Page:Hine (1904) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/184

 superintendent, or, if none, the trainmaster, sign as acting superintendent as a matter of course when the accidents of the service take the superintendent off the division? An assistant is really a deputy, although, with all our borrowing and mutilating of titles, we have not utilized the comprehensive qualification of “deputy.” The time is soon coming when we shall welcome the opportunity of making our organization elastic by giving understudies the title of acting so and so. As we grow in liberality we shall feel proud to lend one of our men to another road for a few months at a time to do special work or to introduce some new idea that he has developed. The other road will be glad to pay the man a good salary, and he will return to us all the broader and more valuable because of service elsewhere. We have been meantime training another man for any vacancy in the grade that may occur. By the same token, we shall by and by consider it a privilege to get back in our official family a man whom we trained to our ways in youth, but who has been broadened by service with different roads. We shall get over considering him as having lost his rights, as an