Excerpt from The British Railway System: A Description of the Work Performed in the Principal Departments The following chapters were contributed to the pages of the Railway Sheet, now the Railway Official Gazette. They are offered by the writer, with a deep sense of many imperfections, to his fellow-labourers in the great railway service, in the hope that they may fulfil, in some part at least, the object he had in view: namely, the setting forth in a broad, general way the duties of the officers and the staff of each of the principal departments of the railway system, and the kind of culture needful to the efficient performance of their several duties. They will have been written to little purpose if they do not encourage every young man in the service, who may honour them with a re-perusal in their revised and condensed form, to devote himself to the improvement of his position by the cultivation of his faculties in the fullest and most comprehensive sense. The writer also hopes to find a general public curious to know something of the intricate machinery by which the work of the great nineteenth century invention of land carriage by steam is managed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.