Letters From A Railway Official
govern. Life is very full in this twentieth century, but, broadly speaking, it is still possible to know something of everything as well as everything of something. The day is coming when we will not entrust a man with the important duties and the great responsibilities of a division superintendent until we have given him a brief course in every department. We examine a man before we let him run an engine, but how about the man who runs him? A superintendent should know enough about an engine to handle the enginemen just as he does the trainmen. When we have men successfully running engines who can barely read and write, it is a mistake to claim that a locomotive is such a sacred mystery that only the mechanical department can judge whether or not it is properly handled. Enginemen are transportation men, and the time that master mechanics put in assigning crews, keeping an age book, and otherwise duplicating the superintendent’s work might a great deal better be given to the back shop. The yardmaster has one caller and the roundhouse foreman another. The two callers go up the same street, sometimes together, and call men in adjoining
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