Deramus led the company through the Great Depression by encouraging industry to locate on the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas.
He helped the railway avoid bankruptcy in the 1930s and refinanced $67 million in bonded debt that fell due in the late 1940s.
Before he was 14, he agreed to tend the switch lamps eagerly and keep the station in order for $4 a month, and an opportunity to learn Morse code.
From the L&N, he went to the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (ACL), then to the Southern Railway (SOU), where, at 20, he became a dispatcher in Memphis, Tennessee.
It is said that he knew the 1,647 miles of track between Kansas City and the Gulf of Mexico so well that he could tell where he was by the sound of the wheels on the rails.