Letters from an old railway official/Postscript
POSTSCRIPT.
BY FRANK H. SPEARMAN.
When a young army officer, a West Pointer, resigns his commission to become a railroad man the unusual happens and observers naturally follow the result with interest. Major Charles Hine was more than a lieutenant of the Sixth United States Infantry when he threw up his commission to become a freight brakeman on the Big Four. He was even then, at twenty-eight, a graduate of the Cincinnati Law School, a member of the bar and a practical civil engineer. When the country needed her army men in 1898, Lieutenant Hine, then on the staff of a Big Four superintendent in Cleveland, secured leave of absence, volunteered and was commissioned a major of the First District of Columbia Infantry. After Santiago, Major Hine promptly resumed his work as a railroadman. He has served as brakeman, switchman, yardmaster, conductor, chief clerk to the superintendent, trainmaster, assistant superintendent and general superintendent. He is, by nature, a student; no task is too onerous to dismay him if there is in it or behind it something he can learn. Thus he has not only stored away information, but he has learned how to impart it, and his fund of shrewd observation and good common sense he has drawn on in writing a railroad book entitled “Letters From an Old Railway Official to His Son, a Division Superintendent.”
The letters cover a breadth of ground in railway operation that is really astonishing to any one who does not know the man behind them. This is not all; loaded as they are with nuggets of hard, practical sense in railroad practice, they have a form and finish that make them doubly attractive. They are short, compact, of an easy and agreeable style and both lively and humorous as well as instructive.
Major Hine has long since won his literary spurs as a contributor to the Army and Navy Journal, The Railway Age and The Century Magazine. His present book is bright, quick and gossipy, and it would interest a man that did not know the difference between a puzzle switch and a gravity yard, but its especial appeal is to the young railroad man of to-day who understands that whether in the operating department, the accounting department or the motive power, he must, to get ahead, know all that he can, and the letters cover as many railroad subjects as they bear numbers. They will take their place at once in railroad libraries and in railroad literature. Major Hine—recently doing special railroad work on the staff of the general manager of the Rock Island system and at present on the staff of the second vice-president of the Burlington, specially charged with the subject of company supplies—may write longer and more pretentious books than this; but hardly one of more real value to the ambitious young railroad man.