Ron Fitch was born in 1910 into a railway family. He began his career as a 16-year-old engineering cadet and completed it, 46 years later, having worked at various times for two state railways and the Commonwealth, as Commissioner of South Australian Railways. In this book Fitch gives a vivid account not only of his career but of the camaraderie of the greater railway community, often experienced in the most trying of conditions. Fitch gives an account of laying track and the remarkable breed of men who do so, of advances in line-building techniques, of derailments and floods and washaways, of wrangles over attempts to implement standard gauge, of the politics of railways. In 2002 when 92 Fitch earned recognition from the Guinness Book of World Records when his thesis on South Australian railways made him the World's oldest recipient of a PhD.