Letters From A Railway Official
It has usually failed; not on account of inherent weakness as a system, but because the superintendent didn’t superintend, and found it too convenient to try to shift the responsibility to the mechanical department. Reform has to begin at the top, and if the division is to be the unit the superintendent must be something more than a high-class chief dispatcher finding flaws in train sheets. It is not enough for him to be a star division engineer, a boss yardmaster. He must remember that his holding of any of these positions is ancient history, not to be forgotten, because valuable and instructive, but nevertheless a thing of the past. As the yardmaster and the dispatcher must scatter their trains, so the superintendent must keep his staff doing different things. He must avoid having two men doing the same thing. If it is better to call the roundhouse foreman a master mechanic and invent a title for the man behind the back shop, let us do so; but by all means avoid working the master mechanic at present as foreman, head caller, road time-keeper and roundhouse clerk. The superintendent can boss all these jobs, and transportation, including its operating attributes,
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