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Railroading remained dangerous work in the 1920s and 1930s, but the risks changed dramatically. The percentage of trainmen seriously injured at work declined from the 1916 peak of 147 injuries per thousand men to about sixty-one per thousand in 1929. The Great Depression years drastically reduced freight and passenger traffic on American railroads, but even when one accounts for the decline in railroad traffic by considering the proportion of injuries to a constant denominator of one thousand railroad workers, the decrease in the risk of injury or death faced by railroad workers during the 1920s and 1930s is still striking. By 1938, the last year that a railroader’s assumption of risk was allowed as a railroad company’s defense under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, only about twenty-six out of one thousand trainmen suffered serious injuries. The fatality rate among trainmen dropped even more noticeably, from a post-1900 high averaging 9.2 deaths per thousand men in 1906 down to about two deaths per thousand between 1924 and 1927, decreasing even further to an average of 1.21 deaths among every one thousand railroad trainmen in 1938. The improvements in working conditions forced in part by federal laws, the state workers’ compensation laws, and the railroads’ individual efforts to reduce risks and minimize the costs of accidents are quite striking when viewed over a thirty-year period.

The shift in managerial attitudes about ensuring safe equipment and taking appropriate responsibility for the well-being of railroad workers is most visible when the experiences of South Shore railroad workers during the Great Depression are examined and compared with the conditions of Albert Fellers’s time twenty years earlier. Operating achievements in 1930 declined only slightly from the record performance of 1929, with a new speed record set, the Electric Traction speed trophy retained for a second year, a new freight terminal constructed at South Bend, a new 32,000 square-foot mechanical department building erected at Michigan City and outfitted with the latest shop equipment, and the original 1908 shop building renovated for use as a car inspection and paint shop. More significantly in human terms, though, the year 1930 brought no worker fatalities for the first time in years, while the workforce returned to the 1925–1927 size. Despite the reductions in operating costs and deferral of maintenance arising from the drop in traffic in 1931, the financial disaster of 1932, and the descent into bankruptcy by autumn 1933, the South Shore Line avoided any worker deaths throughout most of the depression. While the incidence of injuries also rose from 1929 through the end of 1931 and ranged from four to ten times the national average for railroad workers between 1930 and 1938, the railroad continued to reduce the number of lost work days by 62 percent from January until at least October 1931 and cut by 55 percent the number of accidents causing at least temporary disability.

More significant, though, in terms of the railroad’s financial survival is the way the company’s officials treated workers and the way those workers responded during the otherwise contentious and often violent crucible of labor-management relations during the depths of the Great Depression. Surviving anecdotal and statistical evidence show how the Federal Employers’ Liability Act and the Indiana Workmen’s Compensation Act functioned not only to provide financial support for injured railroaders but also to minimize the railroad’s expenditures that might otherwise have been spent in litigation.

Anton Hoffman worked as a brakeman for the South Shore out of Michigan City. The railroad’s general manager, Charles M. Jones, personally considered Hoffman an experienced brakeman, familiar with nighttime freight switching operations and certainly worth his wages of a hundred dollars a month. Sometime between midnight and dawn on 1 June 1932, Hoffman was working a South Shore freight switching job near Marshall Street in Gary, Indiana, just as he had done at Gary many times before. He stepped down from a cut of freight cars to throw a switch, then signaled the engineer to move the cars. As the cut of cars approached Hoffman, he took hold of the grab iron and placed one foot on the stirrup of the leading car. Unexpectedly, his foot slipped the length of the stirrup, throwing him against the side of the moving car. His body then swung outward and the back of his head and his shoulders struck a wooden catenary support pole only twenty-eight inches from the car side. The impact knocked him to the ground and caused a headache, but he got back up, climbed aboard a following car, and finished his shift. Several months later Hoffman noticed a slight impairment of vision. Over the next two years, the impairment developed to the point where Hoffman no longer could see anything except light and dark shadows. The forty-six-year-old Hoffman was legally blind and unable to work to support his wife.

Fewer than three weeks later, another brakeman named George Burgwald was working a nighttime switching job near East Chicago the night of 19 June 1932, when the automatic couplers on two freight cars did not catch. Company rules prohibited trainmen from entering between moving cars, but practical railroading experience usually required a man to couple the cars, or risk the wrath of the dispatcher for leaving a freight train uncoupled and blocking the main line and siding. Burgwald slid between the two freight cars to adjust the uncooperative coupler. As he stood between the cars, either the engineer moved the train or the shock wave from the attempted coupling rebounded through the cars, knocking Burgwald down between the cars. A wheel crushed his left leg. After a nineteen-week recuperation at St. Catherine’s Hospital in East Chicago, he returned home to Michigan City, where he underwent subsequent surgeries at St. Anthony’s Hospital. Two years after the injury Burgwald’s left leg measured two inches shorter than his right leg and he was unable to perform any type of physical labor.
An investigation of the accident scene following Hoffman’s injury revealed that the distance between the outer edge of the car stirrup and the face of the pole measured only about two feet, four inches, where a safe clearance should have been at least three feet. Hoffman filed a claim with the railroad company under the provisions of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act. After a prolonged negotiation between Hoffman’s attorney and the railroad’s attorney, railroad officials agreed to pay Hoffman $3,000—the equivalent of two and one-half years of wages. Under chapter 77 of the Federal Bankruptcy Act of 1933, a worker’s claim arising from a work-related injury was a preferred claim, second only to the administrative costs of the receivership or reorganization. General manager Jones signed a petition on 22 May 1934, requesting that the federal court allow the railroad to pay Hoffman the $3,000. The next day, Judge Thomas Slick of South Bend complied.

