Page:Hine (1904) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/149

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LETTER XX.

HANDLING THE PAY ROLL.

July 31, 1904.

My Dear Boy:—I have your letter about the supply train. Please do not fail to consider that it is an inspection and administrative train as well as a traveling storehouse. The term company train perhaps comes the nearest to a comprehensive designation. As a tentative proposition, to be modified by experience, I think I would distribute one-half of the expense of the train to supply, the other half to inspection and consider both halves as money well spent. With the enormous growth of business, with the increasing expansion of systems, we have had to leave more and more to departments. The result is that each department becomes more and more forgetful of the others. It isn’t enough to have the heads at the general offices take lunch together. We must begin farther down in our administration to keep our departments in touch. Representatives

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