That is getting traffic, you say, and the superintendent is an operating man. You are a bit wrong there. The superintendent is a _railroad_ man and that means that any part of the railroad business is his business. There is a man, by name A. H. Smith, who is to-day operating vice-president of the New York Central system, who held to that idea from the beginning. In the beginning, Smith was the superintendent of a little side-tracked division of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern which centred in at Hillsdale, Michigan. It was a strong competitive territory, and Smith found that the traffic that came to his road was so slight that it did not take a great deal of his time to move it. The superintendents before him had had a lot of time to speed their fast horses and fuss around their gardens. Not so with Smith. He went into the business of making traffic. It was a decade that took keen delight in singing societies, and Smith's robust voice allied itself to every choir of importance in three counties. He sang himself into personal popularity, he sang traffic into coming over the Michigan Southern. After a while, the folks over in the general offices at Cleveland began to take notice. The traffic folks were the first to notice, after that--well, a long story's short when you know that Smith found himself on a short cut to his present job. The superintendent's smile remains while a solemn-faced delegation of commuters files into his room. These grave folk have been coming into town on the 8:52 almost since the road first laid its rails. It is part of their lives, and they fondly imagine that it is a big part of the road's--that the twenty-hour train over the mountains to Chicago is a matter of considerably less importance than the 8:52. The superintendent broadens his bland smile and rings for his train sheets. There are other trains than the 8:52 coming into that terminal--almost a train a minute from a little before eight o'clock until half-past nine. The superintendent's finger runs for corroboration over the train sheets. Twenty-five days this month when 94 per cent of his suburban trains come under the protection of the big shed of the terminal right on the scheduled moment--how was that for consistency of operation? The commuters' committee seem a little dazed. Individually, the men are expert on a good many things--printing, indictments, breakfast foods, patents, wholesale feathers; but consistency of train operation and train sheets are a bit confusing. "The 8:52 has been late a whole lot recently," doggedly affirms the chairman. "Last Thursday we were pretty near fifteen minutes late." A gleam of triumph comes into the superintendent's eye. He fumbles anew among the flimsy train sheets. His forefinger alights upon a line of the typewritten copy.