CHAPTER 6

Job Specialties

From its opening in 1881, the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops had constant need of a large, skilled workforce augmented by less skilled laborers, helpers, and apprentices. Each facet of locomotive overhaul or repair required the work of teams of trade specialists, each skilled in and intimately familiar with the procedures for disassembly, reassembly, cleaning, fabrication, painting, and lubrication of particular sets of components that made up the many locomotive models. Each sub-assemblage of the locomotive mechanism was the responsibility of titled specialists, and each specialty had its own professional ladder.

An exhaustive list of job categories within a typical steam locomotive repair shop of a large American railroad between 1880 and 1955 is impossible to reconstruct because the workforce of each shop had to include a mix of workers who matched the assortment of locomotive models in use by that particular railroad at the time. And the stable of models was constantly in flux. As Albert Churella correctly observes, “Even slight variations in operational requirements could require steam locomotive designs to be altered substantially. As a result, steam locomotive designs proliferated.”¹ Each issue of the trade journal The Railway Mechanical Engineer—published monthly from 1916 through 1949—was filled with scaled drawings of design improvements and new apparatus for steam locomotives. Not all of these ideas were realized in parts and assemblages that came into wide use, but literally thousands of them did.

Within the welter of different designs, there were classes or variations on an original innovation. There were many such classes that came out of the mechanical engineering department of the Santa Fe Railway in Topeka, Kansas. Larry Brasher’s abundantly illustrated chronology of AT&SF locomotive development covers scores of locomotive classes. To single out just three general designs from the AT&SF, “The 3460 class, the 3765 class, and the 5001 class have rightly been called the Santa Fe’s ‘Big Three.’”²

To give a general idea of the number of different job specialties that needed to be represented among the repair shop staff, we provide the following list of job titles reported by AT&SF shopmen at Albuquerque in 1896, as reflected in the city directory for that year. The list of sixtyone distinct job categories, by no means an exhaustive catalog of all the job titles of Albuquerque shopmen, hints at the variety of work done by them. Hidden within classifications such as “machinist,” though, were subspecialties including special skill with boiler flues, superheaters, airbrakes, side rods and wheels, valves and gauges, steam pistons and cylinders, control linkages, sand pipes and water supply lines, and automated stoking devices, to name just a few. As stated in a 1923 description of the Santa Fe apprentice program, when employees completed the training period, “they should be assigned to some particular class of work for which they have shown a peculiar adaptability and upon which they will soon become experts.”³

All Shop departments required a core staff of journeymen, that is, workers who had gained the requisite training and experience to be accredited as fully capable practitioners of their trades. AT&SF required that journeymen machinists, boilermakers, blacksmiths, and other skilled workers complete a four-year apprenticeship. During that time of supervised labor, combined with formalized instruction, each apprentice was required to learn to perform competently the routine tasks associated with his specialty. Furthermore, the apprentice had to receive instruction that would help in dealing with complex problems that were bound to develop during the course of regular work. Problem solving was a skill every journeyman had to demonstrate. At the shops there was no such thing as a routine overhaul; invariably there were complications that made every locomotive unique, requiring imaginative solutions to apparent impasses. An article in The Railway Age Monthly and Railway Service Magazine for May 1880 put it this way: “While the take-it-easy mechanic, whose leading ambition is to put in a certain number of hours a day and get away from the shop, is bothering the foreman for instructions in overcoming some difficulty, his thinking fellow worker contrives a plan of his own and accomplishes the desired object. The demand is for more mechanics who think, not only in the shop but out of it—those who probe outside sources of information in order to advance themselves in those qualifications which are sure to command recognition.”⁴

Table 6.1. Employee Titles, Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, 1896

asst. car clerk

asst. foreman, car dept.

blacksmith

blacksmith apprentice

blacksmith helper

boilermaker

boilermaker apprentice

boilermaker helper

caller at the roundhouse

car cleaner

car clerk

car inspector

car laborer

carpenter

carpenter foreman

car repairer

car repair laborer

chief bill clerk

chief clerk

chief clerk to gen. master mechanic

chief clerk to storekeeper

clerk

clerk to the car accountant

clerk to storekeeper

daytime clerk

employee in the storehouse

foreman

foreman at the roundhouse

foreman in the car dept.

