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How did the flurry of organizational change, worker education, and redesigned equipment and work practices affect railroad workers over time? South Shore Line officials claimed in July 1927, “Although the absence of adequate records preclude the possibility of a comparison of accidents with past years, it is known that they have decreased during the term of the present management, even with the greatly increased train service and the large amount of construction work.” No records from the South Shore Line during this period have survived in any public historical institution, and data from Public Service Commission annual reports do not reflect the severity of injuries, only their incidence. However, the number of hours of lost work time during the years 1927–1929 can be inferred from 1929 figures. Although the number of accidental injuries suffered by workers in 1927 decreased by 25 percent from accidents in 1926, the number of hours of work time lost from accidental injuries declined substantially from an estimated 833 days of lost time in 1927 to an estimated 558 days in 1928, then to 430 actual days of lost time in 1929—a reduction of 48 percent in the time lost from work-related accidents over three years. At the same time, though, the number of employees increased from approximately 690 in 1926 and 1927 to about 830 in 1928 and 1929. In 1928 alone, employees worked 100,000 more hours than in 1927, yet reduced the number of work hours lost from accidents by one-third.

However, the rate of injuries to railroad workers on the South Shore Line during the latter half of the 1920s apparently far exceeded the worst of the “Lake Shore” years, 1924. Keeping in mind the problems of defining what constituted a reportable injury and measuring those incidents in terms of work time lost, the South Shore reported accidental injuries to workers ranging from three to ten times the national injury rate for steam railroad workers, excepting a plummet in accidents reported in 1929 and a lack of data from 1928. The rate of fatal injuries to South Shore workers during the halcyon years of 1926–1929 surpassed the national average by as much as two times. In part, this may reflect the problem of a short-line railroad: the hazards of railroad work were ever present, so large railroads such as the New York Central and the Pennsylvania benefited from economies of scale and a reduced risk of liability per worker, while small operations such as a ninety-mile electric interurban experienced similar risks among far fewer workers, greater risk per worker, and a potentially greater financial impact upon the railroad from every accident.

Even after the new steel Pullman coaches and combination cars arrived in late summer 1926 to replace the venerable but fire-prone old Niles and Kuhlman cars, the close interaction of workers with railroad equipment posed constant risks. At the Randolph Street terminal that the Illinois Central Railroad shared with the South Shore in downtown Chicago, car cleaners, inspectors, and hostlers moved quickly to perform their work in the narrow time windows between scheduled train departures. George Jafros, a car placer, had worked for the South Shore on and off since 1912, beginning at the old Pullman Terminal for about four years, then again during World War I, and finally from 1924 up to 1927. On 4 October 1927, Jafros was at work on a switching track at Randolph Street, adjusting the couplers of two cars that were being connected. According to the train’s motorman, Jafros had given him the signal to move the cars together. If the motorman’s account is to be believed, Jafros apparently stepped between the cars to loosen the coupling further, as the train slowly lurched forward. The slack of the cars shifted, catching him between them and crushing him. No witness saw whether the motorman might have moved the train without a clear signal from the car placer to proceed.

The nature of the work of replacing ties, moving and spiking rails, stringing overhead wires, dumping rock ballast, increasing train speeds, and operating a railroad without pause amid the reconstruction work placed the 240 old-timers and the 650 workers hired between July and December 1925 at greater-than-usual risk of injury or death. While the new management team’s criteria for defining what constituted a reportable injury cannot be ascertained, it is clear that the Midland Utilities group freely reported more worker injuries than both the former Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway officials ever cared to admit and the Public Utilities Commission felt mandated to report. In 1926, for example, the Public Utilities Commission reported only twenty-three incidents of reportable injuries to workers on Indiana interurbans. The Chicago, South Shore and South Bend Railroad, though, reported eight times that number—181 work-related injuries throughout 1926 among the 693 workers on the payroll 31 December. While the severity of injuries suffered was not explained by South Shore officials in more measurable terms of lost work hours, the accident rate of 261 injuries per thousand workers surpassed four times the national rate of injuries suffered by steam railroad workers and reportable to the Interstate Commerce Commission.

