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THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
THE BOYS' BOOK 
 OF RAILROADS 
 
 By 
 
 IRVING CRUMP 
 
 Editor of Boys' Life, The Boy Scouts Magazine 
 
 and Author of " The Boys' Book of Firemen," 
 
 "The Boys' Book of Policemen," etc. 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 1921 
 
<©' 
 
 COPYBIGHT, 1921 
 
 By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc. 
 
 4 
 
 / 
 
 
 
 SEP 20 1921 
 
 ©CI.A622853 
 
To 
 
 "JIMMY" 
 
 This Book is Affectionately 
 Dedicated 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 One of the pleasures of writing this book has 
 been the association I have had with scores of 
 railroad men in various positions, from superin- 
 tendent of a division and chief dispatcher down 
 to the humble job of track walker. I want to 
 make this an opportunity to express my ap- 
 preciation to all of them for the assistance that 
 they have given me in assembling many of 
 the facts herein set forth. I am especially 
 grateful for the interest and kindness of 
 Mr. J. M. Condon, Superintendent of the New 
 York Division of the Erie Eailroad, Mr. Thomas 
 J. Kelly, Chief Dispatcher of the same Division, 
 Mr. J. E. Ingling, Superintendent of Freight 
 Service of the same road, and William Francis 
 Hooker, also of the Erie Company and a genuine 
 " Old Timer." 
 
 During the time that I have been planning and 
 
 writing this book I have frequently referred to 
 
 several very helpful volumes on the subject of 
 
 vii 
 
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 railroads, and I should feel that I were very un- 
 grateful if I did not express my sincerest appre- 
 ciation of Edward Hungerford's " The Modern 
 Kailroad" and "The Strategy of Great Kail- 
 roads," by Frank H. Spearman, both of which I 
 found tremendously interesting and of valuable 
 
 assistance. 
 
 I. C. 
 Oradell, N. J. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I Baw Material 
 
 II In the Cab 
 
 III With the Train Crew 
 
 I Y The Vigilance of the Station Agent 
 
 V Secret Service Stuff . 
 
 VI Operating the Eoad . 
 
 :VII The Man in the Tower 
 
 VTII In the Koundhouse 
 
 IX In the Freight Yard 
 
 X The Wrecking Train 
 
 XI Giants of the Line 
 
 XII The Division's King 
 
 XIII Bailroad History 
 
 1 
 
 24 
 
 50 
 
 74 
 
 98 
 
 118 
 
 139 
 
 164 
 
 180 
 
 194 
 
 215 
 
 238 
 
 254 
 
 IX 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Engineer J. C. Crowley oiling the 5015 before it 
 starts to push a train up the Erie's Susque- 
 hanna Hill. This is one of the largest loco- 
 motives in the world. The 5015 weighs 432 
 tons and has 24 drive- wheels j it has pushed 
 250 loaded cars in a test . . Frontispiece 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The engineer is a very high type of railroad man. 
 He must be, for to his care are entrusted hu- 
 man lives and millions of dollars in property 36 
 
 The track walker is a trouble hunter, always 
 searching for defects along the line. He 
 walks a good many weary miles a day . . 36 
 
 The man on top of the freight car can be presi- 
 dent of the road some day .... 60 
 
 Slow freight but mighty important when a coal 
 
 famine threatens a city 60 
 
 Changing rails between trains means hard work 
 
 for the section gang 92 
 
 The station agent is a man of many responsibilities 92 
 
 When the wrecking crew gets busy. The wreck- 
 ing train has just arrived and the powerful 
 derrick has begun to pick the wreck to pieces, 
 lifting heavy cars bodily back upon the tracks 122 
 
 An old type of switch tower where switches and 
 
 signals are turned by hand .... 148 
 xi 
 
xii ILLUSTKATIONS 
 
 Inside the Terminal Tower where electricity does 
 
 everything except the thinking . . . 148 
 
 Bucking the drifts. A big snow plow forcing its 
 way through drifts in an effort to keep the 
 line open 210 
 
 A modern passenger locomotive. Contrast this 
 
 with the proud "dinky " below . . . 258 
 
 A veteran of Civil War days, a real "flyer " of 
 
 its time. f , , . 258 
 
The Boys' Book of Railroads 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 RAW MATERIAL 
 
 "It's as true as anything ever was," said the 
 veteran roundhouse foreman with a smile, " rail- 
 road men seem to be railroad men from the very 
 beginning, — from the time they are chaps in knee- 
 breeches. It seems to be in their blood. It 
 used to be when a boy grew up in Salem or 
 Gloucester he knew and his parents knew that 
 as soon as he got old enough to ship he'd become 
 a sailor, a whaler or fisherman or something of 
 the sort. It was the salt water. It just seemed 
 to be in the blood. The boy couldn't see any- 
 thing but the sea for a future. 
 
 "It's just that way with railroading. The 
 romance of it gets into a fellow's blood, seems 
 like. From the very beginning it takes hold of 
 you and almost before you know it you find your- 
 
2 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 self just naturally gravitating toward the place 
 where the shining steel rails and the trail of 
 cross ties lead on, off into the distance, off to the 
 other side of things you know, off to the places 
 you yearn to go. That's the last step toward 
 being a railroad man. Sooner or later you'll 
 find your way into the railroad service in some 
 job or another. After that it's like the sea — 
 once you've been associated with those big iron 
 horses and the clanking of the rails has become 
 music to your ears, you rarely get over it. Once 
 a railroad man, always a railroad man — at least 
 so it seems to me." 
 
 The wise old foreman spat, wiped off his chin, 
 and gazed off in the direction of a side track, 
 where a dozen still giants, veritable mastodons, 
 with steam roaring from their exhausts and 
 black smoke billowing from their stacks, were be- 
 ing cared for almost tenderly by the " hostlers," 
 preparatory to their departure for their night's 
 work on the division. 
 
 " Yes, sir," he mused half to himself, " it's a 
 mighty funny thing, but I guess we're all the 
 same. It's the romance of the thing, the adven- 
 ture and the pure love of it all that brings most 
 
RAW MATERIAL 3 
 
 of us into the game and keeps us there. Why, 
 some fellow not long ago — he was a mathematics 
 sharp, I guess — figured out that one out of every 
 dozen to fifteen men in the country was on the 
 pay-roll of a railroad. It don't seem possible, 
 does it, but then railroading is a great game. 
 
 " And let me tell you," he raised his voice a 
 little here and seemed to challenge contradic- 
 tion, " the men who follow railroading don't fol- 
 low it because they can't do anything else. I 
 mean it is a very high type of man we get in rail- 
 roading — not the plug-ugly, or the down and out. 
 No, sirree, they wouldn't last a day. They 
 wouldn't even get a chance at our game — they'd 
 never get through the employment office. 
 
 " Railroad men are the highest type of men you 
 can find. To be sure they are big fellows as a rule, 
 broad chested, two fisted, and men you couldn't 
 back down on anything. But they are clean, 
 clear-eyed, level-headed fellows with brains. I 
 want to emphasize that to you, young man, — 
 they have brains and they are brains that have 
 been trained to think quickly and clearly and to 
 act with the best of judgment. Unless a man 
 has a good set of machinery under his hat he 
 
4 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILKOADS 
 
 can't get very far railroading, and the better his 
 machinery is the farther he can get along the 
 line. The offices of superintendent, general 
 manager and even president with a salary of 
 fifteen to twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars 
 a year or more, if he is worth it, are open to men 
 who are climbing up from the line. They are 
 the kind of men the directors want in official 
 position, and there is many a big railroad man in 
 office to-day who started firing or as call boy in 
 a roundhouse. See that chap over there in 
 jumpers and gloves, the one just climbing into 
 the cab of No. 988, Mai Crawford, that's who he 
 is. Young fellow, isn't he, to be an engineer? 
 But Mai's the best we've got around here. He's 
 too good for his job even now at his age and the 
 bosses all know it. He's slated for a bigger 
 job — a lot bigger job. Wouldn't be at all sur- 
 prised to see him superintendent of this division 
 in a year or two, and he won't stop there. He'll 
 go higher. 
 
 " Say," he seemed to be inspired, " Mai's the 
 very man for you. If you want to know how a 
 fellow gets to be a railroad man get hold of him ; 
 get his story and you'll know what I mean when 
 
RAW MATERIAL 5 
 
 I say it is the romance of railroading that gets 
 into our blood and just won't let us get very far 
 from the sound of a locomotive whistle." 
 
 The veteran roundhouse foreman's suggestion 
 was a good one and I hurried over to the cab of 
 No. 988 to get a word with Engineer Mai Craw- 
 ford, before he began to ease his big steel horse 
 out onto that network of track of the terminal 
 yard. He smiled when I told him what I 
 wanted. Would he tell me his story? Sure, if 
 it was worth while he'd tell me all about it some 
 time when he got a chance. 
 
 But I never did get the full story from Mai, 
 only snatches of it. Most of it I gathered from 
 his friend and from other sources and what I 
 gathered follows. 
 
 ****** * 
 
 It was three hours after midnight — a " mighty 
 dirty morning " — as big Bill Sexton, brakeman 
 on No. 38, the slow Chicago freight, classified it. 
 Although the rain, that had been falling steadily 
 for two days, had left off since the hour of twelve, 
 the air was chilled and the night was overcast, 
 the blackness, blanket-like and almost suffocat- 
 ing in its thickness. 
 
6 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 It was not a strange hour for railroad men 
 to be awake and active, for these men of the 
 line know no regularity of waking and sleep- 
 ing hours, but it was a strange hour for a boy 
 of eighteen to be abroad. However, Malcolm 
 Crawford had several things on his mind that 
 morning, not the least of which was his desire 
 to be at a certain trout stream six miles from 
 town before gray dawn began breaking in the 
 east. 
 
 Up Ulster Avenue of the little town of Bridge- 
 boro, toward the railroad station, Mai swung his 
 way, fish rod in hand and home-made creel slung 
 over his shoulder. Mai felt the chill and the ex- 
 cessive blackness of the night. The half dozen 
 gas street lamps scattered along the street 
 scarcely seemed to puncture the darkness, while 
 far ahead, at the railroad tracks, red and green 
 signal lamps seemed to blink with an effort, as 
 if trying to battle against the smother of black- 
 ness. The only really strong rays that dispelled 
 the night with any success was the white shaft 
 of the powerful headlight of the big "freight 
 hog " locomotive that headed the long string of 
 cars of the Chicago freight, held on the siding, 
 
EAW MATERIAL 7 
 
 to await the passing of the Chicago limited 
 which Mai knew was due to go flying through 
 Bridgeboro within half an hour. 
 
 As the boy swung up the street toward the 
 tracks, he kept his eyes fastened on the winking 
 signal lights and the large shaft of the engine's 
 headlight. 
 
 " Doggone," he mused to himself, " that's the 
 work I'm cut out for. Railroading must be 
 about the bulliest sort of a job a fellow could 
 want. I could see a lot more of the world, live 
 out-of-doors and make something of myself at 
 that game. But here I am stuck in a down-at- 
 the-heel town in a down-at-the-heel job in a fac- 
 tory office." Mai grinned to himself. 
 
 " I don't mean down-at-the-heel — I mean down 
 and out job," he added with a smile, for that was 
 one of the problems Mai had on his mind at the 
 moment. He had lost his job. Not through 
 inefficiency. Not through any personal fault. 
 The shoe factory he had been working in had 
 been the failure. It had closed its doors the day 
 before and Mai with seventy other men of 
 Bridgeboro suddenly found himself wondering 
 what to turn to next. 
 
8 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROAD^ 
 
 It was not a big misfortune in his case, how- 
 ever, for he had his parents to fall back on. He 
 had been graduated from high school but two 
 months before and had taken the position in the 
 office of the shoe factory in order to be occupied 
 while he determined what was to be his future 
 occupation. 
 
 His short experience of office work had, how- 
 ever, taught him that working indoors cramped 
 over a desk piled with yawning ledgers was 
 not the sort of a life he would choose to lead. 
 Mai liked the out-of-doors too well for that. 
 That was the reason why he had seized his fish- 
 ing rod and creel and aroused himself at the un- 
 usual hour of three o'clock that morning. He 
 meant to spend this first day of idleness off 
 beside a trout brook, where he knew the water 
 was high and the fish would be hungry after the 
 rain. 
 
 The long siding on which the big freight 
 engine stood panting ran directly across Ulster 
 Avenue and Mai could but pause a moment and 
 watch with interest the activities of the train 
 crew, who like gnomes, with dangling lanterns, 
 moved from car to car, seizing the opportunity 
 
RAW MATERIAL 9 
 
 while the train was on the siding to inspect their 
 charges thoroughly. 
 
 Presently big Bill Sexton, brakeman, dodged 
 out from between two cars in front of Mai where 
 he had been inspecting an air brake coupling. 
 
 " Hello, old scout. Top o' the mornin' to you, 
 even though it is a mighty dirty one to be out in," 
 said the always affable Bill as he grinned at 
 MaL 
 
 " It is a sort of rotten weather, isn't it? " 
 said Mai cheerily, " but it will be good for fish- 
 ing." 
 
 " Fishing, laws, boy, I wish I were going fish- 
 ing right now instead of tinkering on this old 
 string of freights," said Bill as he removed a 
 dirty glove and felt for a handkerchief with 
 which to wipe the perspiration from his fore- 
 head. 
 
