RAILWAY HOUSEKEEPING by Christian Advocate

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · May 30, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 21.

RAILWAY HOUSEKEEPING.

By Christian Advocate

A SINGLE railroad system will have upward of five hundred stations along its different routes, which must be supplied with certain household articles and utensils for good housekeeping. Every modern railroad appreciates the value of clean, sanitary stations, and these temporary stopping places for the traveling public are kept in better condition each succeeding year.

The "general housekeeper" of a great trunk line is most frequently a man, and his business is to manage the stations, supplying them with all needful articles. Under his bureau control there come numerous items of apparently small concern, but which in the aggregate amount to considerable sums. For instance, on one system last year the "general housekeeper" purchased and distributed 26,000 brooms to keep the stations and offices of the company clean. Twenty thousand boxes of soap, 25,000 scrubbing brushes, and a similar number of mops figured in the expenditures.

The employees and officials of a big road must have pens, ink, paper, and even pins. Last year the total weight of pins bought by a single road was 3,000 pounds. Forty thousand pens were also used, and fifty barrels of ink. There were enough lead pencils used to reach from New York to Chicago and halfway back again, if placed end to end.

The tendency of the public to eat and drink while traveling is so steadily on the increase that more conveniences are being made to satisfy it in this direction. The traveling café and dining-car are as common to-day as the smoker or baggage-car. To supply these thousands of cars with all the necessary provisions and articles of diet to suit the most fastidious, the "general housekeeper" in charge of this department buys in wholesale quantities. A single railroad system will use upward of 50,000 barrels of flour a year for the dining-car service; 40,000 quarters of beef, and innumerable tons of fruit, coffee, and vegetables. One trunk line sells annually over its route a million bottles of soft drinks, half a million pounds of candy, and upward of five hundred tons of fruit.

The care of the linen of a single trunk line is a gigantic task. No hotel or series of hotels offers any comparison. The napkins and table linen for the dining-car service of one road mount up into the tens of thousands, and the towels and bed linen for the sleepers represent nearly as many more separate articles.—Christian Advocate.