On Fri, 4 Feb 2011 20:53:57 -0800 (PST), wrote:


I downloaded a Colvin book on railroad shop practice from the '20s
from archive.org. Maintenance was a pretty big business, he estimated
over a million employed and hundreds of millions of healthy-sized
dollars expended per year in the US at that time. The bigger
railroads could build a locomotive from the ground up in their shops,
downside to steam is the amount of maintenance it took to keep them
running. But most of those jobs were well-paid for the day and didn't
take a college degree to do, too.

Stan

I thought it made for a pretty impressive video. I especially liked
the job task timing kept in paper tags on the shop scheduling work
board and how every task was timed out and scheduled to operate like a
industrial ballet.....disassembly through rebuild and painting. It
seemed that the entire crew knew exactly what was expected and could
do complete overhauls of these machines very smoothly.
Dave