Dear John
I have found some references in "Among the Railway Folk" (From Sea to Sea)
pp.279-280 in my Dominions Edition. An extract is as follows:
Yours, David
A good man from the Army, with his papers all correct and
certificates from his commanding officer, can, after depositing twenty
pounds to
pay his home passage, in the event of his services being dispensed with,
enter
the Company’s service on something less than one hundred rupees a month
and rise
in time to four hundred as a stationmaster. A railway bungalow—and they
are as
substantially built as the engines—will cost him more than one-ninth of
the pay
of his grade, and the Provident Fund provides for his latter end.
Think for a moment of the number of men that a line running from Howrah to
Delhi
must use, and you will realise what an enormous amount of patronage the
Company
holds in its hands. Naturally a father who has worked for the line expects
the
line to do something for the son; and the line is not backward in meeting
his
wishes where possible. The sons of old servants may be taken on at fifteen
years
of age, or thereabouts, as apprentices in the ‘shops,’ receiving twenty
rupees
in the first and fifty in the last year of their indentures. Then they
come on
the books as full ‘men’ on perhaps Rs. 65 a month, and the road is open to
them
in many ways. They may become foremen of departments on Rs. 500 a month,
or
drivers earning with overtime Rs. 370; or if they have been brought into
the
audit or the traffic, they may control innumerable Babus and draw several
hundreds of rupees monthly; or, at eighteen or nineteen, they may be
ticket-collectors, working up to the grade of guard, etc.
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