Page:The Working and Management of an English Railway.djvu/217

 CHAPTER XII.

To the uninitiated, it may possibly appear that when a package or a consignment of merchandise is handed to a railway company for transit, it is a very simple operation to place it in a waggon and convey it to its destination, but it is only necessary to bear in mind the vast extent of the operations carried on at a large and important goods station, the multitude of consignments that have to be simultaneously dealt with, their varied description, and the many destinations to which they have to be conveyed, in order to realise that to enable a vast business of this kind to be conducted with promptitude and certainty, to provide securities against goods being mis-sent or wrongly delivered, and to ensure a reliable means of tracing them in the event of their, after all, going astray, a most complete and careful system of organisation is indispensable. It may be premised that the methods and appliances employed by different railway companies, as a means of securing these results, are not precisely identical in practice, nor are they absolutely uniform at all the stations of one company, it being frequently necessary to be guided by physical circumstances, the mode of construction of the premises, and the special nature of the traffic at particular stations, but from a description of the mode of