This prospective passenger was a man who had held important positions in the engineering department of railroads for years, but he did not know that railroads provided this service for prospective passengers. Subsequent investigation disclosed the fact that travelers are entirely ignorant of the services that city, district, and traveling passenger agents are prepared to render them. The answer to most of these criticisms is again that some twenty years ago the traffic men ceased to be a really vital figure in the organization of most of our American railroads. For more than twenty years they have been forced willy-nilly into policies of the most stringent economy, with the very natural result that the operating man, the man who could be counted upon to make the largest economies in the operation of the railroad, came into his own. To-day there is hardly an important railroad in the United States which is not headed by an operating man. Operating men do not as a rule have much traffic sense. It is a faculty that is born in some men, while others can never even understand it. It is a good railroad operating man indeed who can manage to acquire a real respect for transportation salesmanship and then give a real cooperation in attaining it. Yet that is perhaps as vitally an important thing as our railroads need to-day. For despite large measures of criticism that may be leveled against it, the railroads of the United States are beginning more and more to tender a real degree of service once again to their patrons; not of course to be compared with that which they gave ten or twelve years ago. It may be many years before they attain that standard again, if indeed ever they do. But the service that they _are_ rendering they are failing utterly to sell to their public, all for a lack of real salesmanship. The average man in the street neither knows or believes that the roads have made large strides in the restoration of many of their services, both freight and passenger. In fact in his mind there has arisen a certain intangible but fairly fixed idea that our railroad structure, both in its plant and operation, has begun to become something dangerously near obsolete. The skillful propaganda of the advocates of the motor-bus and the motor-truck, the fanciful tales spread about the future commercial possibilities of the aeroplane, have begun to make him inwardly question whether the steam train is not about ready now to be classed with the stage-coach and the canal-barge. The railroads of the United States in a supreme--and possibly a final--opportunity for setting forth the many, many merits and strengths of their present position, with a few conspicuous exceptions, are failing to grasp that opportunity. They are neglecting transportation salesmanship.