Three Hours Flagging a Freight Train Past a Broken Rail — The Railroad Offered Him $1.50
With no telegraph in reach, John Ryan stood on a broken Northern Pacific rail for three hours and waved down a rushing freight. The company's thanks came to fifty cents an hour.
Tacoma, July 26 — While John Ryan was walking along the Northern Pacific track near Thorpe Saturday, he noticed a broken rail. There being no way to get word to a telegraph station, he remained on the spot three hours and flagged a freight train that was rushing along. Ryan declares that when he visited the road officials they offered him $1.50 for his three hours' work.
“Ryan declares that when he visited the road officials they offered him $1.50 for his three hours' work.”
A wreck averted by one man's unpaid vigilance, priced by the company at fifty cents an hour, is the same arithmetic that governs contract work and safety reporting today: the risk is personal, the savings are corporate. The Northern Pacific, like every railroad of its era, treated track inspection as a cost of doing business until someone else noticed the rail for free.
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