Letters from an old railway official (second series)
LETTERS FROM AN OLD
RAILWAY OFFICIAL
SECOND SERIES
HIS SON, A GENERAL MANAGER
BY
Charles DeLano Hine
1912
Published by the
SIMMONS-BOARDMAN PUBLISHING CO.
NEW YORK
McGraw–Hill Book Company, Sole Selling Agents
239 West Thirty-ninth Street, New York
London, E. C., 6 Bouverie Street. Berlin, N. W. 7, Unter der Linden 71
Copyright, 1912, by
Simmons-Boardman Publishing Co.
new york
FOREWORD.
The author of the letters composing this book, which appeared serially in the Railway Age Gazette in 1911, is a West Point graduate. He served as a lieutenant in the 6th United States Infantry. He is a civil engineer. He is a graduate of the Cincinnati Law School. Leaving the Army to enter railway service, he worked as freight brakeman, switchman, yardmaster, emergency conductor, chief clerk to superintendent, and trainmaster. When the war with Spain began in 1898 he quit railway service and participated in the Santiago campaign as a major of volunteers. After the war he re-entered railway work, and was trainmaster and later general superintendent. Subsequently, he did special railway work in various staff positions for both large and small railways in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
He was for a time inspector of safety appliances for the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 1907 he assisted in the revision of the business methods of the Department of the Interior at Washington, D. C. Then he was receiver of the Washington, Arlington & Falls Church Electric Railway. In 1910, as temporary special representative of President Taft, he outlined a scheme for improving the organization and methods of the executive departments of the United States government. Meantime, in July, 1908, he had become special representative of Mr. Julius Kruttschnitt, director of maintenance and operation of the Harriman Lines, and had entered on a study of the needs of the operating organization of those railways and of the means that should be adopted to meet those needs. The result of this work was the adoption by most of the Harriman Lines of the unit system of organization. On January 15, 1912, Major Hine became vice-president and general manager of the Southern Pacific Lines in Mexico and the Arizona Eastern, having about 1,600 miles of railway.
The foregoing details have not been given for biographical purposes. They have been given to enable the reader to understand the author’s point of view. Or, rather, his points of view. For few men have had opportunity to look at the railway business from so many angles, both practical and theoretical. Given such an education, such a training, such a varied experience, and a keen observer’s eye to see, an active, logical mind to generalize, and a graphic, witty, scintillant English style to set down the results of observation, experience and thinking, and, if their possessor turn to writing, the product is sure to be literature of interest and value. The readers of Major Hine’s first series of letters, “Letters of an Old Railway Official to His Son, a Division Superintendent,” found them at once entertaining, suggestive and instructive. They will find equally or more so the second series, written after a wider experience, and now embodied in this volume.
One of the greatest problems of modern railway management is that of organization. Little railways have been combined into big ones; and big railways have been consolidated into big systems. To so organize these extensive systems that each division and each railway shall have enough individuality and autonomy to deal effectively and satisfactorily with the conditions and needs local to it, and at the same time bring about the correlation and unification of all parts of the entire system essential to the most efficient operation—this is one phase of the problem. To develop men able to administer skilfully departments having many and varied branches—this is another phase. It was as a means to solving this great problem that Major Hine worked out the unit system of organization now in effect on most parts of the Harriman system. In the letters composing this book he has described, not with the cold, hard outlines of a blue print, but vividly, and with fullness of practical illustration, the nature, purposes and workings of the unit system. Whether the reader agrees with the author’s views or not, he cannot but be interested in them as the views regarding a scheme of organization which is the subject of widespread interest and discussion of the man who originated and worked out that scheme of organization.
Besides organization the letters deal with many other questions of practical interest both large and small—with the relations of the railway with the public; its regulation by public bodies; the labor situation on the railways, etc. Indeed, they touch on almost every phase of contemporary railway conditions and operation. Full of human touches, they clothe the skeleton of railway organization and operation with flesh and blood; and will give the current reader and the future historian a better picture of contemporary railway working than many more stilted and pretentious books.
FILE NUMBERS.
The New General Manager |
1 |
Building an Organization |
10 |
The General Manager on the Witness Stand |
20 |
Further Gruelling of the General Manager |
32 |
Limitations of the Chief Clerk System |
43 |
Preventing, Instead of Paying, Claims |
52 |
The Chief of Staff Idea |
63 |
The Unit System |
73 |
Standardizing Office Files |
88 |
The Line and the Staff |
100 |
The Problem of the Get-Rich-Quick Conductor. |
112 |
The Labor Nemesis and the Manager |
126 |
A Department of Inspection, or Efficiency |
136 |
Preserving Organization Integrity |
146 |
The Size of an Operating Division |
156 |
Supplies and Purchases |
168 |
Correspondence and Explanations |
181 |
Organization of the Ideal Railroad |
192 |
The Engineering of Men |
205 |
The Fallacy of the Train-Mile Unit |
214 |
The Man-Day as a Unit |
224 |
| 228 |