Page:Hine (1904) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/144

, the bane of a yardmaster’s life, the teasers of the traffic man’s tracers, block our terminals. Our shopmen and our car repairers, despairing of full time, move away. Yet withal we are serene, for are not we operating just as cheaply as they did at this time last year?

When I am in doubt, when I become mixed with the complexities of our profession, I go back to my boyhood on the farm. From that gateway as a basing point I can think out a rate sheet with fewer differentials. The same common sense housekeeping which my mother practiced will fit any railroad, however diversified its territory. The same well-balanced management which enabled my father to pay off the mortgage and extend his acres is suited to any railroad, however complicated its financial obligations. The bigger the proposition, the greater the need for sticking to homely basic principles. We learned on the farm to expect about so much rainfall every year. Whether the heaviest would come in one month or in another, the good Lord never found time to tell us. We did the things that came to hand, sometimes similarly, sometimes differently, from the