 " Huh, I wish I had your job tinkering on your 
 old freight cars. I'd like to work on a railroad, 
 believe me," said Mai with a smile. "Laying 
 over for the Chicago flyer to go down?" he 
 queried. 
 
 " Yep," replied Bill as they parted, " she's due 
 in ten minutes but I heard she was a few minutes 
 
10 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 late. That means she'll come through here 
 a-roarin', tryin' to make up time. So long. 
 Wish you luck. Hope you get a big one." 
 
 " So long," called Mai, and he swung off down 
 the long line of freight cars, crossed over in the 
 glare of the engine's headlight and started 
 stumping down the ties, for the railroad right of 
 way crossed his favorite trout stream about four 
 miles below the town of Bridgeboro. 
 
 The night seemed blacker than ever as he left 
 the headlight's glare, but Mai knew this stretch 
 of railroad as well as he knew the main street of 
 the town. 
 
 " Guess I'd best get a wiggle on if I don't want 
 to get caught in the cut with the Chicago limited 
 coming down on top of me," he said to himself 
 as he increased his stride. He knew that just 
 around the bend the track cut through a steep 
 bank of clay and rock that rose twenty feet above 
 the road-bed. It was a mighty unpleasant place 
 to be caught in while a train was passing, for if, 
 as it often happened, an up train came through 
 at the same time, one had little choice but to 
 flatten one's self against the clayey bank and 
 hope that the train would pass without hitting 
 
RAW MATERIAL 11 
 
 one. It was close and unpleasant quarters to 
 say the least, and Mai knew he would feel 
 far more comfortable with the cut behind 
 him. 
 
 Soon he was rounding the long curve that led 
 into the cut. He paused a moment to listen for 
 a sound of the expected flyer. 
 
 "I suppose I could climb up over the bank 
 and follow the wagon road. Then I'd have 
 nothing to worry about," he told himself. He 
 even paused a moment to consider the ques- 
 tion. 
 
 " Oh shucks, I might as well go on," he 
 said. "I've done it before. I can't hear her 
 coming and anyhow she's late. I'll get through 
 all right." And having made the decision he 
 pushed on, little realizing how much this de- 
 cision was going to mean to him and others in a 
 few minutes. 
 
 In the cut the darkness seemed even blacker. 
 Mai strode on as swiftly as he could over the 
 uneven ties. He could feel the damp, rain- 
 soaked walls towering over him. Rain water 
 trickled from rock to rock and splashed down 
 into the drain ditch beside the tracks. There 
 
12 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 was a raw earthy smell in the cut. Mai had 
 often smelled the same odor in the spring time 
 where frost and thaw had caused the earth to 
 slide. 
 
 Presently MaPs foot struck something soft on 
 the track. Another step and he plunged ankle 
 deep into soft earth covering the ties and rails, 
 then he stumbled over a good sized rock and 
 sprawled headlong, not to the track but into a 
 bank of earth and stone that had slid down onto 
 the track. 
 
 Even as he struggled to regain his feet he 
 became conscious of more dirt and showers of 
 pebbles falling about him. Then suddenly 
 with the roar of a great mass of earth falling, 
 Mai felt a second slide into the cut, just ahead 
 of him. Great clods from the extreme outside 
 edge of the caved-in bank plunged down upon 
 him. One caught him squarely between the 
 shoulders as he struggled to get up, and knocked 
 him flat again. Then as he rolled over more fell 
 upon him and, with a dull thud and crushing 
 force, a rock as big as his head crashed down and 
 grazed his side. Mai cried out with pain and 
 rolled over in the first agonies of the blow. He 
 
RAW MATERIAL 13 
 
 clasped his side and knew by the feeling that 
 flesh and bone had given way under that terrific 
 impact. 
 
 With a painful effort he struggled to his feet 
 again and blindly staggered out of the cut back 
 the way he had come. His head was in a whirl 
 and his mind seemed muddled and fear-struck 
 with the pain he suffered and the sudden shock 
 of it all. His only clear thought was that he 
 must get out of the cut, out of the path of the 
 sliding bank, out of danger. Almost in a panic 
 he plunged up the tracks until he knew by in- 
 stinct that he was out from between the over- 
 hanging walls of the cut. 
 
 For a moment he paused and stood between 
 the tracks swaying giddily with the pain he was 
 suffering and trying to master himself. He was 
 bewildered but in his bewilderment he knew that 
 there was something he must do — something he 
 had to do before he could give way to his pain 
 and suffering. 
 
 It was then that he thought of the Chicago 
 flyer — the express that was due to come roaring 
 through that cut in a few minutes. Somehow 
 Mai's brain cleared like a flash. He understood 
 
U THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 everything. The rains of the past two days had 
 loosened the heavy earth above the cut and it had 
 slid down onto the tracks, covering the rails with 
 several feet of earth and rocks. 
 
 He remembered vaguely hearing of a similar 
 slide in that same cut ten years past when a 
 freight train had been wrecked by it. A stone 
 retaining wall had been built then in the more 
 dangerous places in the cut, but evidently this 
 had given way under the pressure of earth and 
 rock. The tracks were buried and the Chicago 
 limited was due any minute ! 
 
 With a groan of pain and despair Mai plunged 
 forward through the darkness, staggering over 
 the tracks toward the Bridgeboro station and 
 siding where the lone freight train was being 
 held over to await the passing of the flyer. It 
 was here and only here that the fast train could 
 be stopped. Unless he could reach the freight 
 train and warn one of the crew to flag the flyer 
 the great passenger train would plunge to dis- 
 aster in the cut. 
 
 She was due in ten minutes ! It seemed hours 
 ago that Mai had heard that. Could he make it? 
 He must! He would. Forward he staggered, 
 
EAW MATERIAL 15 
 
 stumbling blindly on, suffering agonies from the 
 pain in his side. 
 
 Presently he ran clear of the turn that pre- 
 ceded the cut and had a clear view of the stretch 
 of tracks to and beyond Bridgeboro. 
 
 There on the siding stood the big freight with 
 its panting engine, the long finger-like rays 
 of its headlight reaching toward him, while 
 other lights bobbed about it and red and green 
 switch and signal lights winked at him. Oh, if 
 he were only in the glare of that headlight, he 
 could signal and shout a warning. He was half 
 afraid he would collapse before he got there. It 
 seemed so far — so far and it required so much 
 strength and will power for him to go on. 
 
 Suddenly he was spurred on to renewed effort 
 by still another light. Away beyond Bridge- 
 boro, deep, deep into the darkness of the night, 
 he saw a glow above the track, the red glow of an 
 open furnace door, while the tops of the trees 
 were faintly lit by the white glare of another 
 headlight. It was the Chicago limited roaring 
 through the night, plunging swiftly forward 
 toward him and the cut behind him and the sure 
 destruction that awaited it. 
 
16 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILKOADS 
 
 Mai cried out in his anxiety and with every 
 ounce of strength plunged forward. On and on 
 he pushed himself, shouting at the top of his 
 voice between great sobs of breath. 
 
 Oh, if he could only make some one hear, — 
 some one hear and understand. It could not be ! 
 It must not be. That flying train loaded with 
 hundreds of human lives must not plunge into 
 the cut to be derailed and wrecked by the slide. 
 
 On and on he struggled. Oh, if he could only 
 reach the white glare of the headlight on the 
 freight engine. Then the engineer and fireman 
 would see him and perhaps understand. 
 
 He struggled on a hundred feet more. The 
 glow of the fires of the flyer and the glare of its 
 headlight were growing more distinct with every 
 passing second. At a mile a minute she was 
 rushing toward him. And he, on clumsy feet 
 and with aching side and splitting head, was 
 racing with her, racing to reach the freight and 
 the assistance of the freight crew. 
 
 Fifty feet more and he would be in that path- 
 way of light from the freight engine's lamp. 
 Twenty-five feet, twenty, fifteen. He was stag- 
 gering now and waving his arms like a madman. 
 
EAW MATEEIAL 17 
 
 He felt his strength going and the grip of his will 
 power failing. 
 
 On he stumbled. A few feet more, only a 
 few. He could hear the roar of the flyer far 
 down the tracks. She was late and tearing 
 through space to make up for lost time. He 
 must save her! He must! He was almost be- 
 side himself now in his agony. Pain and fear 
 of the catastrophe that would result if he failed 
 had made him beside himself. He shouted, he 
 screamed in terror and waved his arms. He 
 stumbled, fell forward, rolled over and dragged 
 himself to his knees. He tried to get up. His 
 strength was all but spent. It took a mighty 
 effort, but he reached his feet. He took one step 
 forward and stopped, swayed a moment, then 
 collapsed in a heap, for everything had gone 
 black. There, almost lifeless he lay in the white 
 rays of the freight engine's headlight sprawled 
 across the rails and the ties, helpless. 
 
 ******* 
 
 Dave Dickson, engineer of the freight locomo- 
 tive, waiting for the limited to go by so he could 
 start his long train out of the siding, was start- 
 led to see, from the cab window, the form of a 
 
18 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 boy staggering blindly up the tracks in the glare 
 of his engine's headlight. The lad seemed fran- 
 tic. He was waving his arms and shouting like 
 a maniac. Then he collapsed into an apparently 
 lifeless heap almost in front of the locomotive. 
 
 "What in time — quick, Jim, something's 
 wrong. That chap out there, did you see him? " 
 Jim Britton, the fireman, had seen him and he 
 and the engineer swung down from opposite 
 sides of the cab at the same moment. The 
 engineer bumped into the burly form of big Bill 
 Sexton as he landed on the ground. 
 
 " Quick, Bill, something's wrong," he shouted, 
 and the three rushed over to the limp form be- 
 tween the rails. The engineer stooped down 
 and turned Mai over on his back. Big Bill Sex- 
 ton recognized him immediately. 
 
 "It's the chap who was going fishing. He 
 went down the track. Look, he's covered with 
 
 mud and dirt. He Great guns, he was 
 
 making for that cut and— and " 
 
 " Bill, there's something wrong. Listen, he's 
 talking. 'The cut — limited — cave in.' Great 
 Scott, Bill, quick, flag the limited, — flag it some- 
 thing's wrong. Something's happened in " 
 
EAW MATERIAL 19 
 
 But Bill Sexton was not there. He was leap- 
 ing across the track and waving Ms lantern 
 madly toward the roaring limited now rushing 
 up the stretch of tracks paralleling the siding. 
 
 It was a tense and awful moment. Even Bill 
 Sexton, with all his railroad training, shouted at 
 the top of his voice as the big engine of the 
 limited roared past, forgetting that his voice 
 could scarcely carry above the roar of the big 
 locomotive. 
 
 But the engineer of the limited had seen his 
 light just in time. Two short querulous shrieks 
 sounded from the flyer's whistle, then, with a 
 hiss, the air let go and sparks flew as the brake- 
 shoes clamped down on the grinding wheels. 
 But with all this the great train crunched and 
 clanked a hundred yards further down the tracks 
 before she came to a full stop. 
 
 ******* 
 
 " Two broken ribs and slight internal injuries 
 that will not prove serious," Mai heard some one 
 say as if through a fog. Then he opened his eyes 
 to find himself in his own room at home so 
 trussed up in bandages that he could scarcely 
 move. 
 
20 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILBOADS 
 
 A strange physician, and the local physi- 
 cian of Bridgeboro were bending over him. 
 There was a white-capped nurse in the room, too, 
 and his father and another man, a very stern 
 looking man, were standing at the foot of the 
 bed. 
 
 "Ah, he's conscious," said the strange physi- 
 cian, whereupon every one in the room looked at 
 him and he felt very much embarrassed. 
 
 " Fine ! " exclaimed the very stern looking 
 stranger. " You've been pretty badly off these 
 three days past, young fellow. You had us all 
 worried, even though we did know you had a fine, 
 clean, strong young body to fight with. I feel 
 better now to know you are nearer being alive 
 than dead, as you have been. I'm Buckman, the 
 superintendent of this division. Came up to-day 
 to see how our railroad physician and nurse were 
 taking care of you. But now that you're con- 
 scious, I want to thank you for what you did and 
 the lives and property you saved for us the other 
 night. And let me add, that when you are well 
 I want to see you in my office at Kingsland. 
 Bill Sexton tells me you are interested in rail- 
 roading and your dad here confirms it. That's 
 
EAW MATEKIAL 21 
 
 fine. There will be a job waiting for you when 
 you report at Kingsland, my boy, for we need 
 just your kind in railroading." 
 
 ******* 
 
 That is how Mai Crawford got into railroad- 
 ing. But he did not get in because of his heroic 
 act alone. He got in because, as Superintendent 
 Bucknian said, the railroad needed just his kind, 
 men with courage, grit, and a fine, well-trained, 
 quick-acting brain. 
 
 Eailroading is comparable with no other voca- 
 tion or trade because of the responsibilities the 
 men employed in it are called upon to bear. 
 Where in any other trade or occupation, save 
 perhaps that of pilot, does one man or one little 
 group of men hold the safety of hundreds of 
 human beings and thousands of dollars' worth of 
 property in his hand, so to speak? In what 
 other line of employment does the safety of so 
 many and so much depend upon the clearness of 
 eye and the swiftness of thought? 
 
