Archived report · 4 min read · Set in The Kessin Crossing ·
The Register of Empty Wagons
The wagon register at Kessin Crossing returns wagons to traffic as empty on the same days the shunters' sheet chalks them as loaded.
- filed: "with the traffic return"
- reference: "KC/EW/07"
1. This examination of the register of empty wagons at Kessin Crossing is filed with the traffic return for the quarter, under reference KC/EW/07, as the movement instructions require of any register left open at the quarter's end.
2. The register records wagons returned empty. A wagon worked off the branch toward its owners without load is entered there: wagon number, date, the load it last carried inward, and the initials of the shunter who set it back. Empties are not billed. The traffic return counts them and pays them nothing, and the quarter's revenue stands on that practice, which has never before needed examining.
3. The quarter's register holds fourteen entries in which the wagon put back empty appears, on the same day, in the shunters' sheet as loaded. The sheets are chalked each shift and fair-copied each night; the fair copies are kept, the chalk is gone by morning, and the copies agree with the chalk, the clerk copying what is chalked being the whole of his duty. The fourteen wagon numbers are correct to the digit, the dates agree within the shift, and the initials in the register belong to shunters rostered on those very turns, who have signed that they set those wagons back.
4. Read as loaded, the sheets chalk no commodity in thirteen of the fourteen cases, which is against practice and was not queried on the nights. In the fourteenth the chalk carries a commodity that no siding on the branch handles. The fair-copy clerk, asked, says he wrote over the chalk what the chalk said, and no more can be got from him than that.
5. The guards' slips were then taken, chalk being chalk and slips being signed. The departing trains on the days in question pass the link's weighbridge, and the slips carry the weighed weights. The fourteen trains are heavier, each by the rated capacity of the very wagons the register empties that day, and by nothing besides, to the hundredweight when the fourteen are summed. A wagon rated at twelve tons that the register sends back empty and the bridge weighs twelve tons heavier is inside the bridge's tolerance and outside the return's.
6. No wagon has been opened. The examination asked for one and received the register's answer: the wagons are not standing to be opened, they having gone back empty already. The owners have raised no fault and filed no claim, their books showing, so far as ours would show were ours read, the arrival of fourteen empties as empties. The owners' books are not ours to read, and the wagons are not ours to stop on the road.
7. The billing is nil, and the return is clean, and this is the finding that will be quoted at any hearing, so it is set down plainly. Fourteen wagons were returned empty and paid the company nothing, and the quarter balances on that. Read the other way, fourteen wagonloads went off the branch unbilled, unwarranted, and heavier by their own rated capacity, and the quarter balances on that also, provided nobody lays the sheets against the register. The return can carry either paper. It carries the register, because the register is the register, and the sheets are chalk.
8. The senior shunter, G. Palfrey, was asked what he chalks when his sheet calls loaded a wagon he is setting back for empty. He said: what is in it. He was asked what was in it. He said that he does not look, that looking is not a shunter's duty, and that no instruction the branch issues asks a shunter to look.
9. It is the recommendation of this return that the register remain open, the fourteen entries standing, pending examination of the wagons at the owners' works. No date is held for that examination, the wagons being, per the register, no longer on the branch. Until it takes place the quarter closes correct and the return files clean, and the one matter it cannot file is carried here for its successor: the register says the wagons are empty, the slips say what they weighed, and which of the two papers is to be believed about a wagon nobody has looked into remains open, and will remain open, until someone on this length of line is instructed to look.