Chapter 5

Overhauling Steam Locomotives

By today’s standards, steam locomotives of the final two decades of the nineteenth century were temperamental machines. As Dodge writes, they “required substantial daily servicing and maintenance, as well as periodic major overhauls. At the end of a daily run, a steam engine had its ash pan dumped and its firebox cleaned, ridding it of clinkers, the irregular lumps of coal left after firing. Its appliances and running gear were inspected, and, if necessary, repaired. Tubes, flues, and smokeboxes were cleaned. Boilers were washed out to remove mineral build-up approximately once per month, more frequently as necessary.”¹

In the early 1880s, when the AT&SF Locomotive Repair Shops went into operation at Albuquerque, the daily run of a steam locomotive was a roundtrip ranging from 200 to 300 miles, at the mid-point of which lubrication, inspection, and dumping of the ash pan were performed before the second leg of the roundtrip.² This daily cleaning and maintenance took place at roundhouses located at periodic points along the main track, usually 100 to 150 miles apart. These locations were known as “division points.” The Albuquerque shops were at a division point, as well as being the site of shops that performed major overhauls, rebuilt locomotives, and repaired other rolling stock. The neighboring division points were at “Las Vegas to the north, Gallup to the west, and San Marcial to the south.”³

Beyond this daily maintenance, the railroad specified in detail a series of monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual inspections that had to be performed on each and every locomotive. By 1934, the standard monthly inspection included twenty-five individual items, ranging from examining and testing electric headlights to tightening unions and clamps on all sand pipes and flushing out tender cisterns.

Also mandatory were periodic, complete disassembly and rebuilding of every steam locomotive, what were called “heavy repairs,” or “overhauls.”⁴ “Locomotives were taken to large shops, such as the ones at Albuquerque, for a major overhaul. In the nineteenth century, this might be necessary after as few as 40,000 miles.”⁵ Over the decades during which the Shops operated, the procedure involved in performing an overhaul remained very much the same, although the process became increasingly complex and mechanized over time.

That mechanization is especially evident in the use of very large traveling cranes that were capable of hoisting and moving entire locomotives. Cranes of this type were integrated into the “new” shop buildings erected at Albuquerque in the 1910s and 1920s (see chapter 11). Those cranes and the use of individual electric motors to operate power equipment of colossal scale were some of the most obvious changes between the original 1880s shops and their twentieth-century counterparts. Major locomotive repair shops, like those at Albuquerque, “required cranes, heavy tools, large stores, and ever-increasing manpower, as did the car repair shops that sprang up along the Santa Fe [line] to service the growing fleet of freight and passenger equipment.”⁶ The Albuquerque Shops encompassed both locomotive and car repair facilities.

Furthermore, the size and complexity of locomotives increased steadily over time. That meant that the number of individual steps that comprised an overhaul grew and grew and, with that, the technical know-how required of the shopmen who carried out the work. The physical size of the Shops, too, increased as they were enlarged to accommodate ever-larger rolling stock, as well as a swelling volume of railroad traffic. There were many other, though less apparent, changes, which we discuss in chapter 11.

For now, though, we outline the overhaul procedure, which in general would have been familiar to shopmen any time from the 1880s to the 1950s. A locomotive scheduled for periodic overhaul traveled under its own steam or was towed to the shops and was either pushed or driven on a spur track into a bay in the spacious machine shop. Within each bay was a long, masonry-lined pit that the locomotive straddled so that its undercarriage could be inspected and worked on. At each bay, there were usually “six to eight [large] machine tools (usually lathes and mills). These machines were used to do fine cutting required to fit engine parts.”⁷ Within the machine shop, fixed at specific locations, were other large machine tools, including multiple engine lathes of varying sizes, centering machines, bolt lathes, radial and vertical drills, bench drills, driving wheel lathes, axle lathes, journal lathes, quartering machines, at least one wheel press, metal saws, external and internal grinders of different diameters, bushing presses, assorted turret lathes, a nut facer, bolt cutters, a pipe threader, slotters, grooving machines, planers, crank shapers, graduated boring mills, drop tables, multiple arc welders, jib cranes, and on and on.⁸

Table 5.1. Required Inspections on AT&SF Steam Locomotives

Monthly Inspection (25 items)

1. Examine, grind in boiler and line checks, clean opening in boiler.

2. Grind, clean, and repack waterglass and gauge cocks and drain valves.

3. Remove caps from tank hose strainer box. Examine strainer and threads.

4. Wash out tender cistern.

5. Examine tank valves and strainer and see that valves are properly secured to stem.

6. Examine plates and brasses in tender.

7. Clean drain pipe back of tank.

8. Operate 3-way valve to reversing cylinder, and apply seal.

9. Examine and clean cylinder and channel cocks.

10. Examine and test electric headlight.

11. Examine blow-out pipes and force oil to engine and tender truck center casting.

12. See that radial buffer oil and grease holes are open. Close and pack oil caps.

13. Hayden exhaust pipe. Clean carter if necessary and record size of opening.

14. Test superheater units if necessary.

15. Inspect and repair stoker.

16. Wash out feedwater heater.

17. Test out feedwater heater for leaks.

18. Test out Klease feedwater pump.

19. Test out Klease feedwater motor.

20. Test air hose on locomotive and tender with soap suds.

21. Check grate shaker post and bar with template.

22. Test out mechanical lubricator to engine truck.

23. Test out mechanical lubricator to cylinders and valves.

24. Oil outboard bearings of multiple throttle.

25. Tighten unions and clamps on all sand pipes and line up with rail.

Quarterly Inspection—Add to Monthly (25 items)

1. Remove and examine engine truck brasses (passenger engines).

2. Remove and examine trailer truck brasses (passenger engines).

3. Remove and examine tender truck brasses (passenger engines).

4. Examine cylinder packing (freight and passenger engines).

5. Examine main valves, packing & valve stem fits on all road engines.

6. Examine and clean branch pipes if needed.

7. Remove and inspect drawbar, safety bars, safety chain, and pins.

8. Have items on 1154 card given inspection and tested.

9. Wash and inspect air pumps.

10. Clean air pump oil cup to air end.

11. Lubricate power reverse gear cylinder with brake cylinder lubricant.

12. Inspect stoker trough.

13. Inspect equipment in tender toolboxes.

14. Clean steam gauge siphon pipe and openings in connections into boilers.

15. Examine check valve feedwater heater and [illegible] line.

16. Clean out flange lubricator.

17. Are flange oil piping and nipples open?

18. Blow out hydrostatic lubricator to cylinders and valves.

19. Examine and clean stems in lubricator and oil pipes.

20. Clean and test out mechanical lubricator to engine trucks.

21. Clean and test out mechanical lubricator to cylinders and valves.

22. Clean air pump strainer.

23. Remove flange oilers. Dismantle, inspect, and clean all parts.

24. Remove and inspect valve gear parts, apply Magnaflux or white wash test and record test on plate attached to valve gear frame.

25. Check contours of radial buffers engine and tender.

Semi-annual Inspection—Add to Monthly and Quarterly (8 items)

1. Remove and examine engine truck brasses (freight engines).

2. Remove and examine trailer truck brasses (freight engines).

3. Remove and examine tender truck brasses (freight engines).

4. Examine cylinder packing (switch engines).

5. Examining main valves, packing and valve stem fits (switch engines).

6. Anneal, inspect, and stencil drawbars and pins.

7. Wash out 9 ½" and 11" pumps.

8. Clean and inspect mechanical lubricator to engine truck.

Annual Inspection—Add to Monthly, Quarterly, and Semi-annual (5 items)

1. Remove, clean, anneal, and inspect copper pipe to water column and left water glass cock.

2. Remove and clean water column.

3. Clean with rose-bit all fittings to boiler for water column and left water glass.

4. Remove dome cap and inspect throttle valve and rigging.

5. Remove receiving and discharge valves from 6" or 8½ " cross stop and air compressors, which are to be thoroughly cleaned and inspected for defects. Parts found defective should not be continued in service.

Source: AT&SF Locomotive Inspection and Repair Report, Form 1215-A, Locomotive Folio, June 1, 1934, held by the New Mexico Steam Locomotive & Railroad Historical Society, Albuquerque, NM.

Figure 5.1. AT&SF locomotive #3914 being dismantled at the Albuquerque Shops in February 1948. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Albuquerque Museum, Photo Archives, catalog number PA1980.184.896.

Figure 5.2. Jacketing plan for AT&SF locomotive #2926, prepared in 2008 during its restoration. Courtesy of the New Mexico Steam Locomotive & Railroad Historical Society.

After the locomotive had cooled down, its firebox and ash pan had been emptied, and its boiler drained, a crew of disassemblers swarmed over the body of the locomotive, removing every appendage, from lubrication tubes to the sand and steam domes on top of the barrel of the locomotive, as well as levers, lights, the smokestack, valves, gauges, cylinders, pistons, and the entire power train.

