Railway Mechanical Engineer, Vol 96 January December, 1922 Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Railway Mechanical Engineer, Vol. 96: January December, 1922

The problems of management in railroad sheps are quite different from those of most other industries. In the aver age manufacturing plant, the produc Controlling tion of the product is an end in itself. Production in In railroad shops the repair of loco Railroad Shops motives and cars is an important, but yet an incidental, part in the produc tion of transportation. The output of the shops is necessar ily subordinated to operating requirements and the result is often very unfavorable. There is scarcely a day when there is not some emergency work requiring the attention of the shop executives. These constant disruptions of plans for handling work are probably the most serious handicaps to the introduction of a well-planned system of railroad shop management.

It is apparent that the management of a railroad shop is in many ways more difficult than the management of an industrial plant, which in general operates under fairly uni form conditions, yet in spite of this fact, practically every railroad shop officer has to depend on his own resources in organizing the operations of the shop. There is no one to whom he can delegate the work of making a systematic analysis of conditions and means of improving them. It would seem that one of the prime needs in many shops is some method of obtaining definite information on which to base recommendations for changes in methods. At every large shop, at least, there should be a man to check up the processes of the shop and devise new methods of cutting costs. He would find a wide field of usefulness and, with the proper co - operation, would no doubt be able to reduce the waste that now exists because of lack of systematic analysis of costs. Among the subjects to which he might give attention are the routing of work; the improvement or replacement of obsolete tools; methods for quantity produc tion by the use of jigs and fixtures; the regulation of speeds and feeds of machine tools; methods of handling material about the shops and labor turnover. These are items which shop officers cannot give sufficient attention and their neglect is responsible for a great deal of waste and inefficiency.

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