 The men who operate our railroads are picked 
 from among their fellow men as best fitted for 
 the responsibilities that are given them. They 
 are educated and well read, they are sober, in- 
 
22 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 dustrious, upstanding citizens. Indeed, they 
 must be, for look what they are called upon to 
 do. 
 
 It is their daily task to move great groups of 
 human beings or valuable cargoes of freight over 
 the country in rushing trains that must make 
 speed on their steel highway. They are called 
 upon to do this and keep their trains moving in 
 time and in relation to other similar trains, to 
 switch and shunt the cars here, there and every- 
 where and always in safety. A crash between 
 trains or cars of a train is all too often fatal to 
 life and dangerous to property. 
 
 To do this these men of the railroads must 
 know the giant steel steeds they pilot as thor- 
 oughly as a boy knows his parents, or the parents 
 know their boy. They must be able to handle it 
 and control it under all conditions and circum- 
 stances. 
 
 They must know the hundreds of miles of 
 tracks and side tracks, with their tunnels, cross- 
 ings, grades, and bridges, and their myriads of 
 switches and sidings, as well as a pilot knows the 
 river he navigates. Indeed, these men in over- 
 alls and jumper must be as familiar with the 
 
EAW MATERIAL 23 
 
 line as the average boy is familiar with the street 
 he lives on. 
 
 Signals, train schedules, and a host of operat- 
 ing details must be so clear in their minds that 
 the knowledge is automatic. Never once dare 
 they make a mistake, for not one of them knows 
 but what a single mistake may mean an appal- 
 ling loss of life and the destruction of millions of 
 dollars in property. 
 
 When all this is considered we can easily 
 understand why railroad men are picked men, 
 why Superintendent Buckman was so eager and 
 willing, ten years ago, to induce Mai Crawford 
 to become a railroad man. He saw in Mai the 
 type of boy he knew would develop into the type 
 of man that the railroads must depend upon. 
 And we can understand why the veteran round- 
 house foreman assured us that Crawford was 
 bound for a higher and better job with even 
 greater responsibilities than those that are his as 
 engineer. 
 
 Indeed, even while this book is being writ- 
 ten Mai (of course that is not his real name, 
 for he would not care to have his real name 
 used) has been elevated one step nearer to the 
 office of superintendent of the division. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 IN THE CAB 
 
 Ask the average locomotive engineer if he ever 
 had any thrilling experiences, any narrow 
 escapes or any really close situations where 
 quick thinking and quick action were demanded, 
 and he'll say no. 
 
 " Shucks/' rumbled a great, big powerful fel- 
 low with closely cropped hair, who drives a fast 
 passenger train into Jersey City every morning, 
 " shucks, no. There aren't any thrills, just 
 plain humdrum every-day experiences. That's 
 all." 
 
 Any fireman you ask will tell you the same 
 thing. 
 
 They are not evading the question. They 
 
 are truthful when they make the statements they 
 
 do, for to most of them the expression " all in a 
 
 day's work " means just that and nothing more. 
 
 But the average human being knows that they 
 24 
 
IN THE CAB 25 
 
 are wrong. They are constantly facing situa- 
 tions that would make the other fellow's hair 
 stand on end and his courage ooze out of his 
 finger tips. Indeed, they have become so accus- 
 tomed to quick thinking and quick action that 
 they hardly know how to distinguish the heroic 
 from the commonplace. 
 
 Take the experience of Fireman Tracy — Jim 
 Tracy, we'll call him, for he is too modest to be 
 willing to have his name appear in print. . 
 
 Jim Tracy was firing for Gordon Nixon on No. 
 
 8, the fast passenger express between S 
 
 and W . No. 956 was their engine, one of 
 
 those hard coal burning, camel back type, where 
 the cab is perched midway on the boiler and the 
 fire pot reaches to the rear. On engines of this 
 kind the driver is alone by himself cooped up in 
 his cab forward, while the fireman is between the 
 fire box and the tender — a mighty unsociable 
 sort of an arrangement since the two men are 
 separated by ten or twelve feet of boiler with 
 only a narrow board foot-path by way of reach- 
 ing each other in case of trouble. 
 
 But Nixon and Tracy had been driving old 956 
 so long that the arrangement had grown to be 
 
26 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 perfectly satisfactory. Up forward the engineer 
 operated the train, knowing full well that behind 
 him Tracy was firing with the care and attention 
 that all good firemen devote to their work. 
 Number 8 was an evening train out from 
 
 S that made a run of 148 miles to 
 
 W arriving there in the small hours of the 
 
 morning. It was a fast run with but few more 
 than half a dozen stops and these only at the big 
 
 towns on the way to W which is the state 
 
 capital. Every night they pulled out of the ter- 
 minal at S at 9.35 promptly and every 
 
 morning at ten minutes after two they arrived at 
 
 W , old No. 956 thundering into the train 
 
 shed, snorting and puffing for all the world like 
 a big animal of steel whose brazen lungs were 
 heaving and panting after the run. But there 
 came a morning when the hour of two ten passed 
 and No. 8 did not put in her appearance at the 
 W terminal. Indeed it was after three be- 
 fore she rolled into the train shed and wonder of 
 wonders, it was not Nixon but a strange engineer 
 who climbed down from the cab, while a mighty 
 relieved looking Tracy swung down from behind 
 the fire box. It all happened this way. 
 
EST THE CAB 27 
 
 It was a cold but snowless December night. 
 Nixon and Tracy buttoned their overcoats about 
 them as they left the warm companionship of the 
 glowing stove in the bunk house. Lunch pails 
 in hand, they began picking their way toward 
 the roundhouse across the network of track in 
 the yard. Eed and green signal lamps seemed 
 to wink and blink in the frosty air, while above 
 them gaunt semaphore arms with their equip- 
 ment of lights stood out against the cold starlit 
 night sky. 
 
 Across the yard was the roundhouse, from 
 which rolled clouds of black smoke and white 
 steam, to be whipped away into the night by the 
 bleak wind. Beside this strange looking stable 
 for the engines were the glowing ash-pits about 
 which gnome-like figures worked with long 
 pokers cleaning out the fire boxes of several 
 powerful locomotives, that, with their day's work 
 done, were being made ready for their rest period 
 in the stalls of the roundhouse. 
 
 Beyond the ash-pits on another track were 
 several other engines, their fires up, and 
 steam hissing from cylinders and exhausts, look- 
 ing for all the world like steeds champing at 
 
28 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 their bits and waiting to be off. Busy hostlers 
 and wipers were pottering about giving them 
 their final touches before their departure for the 
 night's run. 
 
 One of these was Nixon's 956 and the engineer 
 and fireman automatically looked the big camel 
 back over as they approached. Stripping off his 
 overcoat, Tracy climbed up between fire box and 
 tender. The scorching heat from the furnace 
 doors as he swung them open to inspect the fires 
 felt mighty good after the bleak winds of the 
 night. 
 
 Nixon did not climb to his place immedi- 
 ately. Instead, he reached into the cab for kero- 
 sene torch and long goose-necked oil can, and, 
 with this in one hand and the light in the other 
 he began to inspect his big charge, squirting tiny 
 jets of oil into various places with a care that 
 almost suggested affection for the big beast. 
 
 Presently he finished, and, with a word to 
 Tracy about the yellow train order sheet he held 
 in his hand, he went forward and climbed into 
 his cab. Then he eased steam into the cylinders 
 and with a great hissing and snorting the engine 
 rumbled slowly across one switch after another 
 
IN THE CAB 29 
 
 and backed down toward the train shed where, 
 on track three, the string of coaches and sleepers 
 had already been made up and were waiting for 
 the engine to be coupled fast. 
 
 At 9.35 on the dot Nixon saw the yard signals 
 giving him all clear, and with the monotonous 
 call of the train crew's " All aboard ! " echoing 
 through the terminal and the clanging of iron 
 gates, No. 8 started rumbling off on her nightly 
 trip. 
 
 Across the switches of the yard they clanked, 
 then through the roaring gas-filled tunnels and 
 out onto the broad meadows that reached away 
 toward the distant mountain. Here the winking 
 signal lights were left behind and Nixon knew 
 that he had a clear track with plenty of room for 
 speed until he struck the stiff grade that would 
 let them into the mountains through which their 
 
 way to W— led. Slowly the engineer 
 
 opened the throttle and No. 956, as if eager to be 
 unleashed, rushed forward with a roar, drag- 
 ging its snake-like appendage of coaches and 
 sleeper through the night at forty-five miles an 
 hour. 
 
 On and on they thundered while Tracy, know- 
 
30 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 ing each, curve and grade, watched his fires and 
 steam gauges to see that the engine had power 
 enough to carry her through. Past fields, 
 through sleeping towns, over bridges, through 
 cuts and tunnels they roared, the engine's siren- 
 like whistle shrieking warnings as they raced 
 through the night. 
 
 The first hour of the run had slipped by when, 
 suddenly, Tracy got a strange presentiment that 
 something was wrong. He became peculiarly 
 uneasy. He wondered what it was that dis- 
 turbed him. He paused a moment in his shovel- 
 ing and listened. There was nothing wrong 
 about the rhythmic throbbing of the engine and 
 the constant clanking rumble of the big drive 
 wheels over the rails. It was all quite regular 
 and as it should be. Quite too regular, Tracy 
 began to think. He noticed that there was 
 hardly a variation in the speed of the train. It 
 had gone on at the same high rate of speed for 
 goodness knows how long. There had been no 
 slowing up for crossings or curves. 
 
 Even as Tracy was turning the matter over in 
 his mind, the train struck a sharp curve which 
 Tracy instantly recognized as one at which 
 
IN THE CAB 31 
 
 Nixon always eased up a little in his speed. 
 There was no change in speed to-night ; the train 
 struck the curve art a smashing rate and whipped 
 around it under such perilous headway that 
 Tracy staggered across the narrow confines of 
 his own cab. He wondered as he clutched to 
 save himself from falling, why the rear cars of 
 the train were not snapped off the tracks. 
 
 Then another disturbing situation arose in 
 Tracy's mind. He recalled that he had not 
 heard the deep-throated whistle of the locomotive 
 for a long time despite the fact that several seri- 
 ous grade crossings and at least three whistle 
 posts had been passed during the last ten 
 minutes. 
 
 "What on earth ails Nixon to-night? He's 
 running like a madman. Why doesn't he blow? 
 Why ? " 
 
 Tracy stopped, startled at the thought that 
 flashed through his brain. 
 
 Could anything have happened to Nixon? 
 Was he ill? Was he injured? Was he (Tracy 
 shuddered at the thought) dead at the throttle? 
 The fireman had heard of such an accident on 
 another line and it frightened him to think that 
 
32 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILROADS 
 
 perhaps his partner had passed away of heart 
 failure or something else up there in his little 
 cab, and the train with its precious freight 
 of human beings was roaring down the night 
 with a dead man's hand clutching the throt- 
 tle. 
 
 Tracy leaped to the window of his own cab 
 and looked ahead. For several seconds he strove 
 to pierce the blackness with eyes that were 
 blinded by the glare of the furnace. And as the 
 outline of the cab became clear to his vision he 
 gasped with surprise, for he was certain that he 
 could see the limp form of Nixon hanging out of 
 the window of the engineer's compartment, one 
 arm flapping loosely against the cab's side, while 
 his head rolled on his shoulder each time the 
 engine swayed. 
 
 A closer scrutiny left no doubt in Tracy's 
 mind of what he saw, and he knew that he must 
 climb to the engineer's cab and take control of 
 the flying train immediately. But what a task 
 that was to be ! Tracy saw it only as a matter 
 of duty, nor did he reckon the risks he would 
 have to run. "Not once did he consider that 
 only a narrow path of board scarcely six inches 
 
IN THE CAB 33 
 
 wide afforded him access to the cab. Not once 
 did he think of the perilous rate the train was 
 going, of the curves ahead around which it 
 would careen in its mad flight onward, of the 
 cutting cold of the December night and the roar- 
 ing arctic wind created by the train's headlong 
 plunge. None of these factors entered Tracy's 
 mind, or if they did they did not cause him to 
 hesitate a fraction of a second. 
 
 Without even pulling on his overcoat, though 
 his body reeked with sweat from the heat of the 
 fires, he climbed through the narrow doorway 
 of his cab, and, clutching at the iron railing, 
 crept out on to the narrow pathway that led to 
 Mxon's cab. The blast of cold air that struck 
 him caused him to gasp for breath, and the sway- 
 ing of the speeding engine made him cling on 
 with all his strength. 
 
 Stronger courage than Tracy's would have 
 failed there, for every inch of that fifteen feet of 
 plank was covered with ice crystals from the 
 moisture of the condensing steam that had spat- 
 tered there and frozen in the cold December 
 air. 
 
 But Tracy's courage was plussed by that sense 
 
34 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 of responsibility that all railroad men possess. 
 Never once did he think of his own safety. His 
 thoughts were all for the lives that were in those 
 snug coaches and sleepers behind him, all bliss- 
 fully unconcious of their peril. 
 
 Tracy crept forward slowly, grimly, despite 
 the numbing cold that had driven the blood from 
 his face and fingers; despite the swaying of the 
 big steel giant that now, without the restraint of 
 human control, seemed to Tracy to be bent on 
 running away — running amuck and wrecking 
 itself and the cars it carried on some perilous 
 grade or at some dangerous crossing. 
 