Burgwald’s accident, while certainly regrettable, resulted from a violation of company rules, according to railroad officials, so the company did not accept liability for his injury. Burgwald countered with the cause for his entry between the cars: one of the automatic couplers was defective and would not couple. His reaction revealed a common complaint of freight brakemen. A Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B &O) worker once responded angrily to a Safety First poster that urged railroaders not to go between cars to adjust a coupler. If the couplers worked properly and were not defective, the B & O man pointed out, men would not have to risk their lives to compensate for the inferior equipment. In Burgwald’s case, more than a year and a half of negotiations failed to bring the railroad and the brakeman to a compromise. On 26 March 1934 Burgwald filed suit in the United States District Court at Hammond, Indiana, seeking $40,000 in damages according to the terms of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act and the Safety Appliance Act.

Unlike the trial conducted in the same federal court in Hammond nineteen years earlier to decide the question of liability for Albert Fellers’ death, Burgwald’s case found a fairer hearing before Judge Slick, the successor to now-retired Judge Anderson. The terms of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act clearly applied to Burgwald’s accident; a railroader could not be held to have assumed the risk of his employment if the defective equipment that caused his injury violated a railroad safety statute. After Judge Slick overruled the railroad attorney’s assertion that the brakeman’s complaint was too vague because it did not give the name of the railroad car’s owner, nor its number, the railroad’s attorneys filed a petition for a stay of proceedings on 4 December 1934 to resume negotiations. Four days later, the South Shore agreed to pay the permanently disabled brakeman $6,000—the equivalent of five years of a brakeman’s wages. Slick, who also was serving as judge in the railroad’s bankruptcy proceedings, signed the court order approving the settlement that same day. Despite the fact that the average real cost to a railroad company for a worker’s serious injury had risen about 70 percent between 1910 and 1932, the $6,000 settlement actually cost the railroad less than one $5,000 court-ordered judgment for passenger injuries in 1917.

What is more significant about Burgwald’s lawsuit is the fact that it was one of only two filed by an injured railroad worker against the South Shore Line between 1933 and 1938, and possibly during the entirety of the depression. Surviving records, concerning about eighty-one accidental injury claims by seventy-five workers among a total 325 claims filed over a four-year period from 25 May 1934 through 15 May 1938, reveal that injured workers were paid through administrative channels, without litigation, under the terms of the federal or state acts. The $6,000 awarded to Burgwald and the $3,000 given to Hoffman comprised not only the two largest payments to workers, but apparently also 60 percent of all monies paid for injuries to workers during those four years. Car inspector Bernard Kabacinski broke his right leg while trying to remove a fuse and suffered partial permanent disability as a result. The railroad provided him with slightly less than $1,000 under the Indiana Workmen’s Compensation Act. Maintenance of way worker Steve Wyatt suffered a permanently disabling injury on 13 February 1936. The railroad supported him with at least $933 in seven installments between May 1936 and September 1937. Car inspector Fred Raska suffered partial blindness in his right eye when ice or rust flew off multiple-unit jumper cables he was handling between cars and received $399 under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act. Two years later, he remained with the shop force. Most claims amount to just a few dollars, but those few dollars amounted to a day or more of lost wages.

Among the names of injured workers listed in the records as recipients of financial support during the depression years are: Howard Kroenig, who rescued passengers in the 1926 collision and who wrote the poem “Safety First” for publication, receiving about half a month’s pay for an injury suffered in December 1936; Arthur Hegelmayer, author of an essay about accident prevention, who incurred minor injuries in November 1936 and July 1937; Lester C. Harman, author of “Rule 99,” who suffered a serious, temporarily disabling injury in October 1937; and Wilbert J. Hedstrom, brother and uncle of two generations of Hedstrom motormen, who received the equivalent of a week’s wages around Thanksgiving 1935 for an unspecified injury.

What made railroad workers stay with the South Shore Line, despite the dramatically higher risk of a disabling injury—a risk that grew the longer they stayed. What made South Shore employees accept substantially lower wages than the steam railroads, steel mills, and railroad car and automobile manufacturing plants of northern Indiana could offer? Why did so many persist in working for an electric railroad, when Pullman-Standard in Michigan City or Inland Steel in Indiana Harbor paid more during the shaky years of the depression? A hint at the possible answer can be found in Ed Hedstrom’s recollection of the experience of working for the South Shore Line under general manager Charles M. Jones: