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The origins of corporate responsibility for improving work conditions on the South Shore Line beginning in 1925 can be found more than a decade earlier in the transformation of public policy accomplished by the Federal Employers’ Liability Act of 1908, the Illinois and Wisconsin Workmen’s Compensation Acts of 1911, and a progressive response in late 1912 by Middle West Utilities, the holding company owned by Samuel Insull and managed by his brother Martin J. Insull. Historians such as Mark Aldrich and Robert Asher have examined in detail how the various state and federal employee-protection laws during the Progressive Era quickly made the accidental injuries or deaths of workers so costly that they no longer could be considered an incidental expense of conducting business. Employer liability and workers’ compensation laws created powerful economic disincentives for continued neglect of unsafe equipment, shoddy practices, and managerial indifference. Except for the institution of a safety program at lawsuit-burdened U.S. Steel in 1906 and at a handful of other large companies, only the enactment of compulsory legislation beginning in 1908 and favorable judicial review of those laws beginning in January 1912 prompted corporate leaders to invent an industrial safety movement for the benefit of the workforce. In response to state workmen’s compensation laws and widespread litigation by workers, the National Association of Manufacturers formed a Committee on Accident Prevention in 1910. In September 1912, the Association of Iron and Steel Electrical Engineers sponsored the first meeting of the National Safety Council in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Several months later, perhaps the first extensive and sustained effort to promote safer working conditions for electric railroad and utility workers began under the auspices of holding company Middle West Utilities with the incorporation of a Bureau of Safety in Chicago.

The new bureau came under the direction of Charles B. Scott, a former claim agent for the Louisville and Southern Indiana Traction Company and the Louisville Northern Railway and Light Company, on 1 January 1913. Prior to his appointment, Scott had served for about seven years as an associate and eventually as the assistant to Martin J. Insull, the general manager of both electric railroads. At the time, Middle West Utilities was the holding organization for more than 230 electrical lighting and power plants, gas and water utility companies, ice-manufacturing works, street railways, and electric interurban railroads in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and certain New England states. The newly incorporated Bureau of Safety would promote efficient, progressive, and safe operating practices and worker-manager safety programs in all of the subsidiary utility and electric railway companies, including Commonwealth Edison in the Chicago area. Within months, the electric railroad industry began reporting about the Bureau of Safety and the Insull management team’s approach to improving work conditions as a model for progressive electric railroading.

The development of improved work conditions for workers on Insull-owned railroads near Chicago began in 1914 on the Chicago Elevated Railways (later the Chicago Rapid Transit Company). Chicago Elevated Railways president Britton I. Budd commented in late 1914, two years after the formation of the Bureau of Safety, that “while it is easy to start ‘safety first’ systems, the difficulty lies in following them up and getting the results which are so essential.” Budd’s observation proved prescient; the enlistment and conscription of experienced workers into the armed forces in 1917 and 1918 resulted in the hiring of inexperienced replacements and an overall lag in company efforts to promote worker safety. In late December 1919 Budd reorganized the safety program and installed Melvin W. Bridges as the company’s safety engineer. Budd laid out his expectations for mangers in a meeting 30 December 1919:

Under the direction of the safety engineer, committees of workers were formed among the transportation, road, and shop departments on the five geographic divisions of the Chicago Elevated Railways. Each occupational group in each department—motormen, conductors, trackmen, painters, towermen, among others—provided one worker from their group to serve on the safety committee for three months. Safety committee members met every two weeks on company time and received regular wages for the performance of committee work outside of meetings. However, the superintendents and foremen, not the workers themselves, selected the workers who would serve on a safety committee. The committees received and considered a worker’s notification about a hazard or suggestion for an improved practice or tool, judged it, and forwarded the original request and their recommendation to the general foreman or superintendent for that department, who served on the divisional safety committee. The divisional safety committees passed suggestions onto the central safety committee: the safety engineer, an engineer in management, and three assistant superintendents of the transportation, road, and mechanical departments. Two weaknesses in the Chicago Elevated Railways system become apparent. First, the department foremen and managers controlled both the composition of local workers’ committees and the evaluation of any worker’s complaint about unsafe equipment, conditions, or work practices. Second, a worker’s complaint had to run the gauntlet of three manager-controlled committees, each increasingly removed from the problem, before action could be taken.

A more democratic program for improving work conditions took shape beginning in August 1916 with Middle West Utilities’ acquisition of the debt-ridden Chicago and Milwaukee Electric Railroad and its reorganization as the Chicago, North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad. The North Shore Line’s new management team instituted three crucial initiatives in industrial safety work: organizational change, educational change, and workplace and work equipment reengineering. Over the next seven years, those three aspects of improving worker safety would undergo modification, reassessment, and refinement, but the project continued.