 Inch by inch the fireman moved forward. His 
 progress was slow — all too painfully slow for 
 him, for into his brain were crowding a thousand 
 terrible thoughts of curves and crossings ahead, 
 of open switches, perhaps, and towns where 
 speed must be controlled. 
 
 He was half-way across that perilous space — 
 half-way to the cab, where he could see distinctly 
 now the pathetic figure of the unconscious Nixon 
 lolling out of the cab window — when ahead 
 loomed just the hideous situation he had con- 
 jured. 
 
IN THE CAB 35 
 
 Far up the track lie saw the ominous red light 
 of an open switch while beyond it crawling 
 slowly into a siding was a freight train, trying 
 in its tortoise-like way to get out of the path 
 of the flying passenger train. 
 
 It was the midnight way-freight that always 
 laid over in this siding to let the flying passenger 
 train go by. Tracy recognized it and his heart 
 sank. No. 8 had been booming along at such a 
 terrific speed that it had overrun its schedule, and 
 he knew now that, unless he could reach the throt- 
 tle in a matter of seconds, his train would over- 
 take the freight before it had drawn its full and 
 cumbersome length onto the siding. 
 
 There would be a rear-end collision and 
 
 the Tracy muttered a prayer as he thought 
 
 of the consequences. 
 
 All caution thrown to the wind, the fireman 
 worked his way along the narrow path at re- 
 doubled speed. How he clung on he himself 
 could not tell you. He only knew he must hurry, 
 for every fraction of a second meant something 
 now. 
 
 At last, in safety, he reached the narrow door- 
 way of the engineer's cab, and stepping through 
 
36 THE BOYS' BOOK OF BAILKOADS 
 
 and over the body of Nixon lie reached for the 
 throttle. A glance ahead made him gasp with 
 horror. The ominous, red blinking eye of the 
 switch seemed almost before him, while up the 
 tracks he could see the glimmering lights Of the 
 caboose directly in the path of No. 8. 
 
 Desperately he shifted the throttle, and 
 grasped the air brake lever. His hands moved 
 with lightning swiftness but with precision. 
 Then as the air hissed through the pipes he 
 deluged the tracks with sand from the sand chest 
 and breathed another prayer. 
 
 Sparks flew from every brake-shoe, the engine 
 lurched and its brakes shrieked as if in protest 
 at being throttled down. The headway decreased 
 swiftly but not swift enough to suit Tracy. 
 Sliding and grinding along the rails the heavy 
 train plunged on toward the switch light. 
 Tracy watched with eyes bulging. Would it 
 stop in time? Could a collision be avoided? He 
 yanked again at the air, and threw down more 
 sand. The brakes seemed suddenly to clutch on 
 with renewed vigor, and with a clank and a rattle 
 and a jolt that shook the whole vertebrae of cars, 
 No. 8 came to a dead stop not twenty feet from 
 
The engineer is a very high type of railroad man. He 
 must be, for to his care are entrusted human lives 
 and millions of dollars in property 
 
 The track walker is a trouble hunter, always searching 
 for defects along the line. He walks a good many 
 weary miles a day 
 
IN THE CAB 37 
 
 the open switch and the caboose of the way- 
 freight that was just crossing onto the siding. 
 
 " Did it, by George ! " was all that Tracy said, 
 then solicitously he turned to Nixon. 
 
 ******* 
 
 It was the engineer from the locomotive of the 
 
 way-freight who finished the run to W 
 
 while Nixon, suffering from a fractured skull 
 from a stone that dropped from a grade crossing 
 bridge through the cab window, was left at the 
 hospital in Blue Lake. 
 
 That heroic achievement was " all in a day's 
 work " for Tracy, and he hardly ever mentioned 
 the episode to his friends in the roundhouse. 
 To be sure he was made an engineer soon after- 
 ward and perhaps his heroic action had a great 
 deal to do with his quick promotion, but the fact 
 remains that he had accepted the perils of the 
 situation as part of his duty, and after the cli- 
 max was passed he felt quite sure that his life 
 as a railroad man was really a humdrum exist- 
 ence after all. 
 
 The way up to a position in the cab of a loco- 
 motive, which to us all seems to be the most in- 
 teresting position one could possibly hold in rail- 
 
38 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILBOADS 
 
 roading, is long and tedious and crowded with 
 hard work, uncertain hours and serious respon- 
 sibilities. 
 
 Jim Tracy attained those heights while still a 
 young man, yet he had been railroading nearly 
 ten years before he finally got his hands on the 
 throttle of his own engine. 
 
 Let us, for an example, trace his progress from 
 the time he first discovered that the only way he 
 could be thoroughly happy through life was to 
 be in the service of a railroad. 
 
 He was a boy of eighteen then, just out of high 
 school. For several years he had been hearing 
 the call of the railroad. From the windows of 
 his school he could look out across the fields to 
 the highways of steel that reached out across 
 the country leading to distant points ; places that 
 he longed to visit. 
 
 Most of his leisure time he spent at the train 
 station, absorbing railroad romance, listening to 
 the clatter of the Morse keys, and making friends 
 with the trainmen who periodically put in their 
 appearance at the long freight shed across the 
 track while their trains dropped off or took on 
 cars. 
 
IN THE CAB 39 
 
 At eighteen, having graduated from high 
 school, he heeded the call and taking a train to 
 
 S , the terminal, he found his way to the 
 
 employment office. He underwent a close scru- 
 tiny there, for the men who hire railroad em- 
 ployees are most careful of the human timber 
 they pick to build into their road. 
 
 But Tracy had a clear eye that told of a clean, 
 quick thinking mind within. He had a smile, 
 too, and his fingers were free from that smudgy 
 yellow that tells of cigarettes. Tracy passed 
 inspection with flying colors and was told to 
 report to the foreman of the roundhouse. 
 
 "Roundhouse," that was a magic name to 
 Tracy. He had seen one only at a distance and 
 how he yearned to have a peep inside! Would 
 he report? At double quick and in a real hurry. 
 
 Armed with the card that told inquisitive 
 people that he was now an employee of the road, 
 employee No. 5787, Tracy left the office in the 
 terminal building, and with new blue jumper and 
 overalls rolled in a bundle under his arm and a 
 sandwich or two in his pocket by way of lunch, 
 he found his way into the busy terminal railroad 
 yards. 
 
40 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILEOADS 
 
 For a few minutes the big and extremely busy 
 yard almost awed this boy from the sleepy coun- 
 try village. But Tracy gradually mastered a 
 feeling akin to panic that the bigness of the yard 
 had caused, and, standing on an island of safety 
 between the tracks, he decided to have a good 
 look about him and take in all the details of 
 this huge railroad plant. 
 
 His eye swept the busy expanse of tracks (he 
 learned later that there were nearly 150 miles of 
 trackage in the yard with several hundred 
 switches) with the endless procession of cars, its 
 snorting engines, and myriad of gaunt sema- 
 phore signals. 
 
 Into the train shed were backing and drill- 
 ing passenger and Pullman coaches while to his 
 right near the long freight houses, he noted the 
 fact that all the activities seemed to be with the 
 constantly drilling freight cars. Here, he learned 
 later, the freight cars were being sorted accord- 
 ing to their destinations and made up into trains, 
 some for the south, some for the north and some 
 for transcontinental shipment. It was a busy 
 scene, indeed, and for a time it held him spell- 
 bound. 
 
m THE CAB 41 
 
 But soon Ms roving eyes picked out the sooty, 
 grimy looking roundhouse, with the glowing, 
 steaming ash-pits hard by. There were strings 
 of inactive giants clustered about the place, some 
 being wiped and polished, some having fires 
 drawn and fire boxes flushed out with hoses, 
 some proceeding in a leisurely way to their stalls 
 in the big round stable, to rest after a long run, 
 some just emerging from the roundhouse, fires 
 built, exhausts hissing and plumes of smoke ris- 
 ing gracefully from their stacks. They were 
 waiting for the master hand at the throttle to 
 guide them to the waiting trains to be started on 
 some overland journey. 
 
 It was while he watched this activity that 
 Tracy got the real thrill of railroading and he 
 knew then that never could he be happy until he 
 could grip the throttle of his own engine. He 
 little dreamed then that he would acquire his 
 engine in the spectacular way he did. 
 
 His nerves were all atingle with anticipation, 
 and it was with eager tread that he picked his 
 way across the intricacy of tracks toward the 
 roundhouse. 
 
 He found the foreman of engines in his little, 
 
42 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 booth-like office against the wall of the round- 
 house. He was a gray-haired, keen-eyed veteran 
 of the road, and when Tracy presented his em- 
 ployment credentials he felt very nervous and 
 he had to gulp down a lump in his throat before 
 he could speak clearly. 
 
 " I — I — I've come from " he began. 
 
 " Sure, I know. You're Tracy. Just got a 
 call on the 'phone about you," said the foreman. 
 Then he was silent again as he looked deep into 
 the big brown eyes of the boy from the country 
 village. 
 
 " You'll do, I guess," he said succinctly. Then 
 he added kindly, " Get into your jeans and I'll 
 turn you over to O'Brien. He'll show you where 
 to start." 
 
 That was the beginning of Tracy's career as 
 a railroad man. He was a humble messenger 
 boy first, carrying orders and messages about the 
 domains of the engine foreman, and routing out 
 engineers and firemen to tell them of their runs. 
 He was not long at this, however, and then he 
 became one of the dozens of men who were 
 tinkering about the big giants of the round- 
 house. These men were called " hostlers " and 
 
W THE CAB 43 
 
 wipers. He considered it strange that the name 
 " hostler " should apply to these men who cared 
 for and polished up the engines, but when he 
 found that each engine had a "stall" in the 
 roundhouse he quickly deduced that these names 
 were strange survivals of the days before steam 
 engines were known and railroads were run by 
 horses. 
 
 Tracy worked hard and willingly as an at- 
 tendant to the engines and you may be sure that 
 he examined and studied and asked questions 
 about every mechanical part and contrivance of 
 the huge mastodons of the line. He absorbed 
 the real spirit of railroading there and the pleas- 
 ure he got in listening to the gossip of the round- 
 house and in the association with the men made 
 him more than ever convinced that he had made 
 no mistake in selecting railroading as his 
 vocation. 
 
 By asking questions and listening to the gossip 
 of the roundhouse Tracy learned a host of things 
 worth while and that later were to stand him in 
 good stead. He took special pains to learn the 
 meaning of the red lights of danger, the yellow 
 lights of slow and cautious operating. He 
 
44 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILKOADS 
 
 learned the meaning of the different positions of 
 semaphore arms. He discovered that on some 
 roads these indicated a system of blocks of sec- 
 tions of tracks and that no two trains were per- 
 mitted to be in the same section at the same time. 
 He learned the meaning of switch lamps, and 
 how the one type of switch differed from another 
 in that some were turned by hand while others 
 were operated from switch towers at some dis- 
 tant point, the operating being done by elec- 
 tricity, compressed air or another form of hand 
 levers which was fast passing out of existence. 
 He committed to memory the train signals 
 sounded by means of the locomotive which he 
 mentally catalogued in this way. 
 
 Short blast, stop apply brakes. Two long 
 blasts, release brakes. Two short and three long 
 blasts, flagman go back along the tracks with 
 flags, torpedoes or caution lights to protect the 
 rear and warn approaching trains that a train 
 ahead is stalled. Five long blasts, flagman is 
 called to return to train. Three long blasts, 
 train in motion has parted. Three short blasts, 
 standing train must back. Four short blasts, a 
 call to conductor, trainman or switchman for 
 
IN THE CAB , 45 
 
 signals. Two short blasts, acknowledgment of 
 signals. One long and two short blasts, calls 
 attention to train following on same track. Two 
 long and two short blasts, warning at high- 
 way crossing. One extra long blast announces 
 approach to station, junction or grade cross- 
 ing. 
 
 The code of hand signals between engineer 
 and some one standing on or near the track puz- 
 zled him for a long time until he mentally cata- 
 logued them thus: hand or arm swung across 
 the track, stop. Hand or arm raised and lowered 
 vertically, proceed. Hand or arm swung verti- 
 cally in circle across the track meant that a 
 standing train should back or that a train in 
 motion had parted. Hand or arm swung in a 
 circle called for air brakes. Hand held at arm's 
 length above head called for brakes to be re- 
 leased. He also learned that any object waved 
 violently by any person on or near the tracks 
 was a stop signal. 
 
 All these and hundreds of other interesting de- 
 tails he learned and stored away in his memory 
 for future use. He even rigged up a Morse 
 key in his boarding-house bedroom, and after 
 
46 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 hours lie practiced sending on this, for lie 
 was determined to become a first rate railroad 
 man. 
 
 He sought and created opportunities to climb 
 into engine cabs and study the gauges and 
 other mechanism there. He learned to operate 
 the control levers, and after a time, usually 
 nights, he got permission to start and stop the 
 engines that were being shunted out of their 
 stalls onto the big turntable in the center of 
 the roundhouse, which provided means for turn- 
 ing the hundred ton giants. 
 
 Then one day came the longed-for opportunity. 
 Somehow there was a shortage of men in the 
 staff of the train-master. He needed two firemen 
 and needed them badly. He communicated with 
 the engine foreman for suggestions and the keen 
 old boss of the roundhouse assured him that 
 Tracy and another chap of Tracy's age were the 
 brightest boys to be had. 
 
