Charles DeLano Hine

“ Why not go even further and have one chief clerk and one set of records for the whole outfit, just as an assistant superintendent can handle a part of the work without having a separate force? If you ever rearrange an office building, fix it so that the casual visitor waiting to see the boss will not learn state secrets by hearing the chief clerk dictate letters. ”

“ It is not the superintendent who works the most hours who is the most successful. It is he who puts in the best licks at the right time, night or day, and with the right man or men.
I told your chief dispatcher that a knowledge of law is as important to a real superintendent as a knowledge of telegraphy. I advised him to give himself the pleasure of reading Cooley’s edition of Blackstone, which, if taken in homeopathic doses, is one of the clearest things in the language. Every superintendent gets to be more or less of a lawyer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 houses, an expensive duplication of work. The trainmaster rides in the caboose and the traveling engineer—road foreman is the modern term—in the engine, but neither dares presume to know the business of the other. Every trainmaster should be a traveling engineer and every traveling engineer should be a trainmaster. That will be the case when we train officials along more definite lines. Honey bees feed their future queen a special food. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Your chief dispatcher is a fine fellow and understands the art of getting away. He didn’t wear out his welcome but broke away while making a good impression. You have to unlock the switch for some men before they can couple their crossings and get out of town. The dispatcher has to send the operator outside with a clearance. Acquaintance is one of a young man’s most valuable assets, and a two minutes’ interview may grade the way for a lifelong run. Before the world was as good as it is now, men rather prided themselves on the number of enemies they had made. ”

“ It is so easy for us old fellows to forget that we were once junior officials ourselves that I rather like to keep in touch with those who are to come after and maintain the time-honored standards of the profession. I never like to say very much about my desire to acquire information from everyone I meet, for experience has made me a little leery of the man who whistles too long for that station. He is apt to toot his own horn so much that he doesn’t hear the other fellow’s signals. ”

“ So I shall either pull the whole train into the yard or get permission from the yardmaster to cut off on the main, and like an orthodox conductor, leave them for the night men to switch out. We conductors feel that, as a switch engine lies around the most of the time, it can always do at least one more job, besides having time to shove us out of the yard and over the hill. ”

“ It is so easy to follow the line of least resistance that we too often evade responsibility by throwing up our hands and saying that such and such is a legal question, a mechanical matter, or a traffic problem. ”

“ 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 ”

“ We gracefully pass it up to the other fellow, and think we are in to clear when an investigation happens to come. By and by, oblivious of the relation between cause and effect, we deplore the curtailment of our authority and inveigh against centralization. ”

“ The more a man knows the more frankly he acknowledges that a certain idea is new to him. Men to whom talking and writing do not come easy sometimes say beware of the windy man, but there are some mighty efficient railroaders who act and perform all the better for being able to handle words. ”

“ Hot air is all right if properly compressed. The idle breeze dries the ground and runs windmills. Sand bites the rail in more economical quantities when fed down by the pneumatic attachment. Every division has its Windy Bill, its Chattering Charlie, its Gasbag George ”

“ If you tell him that’s all right, that you wall try and correct all these things when the car accountant’s office stops kicking on his wheel reports, he will look at you in sympathetic sadness and bewail the modern tendency to make clerks of conductors. ”