With exterior lines, pipes, and pieces removed, it was time to “strip” off the sheet metal jacket that sheathed the locomotive body. That jacket was composed of about 200 separate pieces of sheet metal that had been custom cut and shaped to fit around the various ports, channels, tubes, pipes, and conduits that passed through it. Those sheet-metal puzzle pieces, welded together to form the enveloping jacket, were virtually impossible to remove without damaging them. Thus, they would all have to be refabricated in order to rejacket the overhauled locomotive.

Beneath the jacket lay insulation, called lagging, the purpose of which was to reduce heat loss from the boiler that would render the engine less efficient and would subject the engineer and fireman working in the cab to intolerable temperatures. Although in the early days of steam railroading limited insulation was provided by closely spaced wooden slats strapped around the boiler, by the 1880s asbestos batting was the near universal material of choice. Removal of such insulation from the exterior surfaces of boilers, generating clouds of asbestos fibers, presented one of the many health hazards to which shopmen were routinely exposed.

After the insulation had been stripped, the boiler-firebox unit was removed for cleaning and restoration. That entailed replacing the dozens of pipes, or flues, that generated and then conducted steam to the cylinders and pistons that drove the locomotive’s wheels. The cab would be removed and finally the locomotive body would be disconnected and lifted free of the running gear (drive wheels, trucks, and bogeys; see appendix 3: Steam Locomotive Components).

The next step was cleaning all the oil- and grease-coated, coal-dust-encased parts. The smaller parts were dumped in lots into a hot lye bath. The larger parts, such as drive rods and wheels, were power steam cleaned. After they’d been rinsed and dried, all parts were inspected for damage and checked against size and mating specifications. Engineering drawings prepared at the time of manufacture of the particular locomotive recorded those specifications, which were subject to minor alterations noted in repair and maintenance logs.

Those parts too damaged to permit repair had to be replaced by newly fabricated duplicates made in the blacksmith shop, sheet metal shop, or babbit (bushing) shop. Because of this, “the blacksmith shop, which supplied both the machine and freight car shops with forgings, occupied an increasingly critical position.”⁹ That was because there was almost no standardization of steam locomotive parts; each new locomotive model, usually manufactured in runs of no more than a dozen units, was customarily redesigned from the running gear up. As Albert Churella aptly writes, “Steam locomotives remained customized, purpose-built machines, and the necessity of tailoring locomotive designs to specific railroad requirements ensured that economies of scale were largely unobtainable” in the manufacture of parts.¹⁰

By the first decade of the 1900s, blacksmith shops were becoming increasingly mechanized. New machines included “oil furnaces, blast equipment, presses, steam hammers, and powered threading and shearing machines. As well as the manufacture of forgings, the heat treatment of metal ensured that materials were hardened, tempered, and annealed.”¹¹

In the case of replacement locomotive cabs, sheet metal workers flattened out the components to be replaced and then traced the resulting patterns, from which brand new substitutes could be cut, reassembled, and fastened in place either with rivets or by welding.¹² Sometimes, serious damage to a cab required a complete redesign based on measurements taken from still intact portions of the locomotive. Then the new cab was reattached to the chassis.

Strict standards governed the fit of all moving parts. Excerpts from the twelfth edition of W. P. James’s Enginemen’s Manual, dated 1917, provide some examples. For locomotives destined for road service (i.e., not within a rail yard): “The bore of main rod bearing shall not exceed pin diameters more than three thirty-seconds inch at front or back end. The total lost motion at both ends shall not exceed five thirty-seconds inch.” Furthermore, “Crossheads shall be maintained in a safe and suitable condition for service, with not more than one-fourth inch vertical or five-sixteenths inch lateral play between crossheads and guides.” Crossheads are jointed rods that convert the reciprocal motion of the pistons into the rotary motion of the wheels.¹³

Among the myriad components of steam locomotives that had to be inspected and refurbished or replaced during a general overhaul were the large drive wheels. Out-of-round wheels or wheels with worn flanges—the lips that held the wheels between the tracks—were usually repaired by replacing the “tires,” the outer, steel rims. These steel tires were mounted and dismounted by heating and expanding them and then cooling and shrinking them onto the wheels. In addition, wheels of different diameter could be installed for special purposes. Generally, freight locomotives ran with smaller diameter wheels than did passenger locomotives.¹⁴

Figure 5.3. Schematic drawing of a steam locomotive’s power train from steam cylinder to connecting rod, through the cross-head and cross-head guide, to drive rod and drive wheel. This articulation of parts converts reciprocal motion (in the cylinder) into rotary motion (of the wheel). Author’s drawing, adapted from The Way Things Work, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology, Vol. 1 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 43.