 They were called before the train-master, who 
 looked them over critically but with a good- 
 humored smile on his face. 
 
 "Both of you have the arms and shoulders 
 of young giants. If you have the brains that 
 
IN THE CAB 47! 
 
 should go with 'em to make a railroad man, 
 you'll do." 
 
 Enthusiastic Jim Tracy was elated. To be 
 sure, he was assigned to the crew of a freight 
 engine, for that is the bottom rung of the lad- 
 der on most roads, and thereafter he fired for 
 grim old Dave Carroll, on 'No. 1090, a freight 
 engine of no mean standing in the roundhouse. 
 Tracy knew 1090, for he had wiped and polished 
 her bulging flanks many a time. 
 
 It was as fireman of the freight hauler that 
 he learned what really hard work was. To 
 heave countless shovels of coal into the yawning 
 maw of the fire box for hours in a stretch called 
 for the back and shoulders of a Hercules and 
 muscles and sinews of steel. 
 
 It was hard work, but Tracy loved it and he 
 was never happier than when he was in the sway- 
 ing cab of the huge locomotive. 
 
 He studied the engine as a cavalryman studies 
 his horse. He knew just how much coal was 
 needed to bring her steam gauge clicking up to 
 eighty and a hundred pounds or better. He 
 studied the line, too, and learned each grade and 
 curve of the division, for he soon discovered that 
 
48 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 grades and curves demanded more power, and 
 more power meant more steam, and more steam, 
 steadier and hotter fires. 
 
 Soon he was getting along famously and 1090 
 did some exceptional work in hauling the clank- 
 ing freights across the division. Grim Dave 
 Carroll knew he had a real fireman "beside him, 
 one who knew his job and knew it well. He 
 warmed to the boy with real affection and told 
 him frankly that he was good enough to go into 
 the passenger service. 1 1 
 
 Tracy got into the passenger service in due 
 time. Gordon Nixon, the driver of 956, had been 
 watching him for a long time and when his fire- 
 man was given an engine, he asked to have Tracy 
 made a member of his crew. 
 
 Again the bright chap from the country, now a 
 man in the twenties, found that he had more to 
 learn. 
 
 Firing a passenger locomotive required even 
 more careful attention than his old job. But he 
 bent to the work with a will, despite the fact that 
 more than once by careful estimation he discov- 
 ered that he shoveled between twelve and fifteen 
 tons of coal into the fire box on a run. Still* 
 
IN THE CAB 49 
 
 with all his hard work, he found time to study the 
 line. Every bridge, every crossing, every siding, 
 every switch, he added to his mental catalogue of 
 grades and curves until gradually he began to 
 know the division as well as a river pilot knows 
 the stream he navigates. He learned more about 
 the mechanism of the engine, too, and he ab- 
 sorbed every scrap of knowledge he could gather, 
 for he was preparing; — preparing for the time 
 when he should be called, perhaps at the most 
 unexpected moment, to assume command of the 
 engine, nor did he guess how soon or through 
 what circumstance this call would come. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 WITH THE TRAIN CREW 
 
 Jerry West was a veteran of the line. Also 
 Jerry was a cripple, one of a big army of men 
 who have sacrificed an arm or leg or even life in 
 the service of a railroad, for railroading, al- 
 though the lines to-day are operated under the 
 most careful supervision and by the best engi- 
 neering brains in the country, can scarcely be 
 called a vocation to which no danger is attached. 
 But, thanks to greater knowledge and experi- 
 ences, a multiplicity of safety devices, the elim- 
 ination of whiskey and all that goes with it, 
 and the coming of a keener, brighter, and more 
 intelligent lot of men into the service, the danger 
 in railroading to-day has been reduced to almost 
 nothing when compared with danger attending 
 the work in the old days. 
 
 Jerry West was a product of the old days. 
 
 He was a brakeman, a member of a train crew 
 
 thirty years ago, when that great invention, the 
 
 50 
 
WITH THE TRAIN CREW 51 
 
 air brake, was young and not in universal use. 
 Because Jerry West had the misfortune to be a 
 product of those times when certain appliances 
 that since have been perfected were in their 
 crude form and surgery was not what it is to- 
 day, he has gone about for three decades with 
 but one arm, and has been a pensioner of the 
 road, a gateman. Jerry lost his arm in the per- 
 formance of his duty as a brakeman on a freight 
 train. 
 
 "Them were days when railroading was a 
 rough, tough and nasty proposition," Jerry as- 
 sured the writer, in telling his story. 
 
 " Sure there was air brakes and they worked 
 too ; but they was expensive, that they were, and 
 it wasn't every road that had them, nor did 
 every train on them what had them have them." 
 (There was no questioning Jerry's nationality 
 after that, for none but a true Irishman could 
 have done a better job at manhandling the King's 
 English.) 
 
 "What did we use instead of air brakes? 
 Why, hand brakes, of course. We had to jam a 
 stick into the wheel for leverage and turn them 
 that way. And a tough job it was. You notice 
 
52 THE BOYS' BOOK OF BAILROADS 
 
 those wheels stickin' up on top of the freight cars 
 even nowadays. Well, them's the hand brakes. 
 In the old days all cars had 'em and when the 
 engineer used to toot-toot for the hand brakes, 
 you should see us boys a-humpin' ourselves 
 scramblin' over the tops of the cars and jammin' 
 'em on as fast as we could. Sometimes we got 
 'em on and sometimes we didn't. It was one of 
 the times we didn't that I lost me arm and lucky 
 I was at that I didn't lose me life." 
 
 " What? Tell you about it. Sure, I'm doin> 
 that thing, ain't I? Give me a little time an' I 
 get it out." Jerry looked up the tracks reflect- 
 ively and was silent for several minutes. Evi- 
 dently his memory was living once again in those 
 old days of railroading, for presently he spoke. 
 
 " Lots of 'em look back and call 'em ' the good 
 ol' days,' but I can't see it their way. I'd call 
 'em c the bad ol' days,' for bad they were. The 
 good days are here now with lots more coming, 
 for railroadin' is a lot easier and a lot safer now 
 than it ever was in my day. And all together is 
 a lot more interesting nowadays too. I remem- 
 ber the morning we took out No. 121 way-freight, 
 that was the old train I near got killed on. 
 
WITH THE TEAIN CEEW 53 
 
 "It was a bitter morning in January. The 
 thermometer was down low flirtin' with the zero 
 mark an' it took a lot of will power to pull a 
 fellow away from the stove in the * hack.' We 
 were all bundled up in overcoats and ear muffs 
 and mittens and the tops of the cars were just 
 covered with ice, so a fellow had to be like a cat 
 to hang on. That's the kind of weather that's 
 hard on the train crew, let me tell you. 
 
 "An' to make matters worse, a lot of the hand 
 brakes were froze up tight an' we had to work 
 like slaves to keep 'em loostened up. Of course, 
 Number 121 was inspected before she left the 
 yard and all the ice was chipped out of the brake 
 gears, but that didn't keep it from formin' again 
 while the train was on the run. In fact every 
 drop of moisture or vapor from the condensing 
 steam from the locomotive froze solid the minute 
 it hit anything and the engine and forward 
 freights looked like pictures you see of arctic 
 exploration ships, only not quite so bad, perhaps. 
 
 " We were makin' the run to Scranton and if 
 you know anything about the country in those 
 regions, you know that it's all one hill after 
 another. That was the mountain division of the 
 
54 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADg 
 
 line, and when a train isn't strainin' itself to 
 climb one grade it's bavin' a bard time tryin' to 
 get down another. We never got a level stretch 
 on that line. 
 
 " Well, this morning I'm telling you about, all 
 was fine and dandy in spite of the cold and we 
 were booming along, a-snorting up one grade and 
 down another with occasional stops on a siding 
 to let some of the flyers go by. 
 
 Of course every time we pulled into a siding it 
 meant work in the bitter cold for the train crew, 
 for the head brakeman, who stays up in the cab 
 with the engine crew, had to swing out and flop 
 over the switch while the rest of us dug out of the 
 6 hack ' and went climbin' along the slippery roofs 
 of the cars pulling away at the brake wheels as 
 soon as the train had slipped past the switch. 
 
 " We'd made three sidings in the course of the 
 morning and things looked pretty good for a 
 quick neat run and then a ' swing ' for us in the 
 bunk house or roundhouse or most any old place 
 where it was warm and where there was sociable 
 companionship. 
 
 " But we had another siding to make about 
 noon time to let the limited go by. That was 
 
WITH THE TRAIN CREW 55 
 
 where the trouble came, and after it was over 
 there wasn't much in the way of warm comfort 
 or companionship they could give me. Most of 
 my pals in the crew figured I wasn't ever going 
 to need much more except a long box and a hole 
 in the ground and it looked like they was right 
 for several weeks. You see it was this way. 
 
 " We reached the siding all right and started 
 to pull onto it slow and cautious like, for we had 
 fifteen minutes to spare before the limited would 
 go by. 
 
 " Now although they try to build most sidings 
 on a level stretch where there isn't any grade, 
 they had to build this one where there was just 
 a little slope because, as I said before, the coun- 
 try was all hills and mountains. We got the 
 whole train on the siding and was just pulling up 
 so we would be as much off the grade as possible 
 when clankety-clank, gurr-r-r-r went something 
 and I looked up the line. At the same time the 
 engine whistle whooped out three long blasts. 
 
 " ' Good night, Murphy,' says I, for that meant 
 that the train had parted. And I was on the 
 hind end! Scared? I guess I was! A little 
 bit 
 
56 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILEOADS 
 
 " I looked back and I saw that the last eight 
 or ten cars had split from the rest of the train, 
 and was slowly but surely rolling back down the 
 siding ! 
 
 " It flashed through my head right there all 
 the awful details of the situation. Those ten 
 cars would roll down the siding faster and faster 
 and smashing the switch break through and out 
 onto the main line, runaways in every sense of 
 the word, and able to play the dickens with 
 everything that got in their way. It was 
 down grade for three miles and the limited com- 
 ing up. I could see those ten cars tearing down 
 the track to meet the limited. I could see the 
 crash that would follow and I guess I groaned 
 when I thought of the wreck that would be piled 
 up there on the main line, not to mention the 
 bodies and like of that. Oh, boy, I was some 
 scared. 
 
 " What was I to do ! I thought quick, I did. 
 I could save myself, of course, by jumping. 
 Maybe I'd get a broken leg at the worst. But 
 that thought didn't stick in my head long. My 
 duty was to prevent the crash if I could. I knew 
 I'd set the brakes on two of the ten cars. I could 
 
WITH THE TEAIN CEEW 57 
 
 hear 'ein grinding. Now I figured if I could set 
 the brakes on the other eight before the cars got 
 to the stiffest part of the grade, perhaps I could 
 bring the runaway to a standstill in time to flag 
 the limited. 
 
 " Believe me, as they say nowadays, Jerry West 
 was some busy boy. I started legging it over 
 the tops of those ice-covered cars mighty care- 
 less of consequences, and jammin' my stick into 
 the wheels a-wrenching and a-heaving with all 
 the strength I had. Good night, but that was 
 tough work. The bloomin' old brakes were stuck 
 fast with ice and that made it about the hardest 
 kind of a braking job a fellow wants to tackle. 
 
 " I was working and sweating and praying to 
 beat all get out and seconds seemed like minutes 
 and minutes like hours. Honest, my heart was in 
 my mouth and I was most afraid I'd bite a piece 
 out of it if I wasn't careful. Then — 
 
 u Crash, Bang, Wow. 
 
 " I thought sure the limited had hit us, for the 
 old freights just rose up off the tracks 'and 
 spilled over, and went rolling down the embank- 
 ment, busting up into a million splinters, and I 
 was right in among the whole heap. 
 
58 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 " What had happened? Well, the brakeman 
 who had flopped the switch had seen the train 
 part. When he saw what had happened, he did 
 the same kind of quick thinking I did and when 
 he realized it was his move he moved fast. On 
 the ground close by the track was a discarded 
 brake shoe. He grabbed this and slammed it 
 onto the rail of the siding and of course that de- 
 railed the whole ten cars and piled 'em up in a 
 pretty mess. He said he yelled for me to jump 
 but I was so busy I never heard him. Anyhow 
 he figured my life was only one where the limited 
 carried a couple hundred, so he let her nicker and 
 figured on looking me up in the wreckage. He 
 found me all right and I was all stove up and un- 
 conscious. They figured I was dead, but they put 
 me on the limited after they got the line clear and 
 carted me to the nearest city that had a hospital. 
 When I woke up ten days later I had a broken 
 leg, three ribs caved in and my left arm was so 
 crushed they had to take it off. 
 
 " But the point of it all is that if that freight 
 had parted to-day instead of thirty years ago it 
 wouldn't have moved an inch. When the air 
 coupling breaks between cars now all the brakes 
 
WITH THE TRAIN CREW 59 
 
 go on with a bang and the cars can't move. So 
 you see when a man talks to me about ' the good 
 old days ' I tell him to go chase himself. 
 
 "The good v days of railroading are here and 
 now and the lot of brakemen of a train crew is 
 much easier to-day than it was in the days when 
 I worked at the job." 
 
