After three years of satisfactory experience with division accounting bureaus, the Harriman Lines have extended such activities to include the division stores. This is done by moving the division storekeeper, his accounting and correspondence clerks, to the division superintendent's office in order that division records may be consolidated in one file and division accounts in one bureau. A division material-on-hand account is included. The necessary issue clerks, foremen, etc., are left at the storehouse, which is often a mile or two from the superintendent's office. Another avowed object is to get the division supply people closer to the train sheet, to give propinquity a chance to develop love, and to counteract that we-are-so-different feeling which comes on many railroads, not only in the spring, but under all signs of the zodiac. The logical development on divisions of considerable volume of supply business will be to make the division storekeeper an assistant superintendent. This method of store accounting is relatively closer to real transactions, especially where the division supply train is used, than might be supposed. On the Hill lines, the store accounting is done in the general auditor's office, perhaps one or two thousand miles from the store itself, a decidedly long range proposition. Which policy is better is of course a question of opinion. A man's views on organization and methods are largely a matter of temperament and association, just as his politics and religion depend usually upon heredity and environment.
My Dear Boy:--The man who is successful in the exercise of authority soon learns to be something of a buffer between his superiors and his subordinates. He learns to temper justice with mercy. In this little railroad game of ours there has often been an unconscious departure from this rule of conduct. The word "why" should ask for an increased overtime rate in its next working schedule. Somebody at the top is peeved because a train comes in late. He asks the next man below, "Why?" Down goes the inquiry through the baskets of offices whose files contain the desired information, because it is so much easier to write another man a letter than to dig up one of our own. The final inquiry is to a man who has already rendered one report or explanation. It would be a pretty poor sort of recording angel that would register against this underling the more or less justifiable profanity in which he then indulges.