With thousands of parts repaired or replaced, it was time to reassemble the refurbished jigsaw puzzle. Again, there was little margin for error. Torqueing of bolts and nuts was carefully gauged. The cutting and cementing of gaskets were precision jobs. The brightness of headlights was a matter of clear visibility of a dark object the size of a man at the distance of 1,000 feet. To ensure wheel traction in wet or icy conditions, “sand pipes must be securely fastened in line with the rails.”¹⁵ The Enginemen’s Manual specifies 158 different conditions of a steam locomotive—like these regarding headlights and sand pipes—that had to be met before an engine could be returned to service. Then the locomotive had to be painted (in the United States usually uniformly black in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). And finally it had to be fired up and run under road conditions to make sure all those parts meshed and ran smoothly, without catches or slippage, without the least wobble or excessive friction, and without leakage of steam.

At the Albuquerque Shops, up to thirty locomotives were in various stages of the overhaul process on any given day. At the Shops’ peak, crews were able to fully overhaul an average of forty locomotives a month, month in and month out, despite injuries to and absence of workers and the occasional intractable mechanical problems of locomotives.

A seventeen-minute film from 1938 of steam locomotive overhaul work at the London, Midland & Scottish (LMS) Railway shops in Britain includes brief glimpses of the same general procedures as were followed at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops described above.¹⁶ There was one major difference, though, between the procedures followed at the LMS shops and those at the AT&SF’s Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops. The British system ran on an assembly-line or longitudinal model in which the locomotives were arrayed for overhaul in single file on a moving conveyer. The defect of that system was that if there was a problem with disassembly or reassembly of even just one locomotive, the whole line came to a standstill. At Albuquerque, on the other hand, each locomotive was stripped down and reassembled in a stall by itself. There were twenty-six parallel, side-by-side stalls, in what was called a transverse layout. Thus, if one or more engines presented complex problems, their extended overhaul time did not interfere with work on other locomotives in their own separate bays.¹⁷ That difference aside, the LMS video offers people of today an opportunity to observe the same sort of dismantling and rebuilding work as was the daily routine at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops.

Figure 5.4. Photo of locomotives under repair in the erecting bay of the machine shop at the Albuquerque Shops, February 1948. View to southwest. Note the ends of concrete-lined inspection pits to the right of each locomotive, the scrap car in the foreground, an overhead traveling crane in background, and the 256-ton traveling crane at the top foreground. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Albuquerque Museum, Photo Archives, Catalog No. PA1980.184.895.

The work of locomotive overhaul was a coordinated undertaking involving shop employees from the various departments: inspection, machine shop, boiler shop, blacksmith shop, sheet metal shop, babbitt shop, paint shop, and store, as well as assorted smaller units such as the stationary engineer, electric plant, and parts vat. There were six major craft specialties represented among railroad shopmen: machinists, boilermakers, blacksmiths, car repairers, electricians, and sheet metal workers, plus many other more minor, but necessary, shop specialties, including painters, carpenters, and draftsmen.¹⁸

Teams, or gangs, of shopmen worked together on individual engines, from initial stripping to reassembly-erection. Experienced teams worked smoothly together, following a set order of coordinated work. The resulting interdependence of shopmen made for a high degree of camaraderie and trust among the shop workforce. The shopmen all faced the same challenges and dangers every day, which required them to work together with confidence in the skill and care of their workmates. And each had a vested interest in the proficiency of the other members of the team, which at its best worked as smoothly as a well-serviced locomotive. As with any professionals with journeymen’s level of experience, the steps required by locomotive overhaul were second nature to every member of a practiced team. Unspoken work habits and innovative techniques were an integral part of work at the Locomotive Repair Shops. But such minute details of shop work were rarely recorded and have largely been lost to memory.

Often, specific operations required the skill and muscle of several men. For example, removing the heavy steel, main drive rod from the crank on the main drive wheel on one end and from the crosshead pin on the other end required the care and strength of five or six men. Although cranes, lifts, and dollies were used to move rods weighing 800 to 1,500 pounds each around the shops, there was, in the end, no substitute for coordinated application of human muscle power and guidance by human eyes and hands in the precision removal or replacement of such heavy, cumbersome parts.

