Page:Hine (1912) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/162

 When he finds it necessary to give instructions he should promptly notify your office, that the record may be completed and confusion avoided. He can do all this without becoming bureaucratic, without putting the company to the expense of a great circumlocution office maintained under the feudal notion of his royal importance. Railroad administration suffers from too many offices and instructions, not from too few. The best officials, and the best train dispatchers, give the fewest orders. It is a qualitative rather than a quantitative proposition.

The moral effect of the presence of an official cannot be discounted. We need more officials and fewer clerks. The railways are over-manned, because they are under-officered. The great mistake of the past, due to crude conceptions of organization, has been in creating offices rather than officials.

The same line of reasoning applies to the handling of outlying terminals on a division away from a dispatcher’s office. The old idea has been to locate a trainmaster with an office at such points. The moral effect of his presence is unquestionably good. The objection is that he must necessarily be on the road much