In 1847 J. Edgar Thomson, an engineer of experience, entered the service of the Pennsylvania Railroad, of which he afterward became president. Three years later, a young man without experience in railroad business applied to him for a position as clerk in the station at Duncansville, and was, with some hesitation, accepted. Not long after--so runs the story--an influential shipper entered the station, and demanded that some transfers should be made in a manner contrary to the rules of the company. This the clerk refused to do; and when the influential shipper tried to attend to the matter himself, he was forcibly ejected from the premises. Indignant at this, he complained to the authorities, demanding that the obnoxious employee be removed from his position. He was--and was promoted to a much higher one. This is said to have been the beginning of the railroad career of Thomas Alexander Scott. Edgar Thomson was a sufficiently able man to appreciate Scott's talent at its full worth, and took every opportunity to make it useful in the service of the company. Both before and after the war the system was extended in every direction; and the man who in 1850 had need of all his nerve to defy a single influential shipper was a quarter of a century later at the head of 7,000 miles of the most valuable railroad in the country. [Illustration: Thomas A. Scott.] As an enterprising and active railroad organizer, Scott was probably unrivalled--especially when aided by the soberer judgment of Thomson; nor has the operating department of any other railroad in the country reached the standard established on the Pennsylvania by Scott and Thomson and the men trained up under their eyes. But in business sagacity and those qualities which pertain to the financial management of property, Scott was surpassed by Vanderbilt. The work of the two men was so totally different in character that it is hard to compare them. Vanderbilt was not so distinctively a railroad man as Scott. He had already made his mark as a ship-owner before he went into railroads. But he was a man who was bound to take the lead in the business world; and he saw that the day for doing it with steamships was passing away, and that the day of railroads was come. He therefore presented his best steamship to the United States Government in a time when it was sorely needed, disposed of the others in whatever way he could, and turned his undivided attention to railroads.