Forging large replacement parts, such as a drive rod, likewise entailed the work of a crew of three or four people to manage the mechanized, industrial-scale drop hammer and the white-hot steel blank. Besides a journeyman blacksmith, such a crew would include a couple of blacksmith helpers as well as an apprentice. Because of the constant, potential risk of injury associated with most tasks in the Locomotive Repair Shops, members of gangs—whether permanent or ad hoc—had to have a high degree of confidence and trust in their fellow workers. That confidence and trust was called on throughout the shops, hour after hour, day in and day out.

In addition to the overhauling of locomotives at the Repair Shops, other gangs were responsible for refurbishing or complete rebuilding of a large array of different types of freight cars, from wooden boxcars to gondola and hopper cars. The accompanying illustration shows engineering specifications for a truck (four-small-wheel assembly) with a forty-ton load capacity. This type of truck was in use on freight cars during the early 1900s and would have been familiar to Albuquerque shopworkers.

Figure 5.5. Author’s drawing of shopworkers man-handling a drive rod onto a cross-head. Based on a frame from General Repair, a short 1938 film documenting the complete rebuild of a steam locomotive at the shops of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway.

No matter how many hours or how many days shopmen worked, they were responsible for the hand tools they used, not the normal wear and tear, but their loss or disappearance. When a machinist, a boilermaker, a blacksmith, a sheet metal worker, or an electrician needed a specific tool, he went to the large caged tool room that occupied the northern middle of the heavy machinery bay and requested the tool from the tool supervisor. When the tool was then delivered to the shopman, he had to sign and date a loan form, which he would later have to sign and date again when he returned the tool to the supervisor. The shopman was liable for the replacement value of the tool, if he was not able to account for its breakage or loss and was not able to return the tool. For the entire time he needed the tool, and that might be years, he could store it at the end of each day in his own locked toolbox, which was kept near or at his current workstation. But eventually, when he left the employ of the Shops or retired, all those loan forms had to be redeemed or cancelled. So the borrowing and returning of tools was another rhythm within the overall routines of work in the Shops.

Figure 5.6. Hammering out a drawbar under the steam hammer at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad blacksmith shop, Albuquerque, NM. Photo by Jack Delano, 1943.

Figure 5.7. Engineering drawings of an 80,000-lb-capacity truck (four small wheels connected by a frame in tandem). From Francis E. Lister, comp., Car Builders Dictionary. (New York: Railway Age, 1909), 477.

Figure 5.8. Author’s photo of the tool room in the machine shop at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops as it looked in 2017.

Whether at the lye bath or the sheet metal shop, the boiler shop or the roundhouse, the store or the babbitt shop, the light machine bay or the overhead cranes, specialists throughout the shop complex engaged every hour of every workday in the myriad tasks involved in keeping AT&SF rolling stock running with a minimum of risk to passengers, goods, and other railroad personnel. Make no mistake, though, most jobs at the Shops were dangerous and regularly resulted in injury to shopmen.

Because faulty or damaged boilers were far and away the leading cause of catastrophic steam locomotive failures, the repair and refabrication of combination boiler-fireboxes were crucial steps in the overhaul process. A machinists’ journal called The Locomotive reported for many years quarterly figures on locomotive boiler explosions in North America and their fatal outcomes. The April 1904 issue is typical, reporting forty-five locomotive boiler explosions in the United States and Canada during the preceding year, including three on the AT&SF. One of those Santa Fe explosions was recorded in this way: “The boiler of locomotive No. 471 of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad exploded, on April 13th, at Florence, Kan. Fireman Hauhn was killed, and engineer Moody was injured so badly that he died shortly afterwards. The boiler of the locomotive was completely demolished.”¹⁹

To minimize such tragic disasters, boiler designs were continually tweaked and improved, and national standards for maintenance and repair of boilers were frequently strengthened. Also, throughout the steam era, work for boilermakers and boiler smiths was always available. And it was always dangerous. For one thing, boiler inspections were carried out under pressure, which meant that being engulfed by or sprayed with live steam was a daily and deadly possibility for workers in boiler shops.