 There can be no questioning Jerry West's 
 statement. Railroading has changed a great deal 
 and is to-day far safer and far more interesting. 
 But with this change in operation a change has 
 taken place in the type of men who compose the 
 train crews. The old type, the rough, rugged, 
 and sometimes uncouth brakemen, trainmen and 
 conductors have given way to clean, bright eyed, 
 intelligent chaps, none the less courageous but 
 far more ambitious than the men who manned 
 the railroads forty years ago. 
 
 But although modern inventions and new 
 ideas in operating have made the work of the 
 train crew less difficult, their task can hardly be 
 considered one of ease and inaction even now. 
 There is work to be done, abundance of it. 
 There are still the cold and storms of winter to 
 be faced from the tops of ice-covered cars, there 
 
60 THE BOYS' BOOK OF BAILKOADS 
 
 are still hours of tedious work on the long hauls 
 where a man must work the whole night through 
 and then often work all day, too, before he gets 
 his "swing," as a rest period between runs is 
 called in the language of the railroaders. 
 
 All trains, both passenger and freight, are in 
 the charge of a conductor, and he is supported 
 by a crew of brakemen, or traimnen as they are 
 called in the passenger service. The conductor 
 has the full responsibility of the train on his 
 shoulders, and it is for him to see that everything 
 goes right, from the safe conduct of the train to 
 its destination to the clerical work that results 
 from being in charge of forty or more cars loaded 
 with thousands of dollars' worth of valuable 
 freight destined to twenty different points on the 
 line. 
 
 Of course, certain of these responsibilities are 
 delegated to his assistants. It is on them that 
 the burden of the hard manual labor falls. Usu- 
 ally there are two, sometimes three brakemen, 
 to a crew of a freight train, and they have certain 
 specified duties. One brakeman has charge of 
 the forward end of the train, another the middle, 
 and the third the rear end, and they are held 
 
The man on top of the freight car can be president of the 
 road some day 
 
 (c) Ewing Galloway 
 
 Slow freight but mighty important when a coal famine 
 threatens a city 
 
WITH THE TKAEST CKEW 61 
 
 accountable, by the conductor, for their portion 
 of the freights. It is necessary for them to range 
 the narrow foot-path on the tops of the cars, leap- 
 ing the two-foot spaces between cars, and in a 
 measure maintain a sort of a patrol to see that 
 nothing goes wrong, and, in the cases where hand 
 brakes are still used, operate these. 
 
 This is no mean responsibility, and patrolling 
 the tops of a string of freight cars in motion is 
 not without its danger. In the patrol the brake- 
 men are always likely to meet the roughest and 
 most desperate type of man in the " hobo " or 
 " yegg " who makes the freight trains, illegally, 
 of course, his special conveyance. 
 
 Many a terrific battle has been staged atop of 
 swaying freight cars between these denizens of 
 the underworld and the men who are patrolling 
 the tops of the trains, for the " hobo " is a vicious 
 character, ready and willing to fight or to kill if 
 he is in a tight corner. Indeed, there has been 
 many a death charged Up to these encounters, for 
 the trainmen are just as quick and eager to fight 
 as the outlaw is, since theirs is the responsibility 
 and they know that with " hobo " or " yegg " 
 aboard the train there is always a chance of some 
 
62 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 of the freight being stolen, in which case they are 
 held accountable. 
 
 Alike they are held responsible for accidents 
 to human beings and they know that if a crushed 
 and mangled body is found between the rails 
 after their train has passed they will be asked to 
 explain, even though the body is that of a tramp. 
 So, to avoid such gruesome consequences, they are 
 quick to drive from the train any who are steal- 
 ing rides. 
 
 But there are other dangers in riding the tops 
 of freight cars that the brakemen have to face. 
 In truth, the mere being a-top the swaying, lurch- 
 ing car when it is under full headway is hard 
 enough. Then, to do this at night with a swing- 
 ing lantern in one hand, and being forced every 
 little while to jump from one moving car to 
 another, is still harder. It is always necessary 
 for brakemen to be on watch for a thump in the 
 face from the " tickler," that gallows-like telltale 
 of ropes that hangs over the tracks at frequent 
 intervals to warn of the approach of a low bridge 
 or tunnel. 
 
 When a brakeman gets a slap in the face 
 from this he knows that he must instantly 
 
WITH THE TEAIN CEEW 63 
 
 throw himself flat on his stomach on the car roof 
 or he will be brushed off the train and dashed to 
 Kingdom Come by a steel girder or a masonry 
 arch. Fortunately, such gruesome accidents 
 rarely happen, for the men, dare-devils though 
 some of them are, heed the warning of the tickler 
 and take few chances, for they do not always 
 know just how high the bridge or tunnel is. Some 
 of these over-track constructions are built high 
 enough to give full clearance to a man standing 
 upright. These are survivors of the days when 
 all freights were equipped with hand brakes and 
 it was frequently necessary for men to stand 
 upright on the cars to manipulate the brake 
 wheels while going through tunnels or under 
 bridges. 
 
 But those that have been built within the last 
 twenty years do not allow so much clearance. 
 Indeed, some of them hardly allow three feet be- 
 tween car roof and bridge girder. One can well 
 understand, then, why a man needs to be flat on 
 the car roof when passing under these. 
 
 Tramps and " hobos " are not the only troubles 
 that brakemen guard against in their patrol of 
 the freight train. There is always the danger 
 
64 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 of a coupling breaking and the train separating 
 or a break in the air connections between cars. 
 To add to the present-day brakeman's troubles 
 there are refrigerator cars and heated cars to be 
 cared for and a host of other details. Then, too, 
 when the train pulls in at a siding or lays over 
 for any length of time, each brakeman is sup- 
 posed to give his section of the train a thorough 
 inspection to see that all is well with the me- 
 chanical parts. 
 
 And all this is outside of the work that is 
 necessary at every stop that is made where the 
 freight the train is carrying is due. To be sure, 
 most freight train runs are made from one cen- 
 tral point to another without breaking up the 
 train. For instance, freight that is to be deliv- 
 ered at points west of Buffalo is hauled as a 
 solid train from New York to Buffalo, where it 
 is split up, some of the cars for the farthest 
 points west being attached to other solid trains, 
 while the cars containing the freight for towns 
 near at hand are coupled onto way-freights that 
 run but a short distance from the central point, 
 dropping off the cars at the towns they are con- 
 signed to. 
 
WITH THE TRAEST CREW G5 
 
 It is at such, times as these that the train crew 
 is called upon for extra tiresome work, for it is 
 up to them to break up the train, cut out or drop 
 off the car or cars that are to be left, couple up 
 the train again and get under way. 
 
 Every member of a train crew must know in- 
 timately a hundred details of railroading. Of 
 course, he must know all the rules of the road 
 regarding signals and one of the crew, usually 
 the brakeman who has charge of the rear end of 
 the train, must act as flagman. When the train 
 is at a stop on the main line, or on tracks on 
 which other trains are liable to be traveling, he 
 must swing to the ground at the sound of the 
 call for flagman from the whistle of the locomo- 
 tive, and hurry back along the tracks a train's 
 length or more and there post himself with a red 
 flag in hand to warn any trains that might be 
 following that they must stop to avoid a rear 
 end collision with the freight train. 
 
 He uses flags in the daytime to do his warn- 
 ing, but at night a red light is necessary. Some- 
 times, if the stop is only for a very short time, he 
 will leave a red caution light sticking in the 
 ground beside the tracks. This can be seen a 
 
66 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILEOADS 
 
 long way at night or even through a thick fog, 
 and while it burns approaching trains travel 
 very cautiously. It is assumed that by the time 
 the red fire is burned out the freight will be in 
 motion again, so the engineer of an approaching 
 train when he sees this red fire stick does not 
 come to a full stop, but he does slow down his 
 train until it almost creeps along for the next 
 half mile until he is certain that the train that 
 has left the burning light has gone on its way. 
 Torpedoes are also used. Every flagman carries 
 in his box of signals a number of light sticks and 
 a half dozen or more torpedoes. These are made 
 of a hollow disk filled with powder and fulminate 
 of mercury and they are clamped onto the rails 
 by means of two strips of lead that bend under 
 the flange of the rail and hold the torpedo in 
 place. When a flagman goes out from a train 
 that is going to be delayed only a short time, he 
 promptly clamps two of these torpedoes on the 
 rails at intervals of a raiPs length and returns 
 to his train. When the train following runs over 
 these torpedoes two quick reports are sounded 
 that can be heard above the clank and rumble 
 of the train, and the engineer promptly slows 
 
WITH THE TRAIN CREW 67 
 
 down and feels his way along until he sees the 
 stalled train or until he feels certain that it has 
 gone on its way. 
 
 All of this flag and signal work is usually done 
 by the brakeman at the rear end of the train. 
 But the brakeman who guards the forward end, 
 and has his headquarters in the locomotive cab, 
 also has his special duties, for it is his job to 
 swing down from the cab each time a siding is to 
 be made, and run ahead and unlock and 
 throw over the switch. There he waits until the 
 train has passed over the switch point and onto 
 the siding, when he throws the switch back into 
 position and locks it again. 
 
 Thus both front and rear brakemen have defi- 
 nite duties, each of which requires that the 
 brakeman be careful and alert, for if the man 
 protecting the rear of the train is careless a 
 collision is likely to result in which lives and 
 property are lost, while if the brakeman who 
 handles the switch is thoughtless and does not 
 set the switch back in its proper position and 
 lock it, the next train may be derailed and a seri- 
 ous wreck occur, all of which indicates quite 
 clearly that a railroad man must have his wits 
 
68 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILBOADS 
 
 about Mm and must always realize his responsi- 
 bilities no matter how humble his position might 
 be. 
 
 But what of the conductor? 
 
 It would seem that with the train crew doing 
 all this work and the engineer and fireman tak- 
 ing care of the motive power, but little remains 
 for the conductor. That official, however, has 
 all the work that he can attend to and usually 
 a lot more. First of all, because he is fully re- 
 sponsible for the train, he must see that his 
 brakemen do their work properly. He must see 
 that the forward brakeman attends to the switch- 
 ing properly, he must be certain that they carry 
 on their inspections, and he must take a hand 
 in their clashes with " yeggs " and " hobos " too. 
 So the conductor is found walking the tops of 
 the swaying freights too occasionally, and at 
 every siding he is out with his lantern looking 
 things over. 
 
 Between times he is to be found in the caboose, 
 or " hack," as railroad men call the queer boat- 
 shaped car on the rear of each freight train. 
 Here at his desk, for he has a sort of an office in 
 the caboose, he attends to all the clerical details 
 
WITH THE TRAIN CREW 69 
 
 of the train. He handles all the way bills in- 
 volved in the shipment of the thousands of dol- 
 lars in merchandise in his cars, and he alone is 
 responsible for caring for these and all the de- 
 tails that they involve. In addition to this he is 
 the one who receives all the train orders from 
 the train dispatcher in the terminal, and conse- 
 quently it is on him that the responsibility of 
 seeing that the orders on these flimsy yellow 
 typewritten sheets that he receives at the begin- 
 ning of the run are carried out. One may tell 
 him that train number so-and-so will lay 
 over at such and such a point to let his train 
 through, another may say that he is to hold his 
 train on a specified siding to permit train num- 
 ber whatever-it-is pass and so on. All of these 
 must be obeyed to the dot and he must see that 
 crew and engineer are properly informed and 
 that the orders are carefully carried out. 
 
 His caboose is an interesting car from several 
 points of view. Besides being the office of the 
 conductor it is also the home of the crew. To 
 be sure, it is a rough and crude sort of a home 
 in many respects, but in other ways it is homey 
 and cheerful, especially on a bleak winter night 
 
70 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 when the wind is howling a gale outside and the 
 snow is drifting and blowing up the tracks. 
 
 Inside, the caboose is arranged with four 
 bunks on either side, and these, covered with 
 gray army blankets, are mighty snug and com- 
 fortable beds. Then, of course, in winter there 
 is a stove in some; others, of a more modern 
 build, are heated with coils of steam pipes kept 
 hot by steam from the engine. In the center of 
 the car, especially those of the old type, is a pyra- 
 mid of steps ending in seats up in the cupola. 
 These seats are arranged so that the men can sit 
 up there under that peculiar sort of a skylight 
 and look the full length of the train without 
 obstruction and in that way keep a watchful eye 
 on things at all times. In the more modern ca- 
 booses this pyramid has given way to an iron 
 ladder which reaches up to the seats in the 
 cupola. 
 
 The equipment of the average caboose is 
 mighty interesting, because there are hoarded all 
 sorts of emergency tools, such as axes, crowbars, 
 ropes and tackle and numerous other odds and 
 ends that sometimes are not in demand from one 
 year's end to another, but when they are needed 
 
WITH THE TEAIN CEEW 71 
 
 they are needed badly. There are locks here, 
 too, for the train crew and an emergency first 
 aid kit. Usually too there can be found a col- 
 lection of pots and pans and coffee kettles, for 
 when the train crew is called upon to make this 
 snug little car their home for any length of time, 
 you can be sure that they make themselves per- 
 fectly at home in every way and cook a snack 
 or two for themselves to go along with the con- 
 tents of their lunch pails. And the writer knows 
 from experience that some of these trainmen are 
 accomplished cooks, for some of the " western " 
 sandwiches, or concoctions of chopped meat and 
 onions, or some of the " mulligan " he has tasted 
 that has been turned out by a brakeman cook 
 on a long run, has been well worth sam- 
 pling. 
 
