Page:The Working and Management of an English Railway.djvu/221

 goods, their marks and addresses, the weight, and particulars of the charges, are passed into an office called the delivery office, where each invoice is entered in a book, stamped with a progressive number, timed as to arrival, checked as to correctness of rate and charges, and is then passed to a "marking clerk," whose duty it is to mark against each entry on the invoice the position on the platform or sorting bank in which the article to which the entry refers, is to be placed. On the platform, by means of letters and numbers painted on the columns which support the roof, the whole of London is mapped out into districts with great care and precision, and the numbers inserted by the marking clerk on the invoice correspond with these divisions, and are for the guidance of the checkers in unloading the goods from the waggons, and loading them into the vans for delivery. The marking clerk having discharged his office, the invoice passes on to another set of clerks, each of whom extracts from it, and enters on the carman's delivery sheets, such of the entries as refer to the particular section of the City with which he is appointed to deal, and by this process of exhaustion, the whole of the entries for delivery to a particular district are brought to a focus, although the goods may have arrived from hundreds of different stations, and be entered on as many different invoices. The same set of clerks enter the charges in the carmen's delivery sheets in cases where they are to be paid by the consignees.

The next step is to pass the invoice out of the delivery office to the platform, where a gang of men unload the goods from the waggons, checking them with the invoice as they do so, and wheel them away on hand-trucks to the different positions on the platform, according to the