Letters from an Old Railway Official. Second Series: [To] His Son, a General Manager

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Letters from an Old Railway Official, by Charles DeLano Hine
Charles DeLano Hine
1912
Published by the SIMMONS-BOARDMAN PUBLISHING CO. NEW YORK
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Sole Selling Agents 239 West Thirty-ninth Street, New York
London, E.C., 6 Bouverie Street. Berlin, N.W. 7, Unter den Linden 71
Copyright, 1912, by Simmons-Boardman Publishing Co. new york
The author of the letters composing this book, which appeared serially in the Railway Age Gazette in 1911, is a West Point graduate. He served as a lieutenant in the 6th United States Infantry. He is a civil engineer. He is a graduate of the Cincinnati Law School. Leaving the Army to enter railway service, he worked as freight brakeman, switchman, yardmaster, emergency conductor, chief clerk to superintendent, and trainmaster. When the war with Spain began in 1898 he quit railway service and participated in the Santiago campaign as a major of volunteers. After the war he re-entered railway work, and was trainmaster and later general superintendent. Subsequently, he did special railway work in various staff positions for both large and small railways in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
He was for a time inspector of safety appliances for the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 1907 he assisted in the revision of the business methods of the Department of the Interior at Washington, D.C. Then he was receiver of the Washington, Arlington & Falls Church Electric Railway. In 1910, as temporary special representative of President Taft, he outlined a scheme for improving the organization and methods of the executive departments of the United States government. Meantime, in July, 1908, he had become special representative of Mr. Julius Kruttschnitt, director of maintenance and operation of the Harriman Lines, and had entered on a study of the needs of the operating organization of those railways and of the means that should be adopted to meet those needs. The result of this work was the adoption by most of the Harriman Lines of the unit system of organization. On January 15, 1912, Major Hine became vice-president and general manager of the Southern Pacific Lines in Mexico and the Arizona Eastern, having about 1,600 miles of railway.