Many years ago Mr. Isaacs, a recognised authority upon railway transport, when General Manager of the Great Eastern Railway, said: “Station work is the backbone of the railway system.” The responsibility for the way in which station work is performed lies with the stationmaster.

Auniformed figure in gold braided hat, promenading the station and signalling the departure of successive trains, between which he sits in solitary splendour in his private retreat—that is perhaps the idea that some of the general public hold of the duties and the functions of a railway stationmaster No doubt his existence becomes all the more Arcadian in our eyes through the tendency to look upon the next man's job as more desirable than our own. Actually, with a multiplicity of troubles besetting him, the stationmaster might himself have plenty of reason to sigh for the next man's job.

What causes stationmasters? Well, some of them can be accounted for like Topsy, as having “just growed,” from sound, orthodox beginnings. With others something of the romantic factor has operated, as it operates in every profession that is worth the brain and brawn and devotion of men. Already, in this young country of New Zealand, heredity has worked its magic and has inspired father and son to the service of the iron trail through generations. The master at one railway station in this country to-day comes from two generations of railway-men. His interest (let us whisper it, because it is against all rules and regulations) started at the age of nine years. His uncle was at that time an engine-driver, and that worthy hid his young nephew on board the engine. Out on the open road, the youngster would make his appearance, and find infinite delight in firing the engine, shovelling in the coal with the enthusiasm of a tyro. What finer adventure could there be than feeding fuel to a real engine that responded mischievously and raced away into the sweep of sunlit countryside? The iron trail had already fastened upon the heartstrings of this youngster, and through the next six years his interest quickened rather than abated, so that at the age of fifteen years he joined up with the service as a cadet in a proper and thoroughly respectable manner, burying his irregular boyhood in his memory. His was now page 28 the training that was required of every cadet before at last attaining the rank of stationmaster, nevertheless a thrill shot home to him across his more matter-of-fact years when, thirty years afterwards, he once more encountered the old engine that had given him so much illicit joy in the days of yore.

Well, well, we must have rules and regulations, and the adventures of this boy of the coal tender are not revealed to be emulated. But it shows that men are attracted to the service of the railways by something more than we imagine, and that they become station-masters by an incentive greater than “the sake of a ribboned coat, or a selfish hope.”