"I know just what the steady increase in traffic is going to bring me to, at this point and at that. Here's where a couple of our biggest feeders from the north come into our main-line; here are a couple of friendly haulers dumping down into us from Canada; here, in the mountains, is where we pick up our stuff from the south and the southwest. Every yard on our system is beginning to stagger under the traffic that shows no let up, and we've got to spend millions to keep ourselves from getting throttled. Don't think I don't know every bit of that. I can see necessary improvements all the way up our main line; but every one of them takes money, and just now the big boss has to hustle to sell his securities and raise the money. But when we know and can't improve--that's railroading." A secretary tiptoes in. This railroad king looks up and smiles quite frankly at us. "Committee from the Chamber of Commerce at Zanesburgh," he announces. "They want a new depot in Zanesburgh, and they're entitled to a new one, costing at a fair ratio about $40,000. A $40,000-depot would give them every comfort and convenience but they demand that we spend $100,000 because Great Midland has spent $80,000 in an architectural wonder in Stenton; and the old time town rivalry makes Zanesburgh want to go Stenton one better." "You've got a lot of these delegations?" we venture. "I lose track of them," says the general manager. "It's all a part of the day's work; it's railroading." We know. Last night, this general manager was at a big freight terminal there in the headquarters city, seeing with his own eyes until midnight the fast freight and the express traffic under handling. The night before he was there, and the night before that he was also there, and three days before that he was out pounding over the line in his car, working eighteen hours a day. That's railroading, too. The freight house in this terminal city is one of his biggest problems. His biggest local freight yard is in a narrow valley between high hills; and these, together with fearful realty values, absolutely circumscribe its area. The traffic is growing all the while, and all the local freight for his road--running in strongly competitive territory--comes to this terminal. Three hundred and fifty cars must be despatched every night for different points, and yet a dray coming into the yard must be able to find any one of those cars without an instant's delay. And still the narrow physical limitations of that yard prevail. There is a big problem for a big man.