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“2d, There should be three grades of firemen, classed as junior, intermediate, and senior firemen,—the young man just commencing, to be classed as junior fireman, and so on up to senior fireman; the senior fireman receiving the highest pay for his services, the others in proportion. When a fireman has fired four years, and is worthy of promotion, and fully competent to run a locomotive, there may be no vacancies in the engineer force on the road by which he may be employed. In that case we recommend that he receive a small amount more per day than the senior fireman (say from fifteen to twenty cents per day more), and be ranked as veteran fireman. On the road which one of your committee represents in this convention, this custom has been in vogue for a number of years, and has worked exceedingly well. All the engineers on this road have been educated under this rule, and to-day no engineers in the country rank higher than they do.

“Proper care should be taken, in selecting young men for firemen, as to their ability to distinguish colors in a practicable, common-sense way. We recommend that all railroads having a sufficient number of employés to justify them in so doing, have a reading-room and library for their firemen and engineers, in which the other employés could participate. The library, to some extent, should consist of works on the locomotive engine that a man with a fair education could understand. While we do not think it essentially necessary, still we believe it would be beneficial to some extent to let firemen work one year out of the four in the shop and round-house, so that they might obtain a more perfect knowledge of all the parts of the locomotive.