TABLE 2. FATAL AND NONFATAL WORK ACCIDENTS ON THE CHICAGO, LAKE SHORE AND SOUTH BEND RAILWAY AND THE CHICAGO, SOUTH SHORE AND SOUTH BEND RAILROAD, 1924–1938

Reporting Year	South Shore Employees	South Shore Worker Deaths	South Shore Worker Fatality Rate (per 1,000)	Nationwide Steam Railroad Worker Fatality Rate (per 1,000)	South Shore Worker Injuries	South Shore Injury Rate (per 1,000)	Nationwide Steam Railroad Worker Injury Rate (per 1,000)
CY 1924	240	0	0	0.83	24	100.00	67.63
CY 1925	681	NR	NR	0.87	NR	NR	64.59
CY 1926	693	2	2.89	0.89	181	261.18	59.50
CY 1927	689	1	1.45	0.86	136	162.10	48.05
CY 1928	832	2	2.40	0.76	NR	NR	40.50
CY 1929	829	2	2.41	0.81	16	19.30	34.65
CY 1930	682	0	0	0.62	85	124.30	22.82
CY 1931	637	0	0	0.51	121	189.95	17.55
CY 1932	492	0	0	0.53	31	63.01	16.26
CY 1933	467	0	0	0.52	72	154.18	15.48
CY 1934	463	0	0	0.52	57	123.11	16.26
CY 1935	485	0	0	0.57	77	158.76	15.90
CY 1936	483	0	0	0.64	88	182.19	19.87
CY 1937	507	0	0	0.60	108	213.02	20.38
CY 1938	527	1	1.89	0.51	96	182.16	16.60

Employee numbers include clerical staff, superintendents, and administrative officials with trainmen, maintenance of way workers, and mechanical department employees. NR = data not reported; CY = calendar year. The archival records of Public Service Commission reports for all interurbans cover calendar years beginning in 1916; the method by which the commission obtained fiscal year data for its published reports from calendar year submissions is not known. Data for 1919 to 1923 are missing or too incomplete for comparative use.

Sources: South Shore Line data from annual reports of the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway and the Chicago, South Shore and South Bend Railroad to the Public Service Commission of Indiana, Indiana State Archives, Indianapolis, Ind. Annual nationwide steam railroad fatality rates from Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870–1939 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 284.

Little is known about any efforts to reduce the risk of railroader injuries between mid-July 1925 and the end of 1926. In part, this apparent absence of a worker safety program within the South Shore’s daily operations and managerial structure reflects the paucity of historical evidence about the laborers and skilled tradesmen, the work processes, and any technological improvements in the tools and track-laying equipment used to rebuild sections of the railroad during its first eighteen months. Railroad officials also borrowed “experts” and programs from the Bureau of Safety as needed. An outside expert offered the first training course in first-aid procedures for twenty South Shore employees over the last few months of 1926, for example. In addition, key construction and safety engineers already were occupied with ongoing construction of the North Shore Line’s new twenty-two mile high-speed Skokie Valley Route until early June 1926, along with the purchase of the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin Railroad at the same time and continuation of that road’s own rehabilitation work. Economic decisions and available finances certainly limited Midland Utilities’ ability to invest in a comprehensive in-house worker safety program during this period. The South Shore’s more than $2 million invested in reconstruction and new equipment during the first year, combined with Northern Indiana Public Service Company’s $857,000 spent to convert the electrical substations and electrical equipment, appear paltry when compared with the $21 million spent between 1923 and 1926 to purchase land, design, and construct the North Shore’s Skokie Valley Route and to rehabilitate that railroad’s west freight line between Lake Bluff and North Chicago Junction.

Perhaps in response to the deaths of two railroaders among 693 employees in 1926 and the fatal collision and fire near Gary, the South Shore took steps in late 1926 and early 1927 to follow up on the physical improvements to the road with organizational improvements to promote worker safety, an educational campaign for railroad employees and the public, and a second phase of eliminating job hazards through re-engineering and safeguarding. In early 1927, general manager Charles Jones appointed W. W. Clemmons as the South Shore’s safety engineer within the transportation department, with the sole duty of preventing accidents. Shortly afterward, the South Shore established a new medical department in downtown Chicago under chief surgeon Dr. Hart E. Fisher, who previously had served the North Shore Line, the Chicago Rapid Transit, and the public Service Company of Northern Illinois. While continuing with these companies, Fisher began inspecting working conditions along the South Shore (and also the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railroad) in relation to occupational health and analyzed drinking water, paints, varnishes, lubricants, and other chemical compounds for harmful effects. He also examined job applicants and current employees, instructed railroad employees about first-aid treatment, provided medical consultations for employees, arranged for medical services in connection with accident liability cases, and held the authority to approve or disapprove all medical bills and disability or death benefits from company group insurance or worker mutual-benefit associations. More significantly, South Shore Line employees who had completed three months of employment could apply for $1,000 in life insurance and $1,000 in accidental death and dismemberment insurance for a monthly premium of one dollar. More than 50 percent of all employees purchased insurance policies under the group insurance program, which the railroad company partially funded. Accident insurance reduced the total amount of damages a railroad company might have to pay under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act for a worker’s injury or death by the amount of the insurance benefit.