foreman in the tinshop

foreman of laborers

foreman of the boiler shop

general master mechanic

general superintendent

helper

hostler at the roundhouse

laborer

laborer for storekeeper

machinist

machinist apprentice

machinist helper

messenger

night watchman

operator

painter

pattern maker

seal taker

stationary engineer

stenographer to master mechanic

storekeeper

tank repairer

tinner

tinner apprentice

tinner helper

upholsterer

washer at the roundhouse

watchman

watchman at the storehouse

wiper

yard foreman

Total of 61 job titles

Machinists: 39

Machinist apprentices: 12

Machinist helpers: 2

Boilermakers: 9

Boilermaker apprentices: 5

Boilermaker helpers: 19

Blacksmiths: 12

Blacksmith apprentices: 2

Blacksmith helpers: 17

Source: Roberts, Albuquerque City Directory and Business Guide for 1896.

Apprentice training was not exclusive to the AT&SF, nor was it new in the world of work. Originating in the distant, undocumented past with the transmission of know-how among close relatives, formalized systems of apprenticeship had existed for artisans and tradespeople in much of the world since at least the late Middle Ages.⁵ The immediate antecedents of the Santa Fe Railway’s apprentice program were European industrial apprenticeships of the nineteenth century, and the company’s version of locomotive repair apprenticeship echoed those European models in many respects.

Although the AT&SF had an apprenticeship program from at least the 1910s, it became even more important as the 1922 shopmen’s strike took hold and dragged on for months and into a second year. As one management observer spelled it out, during the “crisis . . . we have had to take into the shops inexperienced men to carry on the work that was formerly carried on by mechanics with years of experience.” Large numbers of striking or locked-out employees were replaced, and clearly their substitutes had to be quickly brought to an acceptable level of competence. E. H. Hall reported, “I had an opportunity a few months ago to visit the shops of the Santa Fe at San Bernardino, Cal. It was wonderful to see the work they were accomplishing with inexperienced men, who had never seen the inside of a coach before and had only been there 30 days.”⁶

Without referring explicitly to the strike, a Santa Fe official touted the benefits of the AT&SF apprentice program, which not only produces “first-class mechanics,” but “also cultivates a spirit of loyalty to the company which money cannot buy.”⁷ Such results were likely because young apprentices were to be “boys” as young as sixteen (likely without union experience), who would often be taking the places of much older union members. At a minimum, “all boys entering an apprenticeship should be able to add, subtract, multiply, divide and work simple and decimal fractions,” and their apprentice training would include being “taught to read a blueprint and make working sketches.”⁸ Former Albuquerque shopmen Mike Baca, Eloy Gutiérrez, and Thomas Cordova all remembered attending mechanical drawing and blueprint classes, as apprentices, in the evenings at the Albuquerque Shops’ General Administration Building.⁹ To assure that each apprentice could be given individual attention, “there should be a shop instructor appointed for every 25 or 30 boys in the shop.”¹⁰

Figure 6.1. Drawing by AT&SF apprentice Al Morton showing railroad tire in cross section to delineate a defect and limit of acceptable wear. Courtesy of WHEELS Museum, “Apprentice School Drawings, Waynoka, OK.,” June 23, 1925.

Later, during the Second World War, repair shop apprentices were eligible for deferral from military service. But in a perverse logic, once an apprentice completed his training, he could immediately be drafted.¹¹ One effect of this policy was that the railroads were training many military machinists but not getting the full benefit of work by the newly trained journeymen.

Idealized portrayals of the railroad apprenticeship system were frequently belied by social, ethnic, and racial prejudice, as well as budgetary concerns of railroad owners and managers. As historian Colin Davis writes, “Blacks were concentrated in the unskilled and semiskilled occupations, but in many cases African American ‘helpers’ and general laborers were, in fact, quite highly skilled and were kept out of higher classifications by virtue of racial restrictions rather than by their lack of talent or knowledge.”¹² Davis’s research concentrated on shopmen in the East and Midwest of the United States. If he had scrutinized as thoroughly railroad employment in the Southwest and West, he also would have found equally discriminatory job classification practices with respect to Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians.

