And yet new situations constantly arise, the like of which have never before presented themselves, even to the railroad veterans. Traffic moves in unequal volume, particularly freight traffic. There are single-track stretches through the Middle West that starve through eleven months of the year, and for the other thirty days handle in grain more tonnage than a double-track trunk-line in the East. Obviously such lines cannot be double-tracked for thirty days of business; quite as obviously the overtaxed division, its equipment, and its men must rise to every necessity of the floodtide of business. There are fat years and there are lean years. There come years of bumper crops, years when the factory lights burn from sunset to dawn, and wheels turn unceasingly, and then the superintendent wonders how his equipment and men are going to stand the strain. Engines are kept from the shops and in service; nothing that is even a semblance of a car is kept out of service; the demand for men is keen; prosperity strains the resources of the railroad. In the lean years, engines are sometimes kept from the shops because the railroad feels that it must hold down its running expenses to keep pace with reduced revenues, and such a course it can stoutly defend as nothing else than good business. Equipment begins to stand idle. Engines are tucked away on empty sidings, boarded and forlorn; and if the year be very lean indeed, the superintendent may find it necessary to send out a wrecking crane and begin lifting empty cars off the rails and leaving them in the ditch at the side of the right-of-way, until the golden times come again. At such seasons his ingenuity is tested quite as much as in the times of floodtide. Orders come to cut expenses, and his big expense is the pay-roll. When he begins to blue-pencil that pay-roll, some one is going to be hungry. The superintendent knows that. He must move with great care in such emergencies. CHAPTER XV THE FELLOWS OUT UPON THE LINE MEN WHO RUN THE TRAINS MUST HAVE BRAIN AS WELL AS MUSCLE--THEIR TRAINING--FROM FARMER'S BOY TO ENGINEER--THE BRAKEMAN'S DANGEROUS WORK--BAGGAGEMAN AND MAIL CLERKS--HAND-SWITCHMEN--THE MULTIFARIOUS DUTIES OF COUNTRY STATION-AGENTS. One man in every twelve in the United States is on the pay-roll of a railroad. No wonder that that great organism comes so close to human life throughout the nation, that we seem to touch it at every turn. This one out of twelve is the great army of industrial America. Composed of nearly 1,500,000 men, it is an army that inspires loyalty and coöperation within its own ranks, and confidence and admiration from without. To a nation whose creed is work, it stands as the uniformed host stands to a fighting nation like England or France or Germany. The army of industrial America inspires not one whit less affection than those great crops of paid fighters in Europe.