rome road. The pay was eighty dollars a month, which was good in those days. He walked into the new job with a plenty of cocksure enthusiasm. The "super" did not like young men with cocksure enthusiasms. He said so, frankly. And in order to drive his ideas home paid the young man the Despatcher's rate for thirty days; then, for the next five or six months at the old-time operator's rate. The young man caught on. He understood. A job's a job and a boss is a boss. And all the jobs in the world are not worth the paper that they are written on, unless the boss wants to make them so. Which may be put down as an unscientific maxim; yet a very true one nevertheless.

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Back of these men who sought with all their energy and vigor, of mind and of body alike, steadily to upbuild the old Rome road, was the great wealth, organization and _esprit de corps_ of one of the leading railroad organizations of the world. The Vanderbilts were always thorough sportsmen. They showed it in their reincarnation of the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh. Parsons had been handicapped, forever and a day, by the constant lack of ready cash--there have been few times when the New York Central has been so handicapped. I bear no brief for the Vanderbilts. They have made their mistakes and they have been grievous ones. But they have not often made the mistake of being miserly with their properties. That mistake was not made in Northern New York.

Into the R. W. & O., once they had clinched their title to it, they poured money like water--whenever they could be shown the necessity of such a procedure. New track went down and then new bridges went up--superb structures every one of them--until there no longer were any limitations upon the motive-power for the North Country's rail transport system. A locomotive that could run upon the main line could run practically anywhere upon the Rome road divisions. And when Watertown complained that the traffic was rising to a volume that no longer could be handled upon a single-track basis, the Vanderbilts double-tracked the road--in all of its essential stretches, many, many miles of it all told. They built and rebuilt the round-houses and the shops. "Property improvement" became their slogan.

In such property improvement Watertown has always shared, most liberally. The double-tracking of the old main-stem of the R. W. & O. brought with it as a corollary the construction of a much needed freight cut-off outside the crowded heart of that city. That done the local freight facilities were removed from the old stone freight-house opposite the passenger-station and that staunch old landmark torn down. To replace it a huge freight terminal of the most modern type and worthy of a city of sixty thousand population was erected on a convenient site upon the North side of the river. As a final step in this program of progress the old depot was torn away--without many expressions of regret on the part of the townsfolk--and the present magnificent passenger terminal erected, at a cost of close to a quarter of a million dollars. The management of what Watertown will always know as the "old Rome road" has not been niggardly with its chief town.

Nor has it been niggardly with any other parts of Northern New York territory. Oswego has rejoiced in a new station--the blessed old Lake Shore Hotel, which for many years housed tavern and railroad offices and passenger depot, combined, is now a thing of memory. Ogdensburgh has a fine new station, and so has Massena Springs. Norwood still worries along with its old depot, but Richland rejoices in a neat but excellent structure, in which the Wright brothers still serve the coffee, the rolls, the sausage and the buckwheat cakes that cannot be excelled. The North Country has never taken to the dining-car habit; perhaps, because it never has had the chance. But it actually likes its old-fashioned way of living; the innate democracy of the American plan hotel and dinner-in-the-middle-of-the-day.

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Never can I ride up through it in these fine basking days of peace and of prosperity over its well-maintained railroad without thinking of the days when journeying into the North Country was not a comfortable matter of Pullman cars and swift trains by day and by night; of the days when one came to Utica by stage or by canal and immediately reembarked upon another stage for an even hundred miles of rackingly hard riding over an uneven plank-road into Watertown. If one went further toward the North, travel conditions became still worse. Such expeditions were not for tender folk.

And sometimes to-day when I ride north from Watertown upon the railroad--and the cars toil laboriously through Factory Street, as they have been toiling for sixty-five long years past--I press my face against the window and look for a little house upon that Appian Way; the little, old, stone house in which Clarke Rice and William Smith were wont, so long ago, to operate their toy train upon the table and so try to induce the folk of the village to invest their money in a scheme which then seemed so utter chimerical. A house in which a real idea was born forever fascinates me. For it I hold naught by sympathy--and understanding. So many of us are dreamers.... And so few of us may ever live to see the full fruition of our dreams.