On the North Shore Line, as in many similar safety initiatives in other railroad and manufacturing companies during the 1910s and 1920s, organizational change usually involved the creation of a safety department, the appointment of a safety engineer, and the formation of safety committees in which both workers and managers participated. Only unwavering managerial commitment to improving the daily work experiences of railroaders would improve safety and diminish liability claims. In 1918 the Bureau of Safety reported to Budd that a “more business-like consideration of the [bureau’s] work by heads of departments and a less facetious attitude by some of them towards sincere suggestions from their subordinates,” along with more expeditious work by the central safety committee and better notification of workers about upcoming meetings, would reduce accident-related expenses. Budd immediately made it clear to managers that he expected them to listen to North Shore workers, regardless of rank or occupation. A decade later, North Shore Line master mechanic Henry Cordell, known by trainmen as “a warm, sincere man,” reminded attendees of the National Safety Council’s Electric Railway Section about the crucial responsibilities managers and foremen held as leaders, instructors, and coaches. A railroad’s master mechanic and its safety engineer, Cordell noted, could influence safer railroad operation simply by walking among the workers and interacting with them.

Educational change, the second aspect of improving work conditions, required that the safety engineer teach the supervisors, foremen, and workers about the unseen dangers of existing work practices, then convince them to change the ways that foremen assigned work tasks and workers performed them. Cordell recommended interesting, active, practical safety meetings— “not the long, monotonous kind.” First-aid classes, for example, involved workers in participatory exercises, while first-aid competitions between teams of workers encouraged sustained skills. The approach to worker safety on the North Shore Line also fostered a more democratic and participatory system than the Chicago Elevated Railways. By early 1919, the North Shore Line had organized its 625 trainmen, shopmen, maintenance of way workers, and electrical workers into eleven “safety leagues” that involved all workers from every department and shift. Railroad workers in each safety league elected their own chairman, vice chairman, and secretary for one-year terms, as well as any necessary subcommittees to examine special concerns. The worker safety leagues forwarded information about problems and recommended changes to a central safety committee, composed of the heads of departments and moderated by the superintendent of transportation. Unskilled workers in remote locations, such as track laborers, benefited from the dispatch of an interurban car to their work site for on-the-road educational meetings at least once every two months. During the early 1920s, foremen from the North Shore Line joined Chicago Elevated Railways foremen in attending and completing the Chicago Safety Council’s course in occupational safety and health. On 8 and 9 January 1925 the bureau hosted its annual “Inter-Company Safety Conference” at its headquarters in the Edison Building at Clark and Adams Streets in downtown Chicago. Managers from the railway divisions of Wisconsin Power and Light Company and southern Indiana’s Interstate Public Service joined North Shore and Chicago Rapid Transit representatives in giving presentations, discussing problems, and listening to guest speakers about topics such as “Safety Training Course for Linemen.” In a little over ten years, the issues of reducing workers’ risks and improving work conditions had changed dramatically. What once had been the subject of litigation was now the focus of education.

Finally, the reengineering of work equipment and surroundings allowed safety engineers, foremen, and workers to collaborate on safeguarding all equipment and removing the workplace as a factor in worker accidents. Often, safety engineers, workers, and managers on safety committees surveyed and studied potential hazards, then recommended changes in structures, equipment, and tools in order to reengineer the workplace. Examples of reengineering to remove potential hazards might include redesigning a line car to feature a movable platform and handrails, reconstructing the railroad’s right-of-way with wider clearances, and improving the machinery and layout of the repair shops. Good housekeeping of the equipment and shop surroundings eliminated many of the dangers to maintenance workers. Between August 1916 and January 1919, North Shore Line employees identified and reported 935 perceived problems or hazards; by July 1921, the number had risen to 2,500. Department managers, in turn, approved 85 percent of all suggested changes and expended sizable dollar amounts to correct the problems immediately or as quickly as funds would allow. Company investment in reengineering the workplace and equipment acted in two ways: it provided a visible sign of sincere corporate responsibility for ensuring the safety of intelligent, careful workers, while eliminating or minimizing the ability of certain workers to persist in careless choices.

The new Insull management team’s efforts to improve work conditions on the North Shore Line showed immediate results. By the end of 1918, the worker safety program had reduced the number of disabling accidents suffered by North Shore Line railroaders by 38 percent from the previous year. In economic terms, the new proactive approach to railroad workers’ safety reduced the lost work time resulting from accidental injuries by 34 percent in 1918, when compared with work hours lost in 1917. When the wartime increase in freight and passenger traffic to and from Fort Sheridan and Great Lakes Naval Training Station are considered, as substantiated by a 60 percent increase in the railroad’s gross earnings in 1918, the reduction in work-related injuries takes on greater significance. By 1921 the safety campaign had reduced expenses arising from accidents to a mere 1.18 percent of the railroad’s revenue.

