Only a few months ago an organized band of box car and freight shed thieves stole nine pianos and four phonographs from one railway company in a large city, and to date six had been recovered. Claims arising from damage, delay, theft, loss and wrecks are traffic men’s enemies that play the mischief and filter through all departments to the chief legal authorities. Of late years the railway companies have been stimulated to eternal vigilance in order to combat daring robbers with confederate organization quite far reaching and involving from twenty to forty people within the ranks of employees and outside. Such a gang is said to have stolen from one company in four months goods valued at $35,000, comprising candy, cameras, sugar, liquors, musical instruments and clothing. The investigation departments have recovered from beneath hay stacks not far from Toronto, Canada, for instance, forty suits of underwear and a dozen pairs of ladies high suede boots. Imagine the temerity of the men making off with twenty head of sheep from under the eyes of yardmen and special officers. The public press not long ago chronicled details of the loss of fifteen sacks of flour from one car en route Buffalo to Belleville. Whiskey is an outstanding temptation and many a headache that starts rolling fails to join the soda waiting at the other end. Out of a thirty case consignment from further west, making the one night journey from St. Thomas to Black Rock, there checked fifteen cases missing, lock, stock and barrel--the wood only of four cases remained and eleven cases were intact. Unmerited onus for losses is now and then thought to rest with the railroads which enquiry does not substantiate. A well known firm in the congested wholesale zone of a neighboring city engaged a detective who pussy-footed about the premises for a year without locating a leak. This human bloodhound may have had a cold in his head and was a poor scenter as it was developed later that the shortages were manipulated as a side line by a vinegar mill shipper who got away with also $6,000 of the hardened cider--mostly recovered--and had been supplying a small pickle factory through the medium of a carter who drove up daily for kegs. Railway companies very seldom pilfer, but the action of more than one railroad on this continent in appropriating urgently needed steam coal billed to others during the winters of 1917–18, will prepare the reader’s viewpoint for a claim for reimbursement placed in the hands of the Silverplate Road, covering fifty cars of slack coal, lost and being vigorously traced, which that line had seized and hastily dumped into a big washout cavity.