The necessity for the employment of the most efficient methods in industry has never before been so obvious as it is to-day. This statement, with the exception of the “obvious” part of it, has always been, and always will be true. Put another way, it means there never was, or is, any justification for the existence of any industry that employs inefficient methods.

In our country we may be inefficient and not know it. In other countries, where there is intense competition, your competitor or your banker will soon acquaint you of the fact, if you do not know it. So it behoves us to keep an eye on the other fellow—not only on one page of his book, but on the whole book of words by all the means in our power. I admit it is not easy—nothing is easy that is worth while—but, it must be done, for the very good reason that our existence absolutely depends on our so doing.

All the foregoing holds good, whether we are in the railway business or any other business.

Importance of Planning.

Now, in regard to the railways, I am a strong advocate of planning methods. Experience has been my teacher, and I notice in the various engineering magazines that a development has taken definite form in the matter of planning output, that I think is worthy of bringing to your notice. It seems to have taken on the title of the “Spot” system, which suits it very well, although we did not call it anything else but the “Schedule System” in the old days. The “Spot” idea had already been built into the Angus Shops of the Canadian Pacific Railway before I joined them, in 1909, and it is universally used for building new rolling stock, but its application to repairs to rolling stock is not so old, at least so far as I know.

Now, the facts to face are the developments of the last five years, and we find railway workshops reorganising and rebuilding, to meet the competitive conditions of to-day, and adopting the “Spot” schedule system as a base for their operations. We have reorganised our workshops, and the are eminently suited to the adoption of this system, without any constructional or machinery alterations whatever.

The “Spot” System Explained.

What is the “Spot” system? It is a system of group working, where all detail work is carried out in specialist departments, such as ours are now—but with this difference. In all erecting and building shops, the vehicles themselves are moved down the shop, at definitely schedule periods, and stop at defined “Spots” for a predetermined page 39 number of hours, to have specified work performed on them, after which they move on to the next “Spot,” and so on until completion. At each “Spot” is located a specialised group of men, with the necessary equipment, and the required parts to do the work scheduled to be done there, and it is considered by those who have adopted it for repair work to be the most economical method of getting their desired output. In other words, it is now the vehicles that are placed on the “spot” instead of the men.

Illustrations accompanying this article give a clear indication of how the system operates, and, in view of its successful adoption elsewhere, there does not appear to be any reason why we might not apply it here, especially in such shops as it is particularly adaptable to. There are, of course, certain difficulties, such as our number of classes of vehicles, the problem of having adequate stocks of spare parts, the diversity of the traffic requirements, etc., and these would call for some suitable modification in the system.

The Crewe shops of the London Midland and Scottish Railways in England, and the B. & O. Railway in the United States, have adopted the “Spot” system, with beneficial results on locomotive repair output. It appears that equally successful application of the system could be made to wagon repairs.

Rail Travel Comfort at Home

The comfort of railway travel at Home is well-known It is not, however, so generally recognised that the improved equipment that has contributed to this comfort has increased the weight of trains from 450lb. to 1350lb. per passenger. Thus, while the average British steam inner-suburban train of ten carriages seats about 800 passengers on a tare weight of, say, 300 tons, an outer-suburban train set of the same tonnage only seats about 600 passengers, on account of the wider seats and other comforts provided. In the case of a main-line train of ten carriages, only about 360 passengers can be accommodated by reason of the attention devoted by carriage designers to passenger comfort and convenience.

Almost all Home railway passenger carriages are of bogie design, but on the mainland of Europe four and six-wheeled carriages are still being built for local service. Four-wheeled carriages, 40ft. in length, were not long ago introduced on the Northern Railway of France, while until a year or two ago the German railways built four-wheeled carriages exclusively for branch-line working. Since the close of last century, practically no new four or six-wheeled carriages have been constructed at Home.—From Our London Correspondent.

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