Organizational change also required that the railroaders accept ownership of the safety programs. The previous autumn, twenty South Shore employees participated in a six-week first-aid training class sponsored by the company. Nineteen of those twenty joined 310 employees from Chicago Rapid Transit, the North Shore Line, and the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin who had completed similar first aid and railroad safety courses in 1926, as well as seventy other employees of the electric railroads, at the fifth annual first aid and safety banquet in downtown Chicago the evening of February 24, 1927. The banquet, which mixed safety presentations with entertainment by “all-star vaudeville acts,” exposed the South Shore first-aid trainees from Michigan City to the larger work safety programs already established and functioning on the North Shore and the “L.” In turn, the nineteen South Shore representatives who attended the banquet—six from the electrical department, two from the road department, four from the mechanical department, two from the bridge and building department, two from the signal department, two clerical employees, and general manager Charles Jones—hopefully would return to Michigan City to advocate the South Shore’s worker safety program among their fellow workers.

Clemmons quickly organized a full schedule of educational programs for workers in all departments at convenient locations along the line. To encourage full participation, the company paid regular wages for workers to attend safety meetings. Following the practices outlined by Cordell for the North Shore Line, Clemmons showed instructional films from national safety organizations and accident prevention groups, led group discussions about methods for correcting unsafe work practices, and encouraged workmen to write essays about their own thoughts and ideas for presentation to their work groups. Section hands and other workers at remote locations received the same regular training and educational program through the use of the South Shore’s new passenger car number 15 as the railroad’s “Safety First Car.” By the end of 1927, for example, Clemmons had organized 162 separate safety meetings over the course of the year, with an average attendance of eighteen workers per meeting. Around the holidays, safety meetings were being held for trainmen between 8 A.M. and 8 P.M. at Randolph Street Station on 23 November, for car inspectors at South Bend the same day and at Chicago the following day, and for freight handlers at six different freight stations between 7 and 9 December. Clemmons led twenty separate safety meetings each month during 1928.

First-aid drills, competitions, and other popular motivators, helped instill discipline in railroad workers who could not be supervised regularly when out on the line. Sixty-six more South Shore employees participated in first-aid training during 1927; fifty-three intended to participate in the next intercompany first aid and safety banquet in Chicago in February 1928. Four teams of employees trained for the 1928 first-aid competition, the most popular technique used by employers to convert workers to safer work practices. The winning team—significantly, the engineering department—represented the railroad at a Red Cross competition among twelve teams from various companies and industries in Chicago on 20 April 1928. The South Shore’s team, supported by two hundred coworkers, secured third place, while a team from the Chicago Rapid Transit, another Insull-owned electric railroad, won the championship.

Along with educational efforts, motivational techniques encouraged workers to change old habits and accept new equipment, clothing, goggles, and ways of working. Foremen were the front line of control, and company officials held foremen accountable for defective or insufficient equipment and unsafe practices in their sections. Eight foremen in the track department, one in the shops, two in the freight station department, and the foreman of the signal department earned “100 Percent Safety Record” cards during the last six months of 1927. The record was sustained by foremen at least until September 1928, when ten reported no lost time among their workers.

In April 1927 the railroad began publishing a monthly magazine called The Pantagraph, which acted not only as a means for educating workers about accident prevention, but also as a place for acknowledging both the actions and contributions of individual employees and the accidents that caused the deaths or serious injuries to railroaders. While much of The Pantagraph contained chatty reports from worker-correspondents in the individual departments, railroaders also were encouraged to write papers about their work and publish them in the magazine. Ticket collector Kroenig, who had rescued injured passengers after the April 1926 train collision and fire at the Gary gauntlet bridge, published a poem titled “Safety First” in the May 1929 issue. Trainman L. C. Harman crafted a poem titled “Rule 99” about the necessity of a flagman protecting the rear of a stalled train from a safe stopping distance after motorman Joseph Stafford was killed in a preventable rear-end collision with a disabled train at Parson’s Curve south of Kensington, Illinois, on New Year’s Day, 1928. Shopman Harlow Foster wrote an essay titled “Accidents Caused by Lack of Care” for the September 1928 issue. Art Hegelmayer, a truckman in the shops, wrote in the November 1928 issue how “Unsafe Practices in Mechanical Work Cause the Most Accidents,” noting that the 3 million work-related injuries and 24,000 deaths in the United States in 1927 alone equaled the population of Chicago. Hegelmayer echoed the Progressive Era ideas of avoiding waste and promoting efficiency that company president Budd had articulated for the North Shore Line a decade earlier. He added: “These accidents did not just happen. [They] were caused by some kind of failure, machine failure, material failure, or man failure.” Hegelmayer then attested to a mutual interest shared by workers and the employer “to avoid the costly wastes that follow most serious accidents” and identified “mechanical safeguarding” and “a knowledge on your part what safe practice is” as the two most important tasks to master.

