Four early railroad accountants;

              The early partners of Haskins & Sells used to claim
that no accountant was worth his salt unless he had
worked for the railroads. If they were betraying even a
trace of prejudice, perhaps they were entitled to it, for
there is much evidence that they had the railroads to
thank for bringing them together.
Elijah Watt Sells left school at the age of 16 to work
for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. When
he went down to the station at Gardner, Kansas to apply,
he was almost turned down. They told him they wanted
a man who could work the telegraph key. But he had
prepared himself by learning the Morse Code and was
signed on as assistant station agent at Gardner.
In the twenty years that followed before he went to
Washington to overhaul the Government's accounting
system, Mr. Sells worked for seven different railroads
from the Midwest to the Pacific Coast. He became a
railroad man to the core. He knew freight accounts,
ticket accounts, and car mileage accounts. His experi­ence
carried him through virtually every position in the
accounting department and comptroller's office from
bookkeeper to auditor, secretary, and vice president.
The late 1880's found him turning thirty and secretary
and auditor of the Colorado Midland Railway. Colorado
in those days boasted more trackage than any other
state in the Union, with picturesque narrow-gauge rail­roads
being pushed rashly through nearly every creek-bed
and high pass in the Rockies and the canyons echo­ing
with the shrill whistles of intrepid little engines.
Their mission was to haul out the newly-discovered
silver and gold from such mining towns as Leadville
and Cripple Creek.
The Colorado Midland was also popular with the car­riage
trade in Colorado Springs, for whom it provided
the latest Pullman equipment—"luxurious masterpieces
of construction" with woodwork of mahogany and Eng­lish
Oak, seats of maroon and gold plush, floors covered
with rich Wilton carpets, and silver plated trim.
In repeated financial difficulties until its demise in
1922, its heroic accomplishment in traversing the Rock­ies
was to prove its undoing. Originally it crossed the
Continental Divide after a series of spectacular hairpin
curves and steep grades to the Hagerman Tunnel,
11,530 feet high and just below the summit of Sugar
Loaf Mountain. In 1893, the worst of the curves and
grades were eliminated when the two-mile Busk-Ivanhoe
Tunnel was opened 700 feet below the Hagerman. But
three or four "helper" engines were still needed to get
up to the new tunnel, and they had to deadhead back
down. That and the great snowstorm of 1899 helped to
break the railroad financially. Eight of the largest en­gines
were needed to push the big new rotary snow
plow. Nevertheless, it was snowed in for twelve days,
and the line was out of commission for 2M2 months
while 45-foot drifts were cleared at a cost of $73,000, a
sizeable sum in those days.
It was the Midland which brought Mr. Sells together
with Charles S. Ludlam and Homer A. Dunn, who were
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