In early 1923, the North Shore and Chicago Rapid Transit celebrated their successes by inviting employees who had completed a first-aid training course to a banquet and award ceremony in downtown Chicago. By August 1926 manufacturers and industrial managers nationwide had chosen Scott to lead the National Safety Council.
The purchase of the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway on 29 June 1925 by Midland Utilities, an Insull-owned holding company for northwest Indiana properties, brought the South Shore Line into the system that operated the North Shore Line and the Chicago elevated lines. Historians often have interpreted the court-ordered sale of the indebted railroad’s assets to a new corporation, the Chicago, South Shore and South Bend Railroad, as a watershed event. The arrival of the Midland Utilities management team in mid-July 1925 also seemed to support a break with the past. The history of the South Shore Line from summer 1925 until late 1929 has been portrayed as a time of complete change. Indeed, the railroad underwent physical reconstruction of track, the catenary system, and the power distribution system, while new passenger cars, freight locomotives, and stations visually represented a “new” South Shore. This interpretation is certainly accurate in terms of the visible, physical appearance of the railroad, but it misses something significant. As a corrective to the emphasis upon fundamental change, one crucial and often overlooked source of continuity between old and new must be remembered: the South Shore’s workers remained the same. Perhaps the greatest challenge the new management team faced as they reconstructed the railroad from 1925 through 1929 lay not in replacing the rails, ties, and electrical equipment, nor in buying new passenger motors and freight locomotives, but in securing the trust of the employees and reorientating the existing workforce to a new, progressive, safer way of railroading.

The details about the South Shore Line’s reconstruction between 1925 and 1929 have been told elsewhere in two standard histories of the railroad and have become something of legend and oral tradition among certain railroad history enthusiasts. Midland Utilities, drawing from talented officials at Chicago Rapid Transit Company and the Chicago, North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad, provided the leadership and finances to rebuild the South Shore from the roadbed up to the overhead wire. By October 1925, merely three months after the new management team took charge of the South Shore, thirteen separate track gangs labored on replacing ties, resurfacing the entire railroad, widening the roadbed, improving drainage ditches, and clearing vegetation and other potential hazards for trainmen from the right-of-way. Between Kensington and Hammond, section hands replaced seventy-pound rails with hundred-pound rails, installed tie plates underneath for the first time, and reballasted the roadbed with crushed rock in place of old cinders. Electrical linemen replaced the rigid catenary system with new “superflexible” wires that would accommodate the anticipated high-speed trains and 1,500-volt DC electrical equipment. Building tradesmen enlarged freight and passenger stations and platforms, while shop workers refurbished the old wood Niles and Kuhlman passenger cars that were used until the railroad received new equipment and converted over to a new 1,500-volt DC power distribution system in late summer 1926. During the first twelve months, the new management team invested over $2 million in reconstruction and new equipment.

Structural and operational improvements paid off. Passenger and freight revenues rose substantially, propelling the line into Class I railroad status by the end of 1926, boasting more than one million dollars in net revenue for the year. A railroad that in 1925 had operated thirty-five daily trains in three-hour trips every two hours rose to the challenge of running eighty-one trains every day by spring 1928 and covering the line in two hours flat by 1929. In 1929 the railroad won two prestigious industry awards, the Electric Traction speed trophy and the Charles A. Coffin Foundation’s prize for the best electric railroad in the country during the previous year. As the committee that awarded the Coffin Medal wrote, “Within four years the Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railroad, usually called the South Shore Line, has moved figuratively from the scrap heap to the front rank among the electric railways of America.” The first and only railroad ever to win both prestigious honors in the same year, the South Shore quickly became known by the moniker “First and Fastest.”

These accomplishments did not occur without human cost. The South Shore Line that Samuel Insull, Jr., took charge of 15 July 1925 was held together for the next year, he later recalled, with “baling wire and chewing gum.” On 10 April 1926 the fragile interim system failed. On the west end of an overlapping “gauntlet” track over the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railroad about four miles west of downtown Gary, a faulty electromagnetic relay switch inside a newly refurbished signal caused westbound passenger train number 64, comprised of motor car 6 and trailer 111, to receive a false green signal to proceed from the east end onto the gauntlet track and up the 2.5 percent grade to the bridge. On the west end, eastbound train number 63, consisting solely of motor car 9, had just received a green signal, entered the gauntlet track, and reached the summit on the bridge when the motorman saw the oncoming two-car train. Both motormen set the air brakes into emergency, but the heavy motor cars collided nonetheless, telescoping motor car 9 about five feet into the vestibule of car 6. One passenger was killed, while conductor Dabbert and motorman Kull of ascending westbound train 64 and conductor Landis and motorman Tibbets of eastbound train 63 were injured in the crash. Collectors Howard Kroenig and R. C. Iseminger assisted the injured conductors in evacuating passengers from the two motor cars, which caught fire and burned beyond repair. Courageously, the trainmen separated trailer car 111 and its passengers from the burning car 6 while one of the ticket collectors called the dispatcher. Eleven passengers suffered injuries from the collision and resulting fire. Further changes to the signals eventually reduced failures and restored the confidence of the trainmen.