News of work accidents, which railroad company officials only twenty years earlier had denied or suppressed, now received prominent mention in The Pantagraph. Adopting a phrase from the armed forces in World War I, company officials declared that workmen who died in work accidents through no fault of their own “Died in Service.” Statements made in the company magazine not only acknowledged corporate responsibility for the deaths or injuries of certain railroaders but also used their deaths to illustrate graphically the importance of participation in the work safety program. Charles Deardorff, a conductor on a work train near Bailytown, was standing in the cab of a work motor on Saturday morning, 11 February 1928, when the car suddenly lurched to one side. Deardorff fell backwards out the open doorway onto a wooden line pole, breaking his back. He died the next day. The Pantagraph editor commented, “It was while acting as conductor of a work train that he was fatally injured.” On the same page, directly below Deardorff’s obituary, was Clemmon’s “Safety Notes” column. Other railroaders’ deaths also were described in conjunction with work safety articles. Regarding the 4 October 1927 death of Jafros, the editor of The Pantagraph wrote, “At all times he abided by the Safety First rules and his work was commended highly by his superiors.” However, the obituary also mentioned that Jafros had changed the beneficiary of his $1,000 accidental death insurance policy and a separate $1,000 life insurance policy on a form dated 19 August, but the form was not received by the railroad’s auditor in Chicago until the day of Jafros’s fatal accident. The railroad’s auditor was quoted in Jafros’s obituary in a mildly scolding tone: “The importance of changing beneficiaries without delay cannot be stressed too much.” Immediately below the obituary was a coupon for $1,000 group life insurance and an additional $1,000 in accidental death and dismemberment insurance for South Shore Line employees from Aetna Life Insurance Company.

The redesign and reengineering of railroad equipment, structures, surroundings, and work practices began a second phase in January 1927. In the mechanical department’s car shop building, for example, workers installed skylights, enlarged the storeroom, and replaced the flooring to eliminate hazards. Shop workers used hand jacks to raise cars and locomotives off their wheel sets and motors, then to set them down. The dangers of a man standing over a rod inserted into a mechanical jack that might slip and fling the rod upward rivaled the possibility of a car slipping off a jack and falling on a man. In response to the potential hazard, the railroad purchased electric jacks for raising and lowering car bodies. Besides reducing the risk of injury or death, the electric jacks saved about 15 percent of the cost of operating hand jacks and allowed shop workers to labor on actual mechanical work, rather than the physical labor of jacking up cars or lowering them.

South Shore officials openly touted the design and safety features of a new line car, rebuilt from an old wooden passenger motor car, as a marked improvement to the safe work conditions of electrical linemen. Electrical engineer Charles E. Keevil, on loan to the South Shore Line from the Chicago Rapid Transit, redesigned the electrical and structural features of old heavy wooden South Shore passenger-baggage motor 72 to convert it from a 6,600-volt AC passenger car to a 1,500-volt DC line car, renumbered 1101. In a brief that railroad managers submitted to the Charles A. Coffin Foundation in July 1927 for the fifth annual competition, they wrote that the new line car featured a “revolving platform which can be swung under the wire on the adjacent track. . . . Its advantages are apparent. The platform is elevated from its position on the top of the car [with] air hoists and the equipment has several major safety features.”

Motorman Ed Hedstrom, whose father also worked as a South Shore motorman, operated line car 1101 many times and described the safety features installed in 1927:

The tower also swiveled; it would swivel ninety degrees out on either side. It was quite an operation.
The platform was raised and lowered with a pneumatic lift system. At the top of the platform, three ropes provided complete control for the linemen. A lineman could pull on one rope to pump air into the hoist, lifting the platform. Pulling on a second rope let the air out and lowered the platform. A third rope connected with the signal bell in the cab, allowing the linemen to signal the motorman and conductor below while the car was moving along the railroad on “patrol”—the term used for visual inspections of the overhead catenary wire along the entire length of the railroad. Hedstrom recalled, “There would be two or three linemen sitting on top of the deck, and you’d just run slow, and then if they saw something that had to be fixed—a hanger that was loose or a hanger that was burned through on the top end—why they’d ring the bell and you’d stop.” The usual interurban signals were used: one bell indicating “stop,” two bells for “proceed,” and three bells for “back up.”