Two important events occurred today, the 28th of May, in the history of the Norfolk and Western Railway:
1946: Robert H. "Racehorse" Smith becomes the seventh President of the railway. Smith was another product of the N&W's career hiring policy, which sought to develop bright college graduates for long-term executive service. Basically, young men were hired from college to start in low-level jobs with the N&W, just like with every other sort of business at the time. N&W management would then oversee the careers of these men, placing them in various areas over the course of several decades in order to give them the experience, operational and financial, to allow them to later assume positions of management in the railway.
The small amount of reading that I've done on the N&W's hiring practices at that point in time indicates that this was somewhat uncommon; ordinarily, it would seem that a man who was hired to be a draftsman stayed a draftsman, and maybe became head of his department or something like that. Senior-level management was often recruited elsewhere, apparently. The N&W of course didn't do it that way, and chose to create its leadership from within.
President Smith's tenure is most relevant to modern fans due to his authorization of O. Winston Link's sojourns through the system, taking photographs of the waning days of steam locomotives in N&W revenue service.
Speaking of steam locomotives in revenue service...
1959: The last Class A locomotive in revenue service, 1214, is retired on this date. She would of course not survive President Stuart T. Saunders' revenue generation programs, being sold for scrap at some point in time after that. (Of the N&W's A-class locomotives, only 1218 survives, at the Virginia Museum of Transportation.
Posted by Country Pundit at May 28, 2004 07:37 PM