No, Old Railroader. Not for a minute. We have those engineers already in America; nine out of ten of the men who are handling our locomotives in the United States are quite capable of handling all these devices, and a considerable number in addition. Even overseas where, broadly speaking, the type of individual railroad employee is not supposed to be as high as in this country, the enginemen are to-day used to all these modern devices, the hall-marks of the really modern steam locomotive. A keen-minded American who has known and loved locomotives all his life went over to France not many months ago and rode in the cab of one of those high-speed engines that haul the heavy expresses of the Northern railway from Paris to Calais, 180 miles in three hours and thirty-five minutes--a remarkable daily performance,--and he had his eyes opened. In the first place the cab was immaculate. I might almost add "of course." I rode myself in the cabs of British locomotives after the Armistice. Had there been a war just ended over there across the narrow English Channel? The rolling-stock of the British railways certainly belied that fact. Their locomotives were clean, bright, freshly painted; they were not rusty, dirty, or leaky. They had upkeep, continuous upkeep even through the fifty-one heart-breaking, man-shortage months of the World War. That showed for itself. The cab of the engine in which my friend rode from the Gare du Nord to the Calais pier was more than immaculate; it was intricate. There were levers here and levers there, gages high and gages low. It looked more like the control-board of a fair-sized steamship than that of a locomotive. There was a variable exhaust nozzle, a control here, a control there; the locomotive was itself a four-cylinder compound engine with all the improvements that we have just seen (and then some more)--and with 180 miles to be made in 215 minutes, which is faster than almost any American train goes to-day--faster by twenty-five minutes than the fastest train between New York and Baltimore (185 miles); faster by thirty-one minutes than the fastest express between New York and Providence (also 185 miles).