Early Days

The early training of a cadet was particularly exacting when the railways were younger than they are now. He found himself checking the numbers of the cars, assisting the guards, visiting country stations to load fruit, wool and milk. Nowadays, a cadet generally begins his work at a country station, and thus obtains early a thorough insight into all the varied duties that attach to the conduct of a station. Like the professional journalist, he soon comes to know “something about everything and everything about something” connected with his job. Passenger, goods and parcels traffic reveal their secrets to him, and by his contact with the work in all its phases he is able to store up valuable knowledge for later years: a station-master must know from the ground floor up the structure that he controls, either by his own experience or from observation during the course of his duties in his training years.

It is when the cadet is brought to a city station that the varied work to which he has been accustomed is necessarily, because of its greater dimensions, subjected to division and sub-division, and he finds himself in a specialised department. The change gives him perspective, among other things. The extensive system of which he is a cog forms more clearly in his mind, like lines taking shape on a chart. His little country station has been magnified into a dozen busy departments. The rumble of the shunting yards has succeeded the chirp of the birds outside the window. The express trains that roared impatiently past his country station, with a blur of faces at the windows, now come home here to rest. Around this place is the buzz of power.

But he will go into the country again, this rising young cadet, this time to take charge of a station there, to practice what he has learned from that city system, whose hot, quick breath has warmed his heart. The big shunting yards are far away, and the birds are outside his window again. He will come to know Strawberry, the vagrant cow, and chase her off the railway track; he will exchange good-days with Farmer Brown entraining for the wool sales; he will cultivate a garden patch around the station platform, with all the railwayman's traditional love for flowers. He will handle the waybills for the produce of his district—sweet, golden butter and springy wool, to tempt some distant palate and to clothe some foreign skin. He will stamp a ticket for the nervous Widow McGurkinshaw, plumed for a visit to the city to see her son. And his station will resound to the rumble of the trains that come and go with majestic instancy.

But his grip is tightening, and some day it fastens on the chief position at a city railway station.