Several former shopmen at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops interviewed for this book reported chronic failure of skilled helpers and laborers of color to be advanced up the ladder of skill grades. Dr. Eloy Gutiérrez, well-known Albuquerque dentist and himself a sheet metal and pipefitter apprentice in the 1940s, told that his brother Frank was only the second Hispanic to become a foreman at the AT&SF Shops more than sixty years after the opening of the Shops. It should also be pointed out that Frank Gutiérrez eventually became equipment supervisor for the entire AT&SF system.¹³ But for generations such advancement was barred to Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians, as well as African Americans.

Likewise, Jim Brown writes in an undated manuscript, “Although there were opportunities for in-house training and job advancement [at the Albuquerque Shops], most of the skilled positions in the early 1900s were held by white men who had been trained elsewhere in the United States or in Europe.”¹⁴ As we have pointed out earlier, information from various annual editions of Albuquerque city directories support both Brown’s findings and Gutiérrez’s memory. By 1950, though, there was near parity between Hispanics (113) and non-Hispanics (120) among AT&SF journeymen machinists listed in the city directory for that year.¹⁵ This is in keeping with the general Hispanization of the shop staff at Albuquerque beginning after the 1922 shopmen’s strike (see chapter 13).

On the other hand, company management at all levels, from supervisors and foremen on up, was almost entirely in the control of non-Hispanic employees. Of the fifty-three Albuquerque Shops employees who were listed in the 1950 city directory as occupying supervisory positions—including superintendent, master mechanic, storekeeper, foreman, supervisor, and assistant foreman—only two were Spanishsurnamed. They were foremen and therefore at the lowest level of the supervisory staff.

That represents only the tiniest improvement from 1896, when all fifteen men in supervisory positions at the then much smaller Shops were non-Hispanic. Thus, throughout the steam era, while the rank-and-file staff of the Albuquerque Shops became increasingly Hispanic, the same was not true in the supervisory ranks.¹⁶ Regardless of job title, there were pervasive ethnic differences in play throughout the Shops before WWII.¹⁷ Age discrimination was also prevalent. Olivia Cordova Loomis remembered her father Thomas Cordova saying that when he was an apprentice, older men were often summarily let go, even if they were close to retirement age.¹⁸

The job classifications of shopmen also established their position within the company’s professional ranking. The most obvious distinctions, indicated by pay level, were between skilled and unskilled workers. Thus, the skilled staff—electrical workers, sheet metal workers, machinists, boilermakers, blacksmiths, and carmen—were bunched at the top of the order, with average annual pay in 1950 ranging from just under $3,700 to about $3,850. Meanwhile, workers in the least skilled positions, laborers—with small variations among them—averaged in the neighborhood of $2,700 a year. A middle ground was taken up by apprentices and coach cleaners, at under $3,000 a year, and helpers to the skilled trades and helper apprentices who were somewhat better

Table 6.2. AT&SF, Number of Full-Time Employees and Amount of Compensation, 1950

* Average US annual family income for 1950 was $3,319 according to the US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. “Median Money Income of Families, 1:297.

Source: AT&SF Railway, Annual reports of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Company to the [Kansas] State Corporation Commission, 1945–1959. Kansas State Historical Society, Item No. 218470, “Employees, Service, and Compensation, Chart 561, IV. Maintenance of Equipment and Stores,” 522; average annual compensation computed by the authors.

It is worth pointing out that systemwide within the Santa Fe Railway, shop staffs were divided fairly evenly between skilled workers (47.8% in 1950) and unskilled and semiskilled workers (52.2%), with the margin going to those with lower skill. It was, of course, in the company’s financial interest to maximize the lower-skilled share of the shop workforce, thereby minimizing payroll. As we have already seen, employees regularly complained about company efforts to artificially skew those percentages by failing to promote workers even when their skill level would have warranted it.