Page:Hine (1904) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/32

 to you that your office will be in better touch with its responsibilities if it is in charge of a man who has worked outside along the road? Why not look among your trainmen, your yardmen, your dispatchers, your agents, your operators, or even among your section foremen? Experience is a great teacher, but it can never entirely supply the place of native ability, of natural adaptability. Brains and tact are the essentials and each is comparatively useless without the other. Both must be developed by training, but such training does not necessarily have to take the same course for all men. Railroading as a business is only seventy-five years old, and as a profession is much younger than that. It is too early in the game to lay down iron-clad rules as to the best channels for training and advancement. Common sense demands that such avenues be broad and more or less definite. The danger is that they will be only paths and so narrow that they will wear into ruts.

Do not delude yourself into thinking that by going out on the road you can get away from the accounts. They are a flagman that is never left behind to come in on a following