Many were the dangers to machinists, boilermakers, and their apprentices and helpers during the process of disassembly of locomotives and the repair of parts. Steam locomotives were aggregates of 6,000–7,000 metal pieces and parts held together by bolts, rivets, and welds, which over months of nearly constant vibration and impact could jam, break, crack, or simply fall off.²⁰ Disassembly therefore routinely required that manual force be applied to bent, twisted, or otherwise distorted connectors. Oversized wrenches wedged onto the heads of frozen bolts and then beaten with sledgehammers were a continual recipe for mashed and broken fingers, as well as flying parts of broken tools. Manhandling heavy, grease-coated parts such as drive rods put human backs and muscles at risk every day. Slippery, oily surfaces, paired with equally slick soles of shoes made for treacherous footing around and on locomotives being overhauled. Sharp edges of sheet metal, metal shavings, and splinters as well as hot welds and solder were constant hazards. All of this was compounded by the system of constantly moving belts that drove larger machine tools and by rotating gear-driven machines that could snare hands, arms, feet, legs, and loose clothing. And the situation was aggravated by the nearly incessant clanging and banging of metal on metal. In 1885, a visitor to the Topeka, Kansas, shops of the AT&SF “reported that many years of work in the boiler shops were literally deafening.”²¹ According to Mike Baca, even as late as 1945, many of the larger machines in the Albuquerque Shops ran off long belts powered centrally by a steam engine. That arrangement ramped up the noise in the Shops even more.²²

Figure 5.9. Photo of C&O steam locomotive #3020 after the explosion of its boiler, May 1943, at Chillicothe, OH. As was typical of such events, the explosion extruded the boiler flues through the front end of the boiler, creating a spaghetti-like tangle. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of C&O Historical Society, item number COHS-6198.

In the face of such a multiplicity of hazards, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shopworkers routinely had no safety equipment available beyond gloves and welder’s goggles. Even so, many workers managed to avoid serious injury while working at the Shops, but virtually no one escaped the daily cuts, scrapes, bruises, burns, contusions, and eye injuries that went with the job of overhauling steam locomotives. As but one example, in the early 1940s at the Albuquerque Shops, pipe fitter apprentice Tony Gutiérrez’s clothing got caught in the rotation of a pipe threading machine. He was saved from serious injury only by quick action by his brother at the next bench, who cut power to the threader and stopped it.²³

Everybody, shopmen and their families and railroad management, knew that work at any locomotive repair shop or at any roundhouse was inherently dangerous.²⁴ Issues of the Santa Fe Magazine for employees frequently carried reports of on-the-job injuries to shopmen. The September 1911 issue, for instance, breezily reported that “C. L. Berndtson and wife have returned [to Albuquerque] from Denver, where they spent several weeks. Mr. Berndtson had the misfortune to severely mash his foot and thought it a pretty good time to take a vacation.”²⁵ Somewhat more cryptically, in December 1914, the magazine noted that “F. Salazar, machinist apprentice [at Albuquerque], was injured in a runaway. He is off duty.” Further, “[Albuquerque] Boilermaker E. A. Moon has been off duty on account of an injury to one of his eyes, caused by a piece of a chisel breaking the glass in his goggles. A piece of the glass flew into his eye.”²⁶ In 1940, the hazards of shop work were still ever present; machinist Ray Stewart suffered a double hernia.²⁷

To keep trained, experienced shopmen on the job was naturally an important goal of AT&SF management. Starting over with brand new apprentices meant four years of less than optimal work from each understudy. Training new journeymen was a costly undertaking. So, when shopmen suffered serious injuries on the job, the Railway sought to get them the best and quickest curative care available.

Figure 5.10. Santa Fe Railway Hospital at Albuquerque, 1880s. Cobb Studios photo. Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; Cobb Memorial Photography Collection 000-119-0799.

At least by the 1880s the Santa Fe had company-appointed doctors in many towns on the line. In an attempt to deal more systematically with the problem of injured and ill workers, Santa Fe Vice-President A. E. Touzalin on March 1, 1884, issued a circular announcing the inception of the Atchison Railroad Employees’ Association. . . . The purpose of the organization was to build hospitals and contract with doctors throughout the line to care for sick and injured employees. . . . Indeed, the A&P had established a similar organization and built a hospital in Albuquerque in 1882.²⁸

In cases in which an injured employee sued the Railroad, alleging its responsibility for unsafe conditions or reckless supervisors, management often settled at reasonable terms. Not only did that tend to satisfy the injured employee, but also it helped to assure other shopmen that they, too, would be treated fairly, if they were unlucky enough to suffer a serious injury. In sum, the Santa Fe often “treat[ed] those involved in accidents more liberally than was legally necessary.” That, in turn, encouraged company loyalty. On a related matter, “the Santa Fe had no pension plan until 1907. However, old-timers too enfeebled to carry on their usual jobs were sometimes given easy tasks they could handle,” and thus were able to maintain employment.²⁹