 There are good times to be had in the " hack " 
 of a freight train, for always railroad men are 
 good company. Fancy sitting on one of the 
 bunks with two or three trainmen as compan- 
 ions and listening to the " yarns " they spin. It 
 is bully. Then, some one of them tunes up a 
 harmonica that he has dug up from the bottom 
 of his locker, and a rich, rollicking concert 
 
72 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILBOADS 
 
 blends with the clanking cadence of the train, 
 and the visitor settles down on the bunk and be- 
 gins to think that if he had his life to live over 
 again he would choose to share it with the fine, 
 strong, clean-eyed huskies who compose a freight 
 train crew. 
 
 As with the engineers and firemen, promotion 
 is made from the freight service to the passenger 
 service with the men of the train crews, and 
 sooner or later these good-natured, hard-working, 
 rollicking young chaps of the caboose, if they 
 have ambition, as most railroad men have, are 
 given a chance in the passenger service. They 
 are no longer brakemen when once they don the 
 blue uniform of the passenger service. They be- 
 come trainmen then. But their duties on the 
 passenger trains are essentially the same except 
 that they have more details added to their regu- 
 lar routine. They must here see that the cars 
 under their care are properly heated and venti- 
 lated, they must show every attention and cour- 
 tesy to the passengers, but they have full author- 
 ity to act in the case of disorder in their cars, 
 ejecting or even causing the arrest of rowdies or 
 other type of objectionable people. 
 
WITH THE TRAIN CREW 73 
 
 As in the freight service, the trainman is given 
 a section of the train to take care of. One man 
 works from the back forward, another has charge 
 of the middle of the train and still another the 
 forward end. As in the freight service, too, the 
 rear trainman is also the flagman, protecting the 
 rear end of the train whenever the occasion de- 
 mands. 
 
 The conductor in the passenger service has in- 
 finitely more details to trouble him than when he 
 was conductor of a freight train. The clerical 
 work on a passenger train is very much more 
 difficult, for it involves money and tickets and, if 
 there are any errors, why the conductor must 
 reimburse the company out of his own pocket. 
 
 Of course, on a passenger train there is neces- 
 sity for a much larger train crew than on a 
 freight and there are, too, additional employees 
 on these trains for which there is no need on 
 freights, such as the baggageman, for instance, 
 and the clerks in the express and mail service. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 
 
 THE VIGILANCE OF THE STATION AGENT 
 
 The station agent is an important personage 
 no matter where his station may be located. In- 
 deed the smaller the station and the town it 
 serves, the more important is his work and the 
 more he becomes a man of affairs in the com- 
 munity. 
 
 In many of the small western towns, and in 
 fact small eastern towns as well, the station 
 agent occupies a position next in importance 
 to that of constable or postmaster. He has a 
 position with a certain amount of authority and 
 because of this the townspeople have a great deal 
 of respect for him. But he is as a rule deserv- 
 ing of this respect, for he is a man of good educa- 
 tion, he has a good general knowledge of things 
 that go on in the outside world and he has a good 
 position with good wages, and he is the repre- 
 sentative of a big and strong company. 
 
 74 
 
THE STATION AGENT 75 
 
 Next to the postmaster, lie comes in contact 
 with a greater number of the townspeople than 
 any one else. He has a wide circle of friends and 
 he is in a position to do many services both for 
 the community and the individual. In small 
 towns he is the local telegraph operator and all 
 the messages coming and going from town clear 
 through him. He is in close touch with all that 
 goes on in the town, for strangers coming in or 
 going out must pass beneath his window. 
 Freight and express packages of all values are 
 left in his care and at many stations he is given 
 the responsibility of money shipments for banks 
 and for manufacturing plants or other industries 
 in the town. 
 
 Of course, such valuables are guarded with 
 extreme care for, back of his personal responsi- 
 bility, is the company's responsibility and the 
 company's honor, all of which are sacred in the 
 eyes of the station agent. Indeed, there are 
 many thrilling tales told of the courage and 
 bravery of station agents, who have sacrificed 
 even life in the protection of property left in 
 their care. 
 
 Not the least thrilling of these stories is the 
 
76 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 one told about Fred Foster, agent at Cordele on 
 a certain western road. 
 
 Cordele was a small town, a tank town in the 
 parlance of railroad and traveling men, for there 
 was a watering tank beside the track kept filled 
 by a windmill, from which engines drew water 
 when necessary. The actual inhabitants of the 
 town numbered about three hundred men and 
 women, but there was a floating population, so to 
 speak, of twice as many, for seven miles back of 
 the town in the mountains were two rich silver 
 mines and a smelting plant. All of the business 
 of the mine was transacted in the town and all of 
 the miners who came to the works or left it, left 
 by way of the Cordele railroad station. The sta- 
 tion was of reasonable importance on the line, 
 too, since the mines were responsible for the com- 
 ing and going of a great deal of freight as well as 
 the " bohunk " passenger traffic, which is the 
 name given to travelers of foreign extraction, 
 especially the laboring class. 
 
 There was another big reason, especially to 
 Fred Foster's mind, why the station was impor- 
 tant. Twice a month, on the thirtieth and the 
 fourteenth, he received from the express mes- 
 
THE STATION AGENT 77 
 
 senger of No. 6, the local passenger train up from 
 Bawson City, a small but heavy safe, which he 
 was ready to guard with his life, for it contained 
 twenty thousand dollars in currency, the bi- 
 monthly pay-roll of the two mines and the smelt- 
 ing plant. 
 
 Twenty thousand dollars! That was a big 
 sum of money and Fred Foster considered anew 
 his responsibilities each time he lugged the little 
 safe, by means of a platform wagon, to the sta- 
 tion, and stowed it away in his bigger safe until 
 it was called for by Jeff Sturgess and his well 
 armed assistant from the smelting plant. 
 
 " Twenty thousand dollars. That's a goshaw- 
 mighty lot of money," he would say to himself. 
 " There's lots of men in these parts that would 
 commit murder for less than that. Fred, my 
 boy, you got to watch your step or some fine 
 night some one is going to try and take that away 
 from you like they did from poor old Dicky 
 Crawford twelve years ago. Wish No. 6 got in 
 here at twelve o'clock noon instead of six o'clock 
 nights. Then Jeff Sturgess could get it out of 
 my hands and up to the mine the same day. I'd 
 get more sleep on the night of the thirtieth and 
 
78 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 the fourteenth of each month than I do now. I 
 guess Minnie would be glad, too, because I know 
 she worries over it." Minnie was Fred Foster's 
 wife. They lived in quarters provided for them 
 by the railroad on the floor above the station. 
 
 As time went on Fred Foster never let down in 
 the care with which he guarded that precious 
 safe with its treasure in currency. Twelve years 
 back, when the mine and smelters' pay-roll 
 amounted to less than half its present value, one 
 of Foster's predecessors, Dicky Crawford, had let 
 down just a little in his vigilant guard of the 
 money and the station was robbed. Dicky 
 arrived on the scene just in time to stop two bul- 
 lets that tried to get through the doorway at the 
 same time he did, and after that there was a 
 headstone with his name on it in the local 
 cemetery. 
 
 So Fred Foster never became careless about 
 the pay chest. Indeed, he made it a point to 
 have a great deal of work to be done on the 
 nights of the thirtieth and the fourteenth of each 
 month and as a rule he sat up in the office all 
 night doing it, so that there was little chance of 
 a robbery being attempted without his knowl* 
 
THE STATION AGENT ,79 
 
 edge. Yet for all his vigilance he feared that 
 some night some one was going to be tempted by 
 the possibilities of a big haul and give him a lot 
 of trouble. He tried to shake off this presenti- 
 ment time and again, but it persisted. And then 
 one night, the fears he had were realized. 
 
 It was on the fourteenth of the month, a raw 
 and rainy day that grew more ugly as night 
 came on. Number 6 was late and it was dark 
 and soggy outside when Foster trundled the sta- 
 tion truck up beside the baggage car and helped 
 the express messenger lift off the heavy safe. 
 Foster waited only long enough to give what dis- 
 patches he had to the conductor, then he made 
 haste to trundle the truck down the short plat- 
 form. 
 
 Before the train had left the station he had 
 lugged the little safe through the deserted 
 waiting room into his own wicker-windowed 
 office and stowed it away in the safe. Once more 
 back at his desk and his telegraph instrument, he 
 looked out upon the sodden world and watched 
 the rear red lights of the train disappear down 
 the tracks. Then he cleared her with a brief 
 message clicked off to stations down the line. 
 
80 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 This done, lie locked the waiting room with 
 great care, looked once again at the combination 
 of the safe, then left his office, locking the door of 
 this too and all the windows, before departing 
 upstairs to his waiting supper. 
 
 It was half-past seven when Foster came down 
 again, and unlocking the door of the ticket office, 
 went inside to his desk again. He did not 
 bother to unlock the waiting room doors, for 
 there were no more trains scheduled to stop at 
 Cordele that night. 
 
 Alone in his office he lighted his corn-cob pipe 
 and sat there listening to the sporadic clicking of 
 the telegraph instrument. He could hear No. 6 
 being cleared far down the line, her automatic- 
 ally deciphered messages from J. G. to K. C. 
 about work to be done on the track at Oakland, 
 he heard B. F. tell X. M. about a car of coal that 
 was lost between Kelly's Corners and Newton, 
 and so the chatter of the key went on. Some- 
 times it was business up and down the line, some- 
 times it was mere wire gossip between stations. 
 
 By and by the key seemed to grow sleepy. 
 There were longer intervals between its chatter 
 and Foster knew that one after another the sta- 
 
THE STATION AGENT 81 
 
 tions up and down the line were closing and the 
 agents were going to bed. Fred envied them. 
 Only the stations of the big towns would stay- 
 open all night and the nearest to Cordele was 
 Oakland, thirty miles away. 
 
 The gradual diminishing of the gossip of the 
 key began to make Foster feel lonely there in his 
 little office. The station was quiet, dreadfully 
 quiet. The ticking of the big station clock seemed 
 very loud by comparison. Outside wind and rain 
 swept the platform and tracks and beyond Foster 
 could see only one or two dim street lights in the 
 town. Every house was dark and silent, its 
 occupants gone to bed. How Foster envied 
 them ! There would be no bed for him that night 
 and it was a long, long time until dawn. 
 
 " Oh hum," he yawned, but his voice seemed so 
 loud and strange in the silent station building 
 that it made little chills run up and down his 
 spine. 
 
 " Shucks, I must be getting as nervous as a 
 cat," he muttered to himself. And, a little bit 
 disgusted at the way he felt, he threw himself 
 into the mass of clerical work that was stacked 
 up before him. 
 
82 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILBOADS 
 
 But it was hard for him to concentrate his 
 mind on what he was doing. Somehow it 
 seemed to wander. 
 
 " What on earth ails me to-night? " he mut- 
 tered as he put down his pen and reached for his 
 pipe. In doing so he looked up and his heart 
 jumped, for he was almost certain that he saw a 
 shadow flit across the shaft of light his lamp cast 
 on the station platform. He stood up and peered 
 out into the dark, but he could see nothing save 
 the rain spattering down. 
 
 " Blamed fool you," he upbraided himself as he 
 sat down again. " Blamed fool. You are get- 
 ting worse than a rabbit. What's the trouble? 
 Liver out of order or have you been drinking too 
 much coffee lately? You didn't see anything. 
 That was just the wind blowing the rain in 
 sheets. Come on, get to work and forget it." 
 
 Again he tried valiantly to crowd disturbing 
 premonitions out of his mind. But the harder 
 he tried the more they persisted. Once he 
 thought he heard footsteps on the station plat- 
 form. They were guarded footsteps, at least so 
 they seemed to him. Then he thought he heard 
 the soft muffled rattle of the knob of the wait- 
 
THE STATION AGENT 83 
 
 ing room door, as if some one was surreptitiously 
 seeking to discover whether it was locked. It 
 was terribly creepy. He tried to tell himself 
 that it was all imagination, but somehow he knew 
 better, somehow he felt certain that out there in 
 the rain and the darkness some one was lurking 
 about the station, slinking from window to 
 window or door to door, trying to find some way 
 of getting in. 
 
 Chills raced up and down his spine. He began 
 to feel the presence of that safe behind him, with 
 the smaller safe inside and its precious contents 
 of $20,000. He turned and looked at it almost 
 accusingly. It was like a millstone about his 
 neck. He wished heartily that it was not there. 
 Then he could be abed and asleep. 
 
 Just when his nerves were most unstrung he 
 did see something that told him all too plainly 
 that out there in the dark there were human 
 wolves bent on breaking in and robbing him. 
 Foster's heart began pumping hard. For a 
 moment he was panic stricken, for, half turning 
 his head, he looked out through the grill of the 
 ticket window toward the window of the waiting 
 room. He saw a hand traveling slowly around 
 
84 THE BOYS' BOOK OF BAILBOADS 
 
 the edges of the window pane. Beyond it he 
 thought he could dimly see an ugly face leering 
 at him from the darkness. Instinctively he gave 
 a start and his right hand slipped down under- 
 neath the desk, where in a holster nailed to the 
 table leg, but out of sight, he always kept his big 
 six shooter. His hand grasped the holster and 
 felt about gropingly for a moment. Then his 
 whole body went limp with surprise and dis- 
 appointment. The revolver was not in the hol- 
 ster ! Some one had stolen it ! 
 
