00. The Firemen's Magazine, established in 1876 and
now published from headquarters in Cleveland, is indicative of
the ambitions of the membership, for its avowed aim is to "make a
specialty of educational matter for locomotive enginemen and
other railroad employees." An attempt was even made in 1908 to
conduct a correspondence school, under the supervision of the
editor and manager of the magazine, but after three years this
project was discontinued because it could not be made
self-supporting.
The youngest of the railway labor organizations is the
Brotherhood of Trainmen, organized in September, 1883, at
Oneonta, New York. Its early years were lean and filled with
bickerings and doubts, and it was not until S. E. Wilkinson was
elected grand master in 1885 that it assumed an important role in
labor organizations. Wilkinson was one of those big, rough and
ready men, with a natural aptitude for leadership, who
occasionally emerge from the mass. He preferred railroading to
schooling and spent more time in the train sheds of his native
town of Monroeville, Ohio, than he did at school. At twelve years
of age he ran away to join the Union Army, in which he served as
an orderly until the end of the war. He then followed his natural
bent, became a switchman and later a brakeman, was a charter
member of the Brotherhood, and, when its outlook was least
encouraging, became its Grand Master. At once under his
leadership the organization became aggressive.
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