 For a moment he was stunned. He could 
 hardly realize the situation he was facing. His 
 gun gone and the thieves forcing their way into 
 the station. He glanced toward the window. 
 A big hand was pressed flat against the pane, 
 forcing it inward. He was certain that he saw 
 the ugly face in the dark grin at him. It was a 
 terrible grin. It made him realize how helpless 
 he was. 
 
 Then suddenly he gripped his shattered nerves 
 and became master of himself. He could beat 
 them. He would beat them. His hand flashed 
 for the telegraph key and he began clicking with 
 deliberate slowness. 
 
THE STATION AGENT 85 
 
 " O. L.— O. L.— O. L.— " he called. He was 
 calling Oakland, the nearest station at which he 
 knew there was a night operator. 
 
 Presently there came a break in the call and 
 he closed the wire to hear Oakland's answer. 
 
 " O. L. What — do — you — want — this — 
 time — of — night? " came the query. 
 
 " This — is — Cordele — " snapped back Fos- 
 ter. " Thieves — are — forcing — their — way 
 — into — the — station — . Twenty — thou- 
 sand — dollars — here — . They've — stolen — 
 my — gun — . Send — help — or — they " 
 
 Came a crash of glass as the window was 
 forced in. Foster closed the key and ducked out 
 of sight below the ticket grill, but not before he 
 had seen a big hand reach in and unlock the win- 
 dow. He heard the lower sash raised upward on 
 squeaky pulleys. Then he heard the thump of 
 feet as first one man, then another, and still a 
 third dropped to the floor inside. Three men 
 against him. Foster gasped. Then reaching 
 upward he put out the light in the ticket office 
 and the rest of the station building. He did not 
 mean to be a target for them through the ticket 
 office window. 
 
86 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 " Cut that stuff Bo," growled one of the rob- 
 bers in the darkness of the waiting room. " We 
 got you now. You ain't got no gun because we 
 pinched it this afternoon, so you ain't got a 
 Chinaman's chance. Best open up the ticket 
 office and let us in. We don't mean no harm to 
 you if you're a good guy. We don't want no kill- 
 in' 'lessen we haff to. See? " 
 
 Foster saw and understood but he did not re- 
 ply. He was too busy fumbling behind the big 
 safe in the rear of the ticket office. Hidden be- 
 hind this, magazine fully loaded, was a short 
 barreled riot gun. It had been gathering dust 
 back there ever since Dicky Crawford had been 
 killed by station burglars. Foster was not sure 
 that it would work, nor was he sure that the 
 twelve-year-old ammunition would explode. But 
 he realized that it was his only chance and he 
 grasped at it eagerly. 
 
 He found the old gun and drew it forth. 
 Crouching behind the safe he tried the pump 
 mechanism. It was so badly rusted that it re- 
 quired all his strength to move it backward. He 
 gave a mighty wrench and it gave way with a 
 clatter, ejecting a shell onto the floor. 
 
THE STATION AGENT 87 
 
 The sound of the gun caused the robbers to 
 stop in their tramping about in the waiting room 
 outside. 
 
 " Hear that, Slippey? The bloke's got a gun 
 at that," said one with a slight suggestion of con- 
 cern in his voice. 
 
 "Naw he hasn't. He's bluffing" replied 
 Slippey. Then he shouted, "Hi you in there, 
 we'll give you two minutes to open up." He 
 kicked a heavy foot against the door of the ticket 
 office and Foster heard the wood crack and 
 splinter under the impact. 
 
 For answer Foster aimed the riot gun at the 
 door and pulled the trigger. There was a ter- 
 rific roar and a blinding flash that lit up the close 
 quarters of the ticket office and a charge of nine 
 buckshot carried away the splintered panel of 
 the door. 
 
 Beyond from the waiting room came a yell and 
 a volley of oaths. 
 
 " Ugh, got me in t' wing. Take that." 
 
 "Bang! Bang! Bang!" roared the forty- 
 five out there in the darkness and three bullets 
 ripped through the door and flattened themselves 
 against the safe behind which Foster crouched. 
 
88 THE BOYS' BOOK OF BAILEOADS 
 
 "Fight, will you?" came a coarse voice. 
 "Well, well give you enough if that's what 
 you're looking for," and another string of shots 
 ripped out. 
 
 Through the broken panel of the doorway Fos- 
 ter saw the jets of flame from one of the six guns 
 and he let another charge of buckshot fly in that 
 direction. He was cool now, perfectly cool and 
 collected. He knew that he had the best of the 
 situation. The only way they could get him out 
 from behind the safe was to Mil him and drag 
 him out, and he could repel any assault of 
 theirs — that is if his ammunition held out. 
 
 Foster had not thought of that before. He 
 suddenly realized that the magazine of the gun 
 held but six shots and that was all the ammuni- 
 tion he had on hand. He had spent two shells 
 and pumped one good one out onto the floor. 
 That meant he had just three shots left. Three 
 shots and there were three men outside. He 
 would have to make every shot count. 
 
 He thought again of the one good shell he had 
 pumped out of the gun before he fired it. He 
 needed that, needed it badly. He began groping 
 for it in the dark, reaching as far as he could 
 
THE STATION AGENT 89 
 
 from the protection of the safe. But while he 
 searched a sound came to his ears that made him 
 shudder. It was the scraping of a heavy timber 
 through the open window of the waiting room. 
 In a moment he knew what was happening. The 
 robbers, determined to get into the ticket office 
 the quickest way possible, had brought in a 
 heavy railroad tie. Doubtless they would use 
 this as a battering ram against the all too flimsy 
 ticket office door. He knew only too well how 
 quickly the barrier would give way under the 
 crushing impact of such a missile and his heart 
 sank. He knew there was nothing left for him 
 now but to stand up and as the door went down 
 repel their rush with buckshot. If he could lay 
 them low in three shots he would be saved, but 
 if he failed — he knew what the end would be. 
 
 In the waiting room he heard the scuffle of feet 
 and the thumping of the heavy tie as the men 
 gathered it into their arms. 
 
 " Ready, Fargo. Right. Crash it down, then 
 go in and clear him out. Can't waste any time 
 now or some one will be here." 
 
 Foster heard them start — heard the scuffle and 
 tramp of heavy feet, a muttered curse or two, 
 
90 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 then a jarring, splintering crash. He jumped 
 erect as the door splintered and crashed down. 
 In the darkness he could see vague burly forms 
 filling the doorway. He knew that ugly faces 
 glared at him. Revolvers roared almost in his 
 face. Then he cut loose. 
 
 " Bang ! Bang ! " He paused an instant for 
 the third shot. Something had happened to him. 
 He felt very strange. A peculiar dizziness came 
 over him. He could hardly hold the gun for the 
 next shot — his last. He had been hit! He 
 gritted his teeth and steadied himself. Then, as 
 a big form hurled itself at him, he fired. 
 
 The gun fell from his weakened fingers. He 
 staggered, sagged back against the wall and tried 
 by a mighty effort of his will power to keep from 
 going unconscious» 
 
 Then as he leaned there unsteadily he be- 
 came conscious of a light that flooded the wait- 
 ing room. There were other shots fired in quick 
 succession. They ripped out with smashing vio- 
 lence. Through half -shut eyes he could see two 
 of the robbers rushing for the opened window. 
 One went down, rolled over and lay still. The 
 other gained the sill and was part way through 
 
THE STATION AGENT 91 
 
 when another string of shots ripped out and with 
 a groan he swayed, clutched vainly at the window 
 jamb, then fell with a crash. 
 
 For a moment absolute, deathlike quiet fell in 
 the station. Then the fast sinking Foster beheld 
 through the shattered doorway a figure in a 
 white nightgown coming toward him, a lantern 
 in one hand and a smoking revolver in the other. 
 It was his wife. Minnie Foster, despite the dan- 
 ger, had come down into the bullet-swept wait- 
 ing room just in time to save the whole situation. 
 
 Foster with a smile on his lips sank to the floor 
 unconscious. 
 
 • •*%¥** 
 
 To be sure, not every station agent has the 
 thrilling experience that Fred Foster had. In- 
 deed, Foster is one out of thousands, and yet the 
 list is all too long of the number of station agents 
 who have given their lives to the service in en- 
 counters such as this. Yeggs and tramps con- 
 tinually have their eyes on the usually prosper- 
 ous cash drawer of the country railroad station 
 and such men have small regard for life or prop- 
 erty. 
 
 But a few months before these lines were 
 
92 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 written the station agent at West Point on the 
 Hudson was shot and killed by yeggmen who 
 robbed the station cash drawer. At West Point, 
 within hearing distance of the army academy, 
 almost under the nose of Federal authority, such 
 an act was committed. It would seem from this 
 that the average station agent has something to 
 worry about. 
 
 Yet the station agent takes his task in the same 
 way that an engineer takes the job that is before 
 him. Again it is "all in a day's work." But 
 the day's work of the small town agent is likely 
 to be far more than the work of so many hours. 
 Indeed, it seems never ending in many instances, 
 so many are his duties. 
 
 The station agent of a small town must first 
 of all be a thoroughly trained A No. 1 telegraph 
 operator. This is essential, for the telegraph is 
 the nerve system of the railroad on the smooth 
 operation of which depends the safety of the en- 
 tire line. Paralleling every set of railroad tracks 
 is a telegraph line that touches every station and 
 signal tower. The whole line is one long cir- 
 cuit, so to speak, and by means of it headquarters 
 and every station agent on the line can keep in 
 
Changing rails between trains means hard work for the 
 section gang 
 
 
 II kf 
 
 Bit 
 
 i -# '<i 
 
 bs^s C9TI 
 
 1 . 
 
 \ 
 
 The station agent is a man of many responsibilities 
 
THE STATION AGENT 93 
 
 touch with every moving object on the rails. All 
 important messages concerning train operations 
 are sent over these wires and each station agent 
 can read them and translate them into written 
 messages. 
 
 All orders to trains upon the line are sent 
 and delivered by way of the telegraph and the 
 station agent. A freight may leave the ter- 
 minal yard with definite orders to go through 
 to a given point before side tracking to permit 
 a faster train to pass. When the freight is half 
 way up the line it may be necessary to send a 
 flying special, perhaps the wrecking train, to 
 some point, and this special must have a clear 
 track. Orders are flashed ahead by telegraph 
 and are received by the station agent through 
 whose station the freight will soon pass. He im- 
 mediately flags the train and gives the conductor 
 the order for a clear line, and the freight pulls 
 in at the nearest siding or middle until the flying 
 special goes by. 
 
 Or again freight trains are often sent out with 
 incomplete orders — that is, the conductors are 
 told to report to certain stations for orders from 
 the dispatcher's office as to what to do next. All 
 
94 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 these messages reach the men operating the 
 trains by way of the telegraph instrument and 
 the station agent; that is, unless it happens to 
 be a line where the telegraph has been sup- 
 planted by telephone, and all the dispatching is 
 done over telephone wires. 
 
 Thus we see that the station agent is a very 
 important link between the operating manage- 
 ment of the road and the men who actually 
 operate the trains. Indeed the station agents 
 on some lines are daily receiving messages over 
 the busy railroad wires on which the safety of 
 life and property depends. 
 
 This in itself would indicate that the agent 
 must be a man of high caliber. He must first of 
 all have a quick ear and an accurate brain to be 
 able to translate the dots and dashes- of the 
 Morse code into intelligent messages. He must 
 also have a full realization of the responsibilities 
 of his position. 
 
 But the telegraph instrument can only claim a 
 portion of the station agent's time, for he has a 
 host of other duties besides. He must take care 
 of the sale of all tickets at his station, and for 
 that reason he must have at his tongue's end the 
 
THE STATION AGENT 95 
 
 variety of rates between his town and other 
 points on the line. He must also know all the 
 details of arranging for Pullman accommoda- 
 tions, and of course he must know the road's 
 train schedule to the dot. The many and varied 
 details of the passenger service of his line must 
 be as an open book to him. 
 
 That is not all. Indeed, it is only a part of 
 this varied knowledge of railroading. He must 
 know, too, equally as much about the freight 
 service of his line, for in a one-man station he 
 is also freight agent, having all to do with the 
 complicated work of figuring out freight rates 
 and making out freight bills. 
 
 Then, too, he is the baggageman at the same 
 time, checking and accounting for all baggage, 
 such as trunks, suit-cases, valises and packages 
 of personal belongings that arrive or depart from 
 his station. He is likely also to be the agent of 
 the express company, transacting all its busi- 
 ness along that part of the railroad. And if the 
 town is small enough to require him to do all 
 this, he is probably required also to be the local 
 telegraph operator, sending and receiving mes- 
 sages for the telegraph companies that, by ar- 
 
96 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 rangement with the railroads, send messages over 
 the railroad wires. 
 
 And there are many stations, too, where the 
 agent having all this to attend to is given in ad- 
 dition the job of local postmaster. The station 
 agent is a man of many and varied occupations, 
 and one wonders as he looks out from the window 
 of a flying train at the station of some tiny and 
 remote town how the station agent ever finds 
 time to keep the little grass plot cut and trimmed 
 so neatly and how he can afford to devote even a 
 little of his day to the care of the pretty flower 
 bed beside the station platform. 
 
 Bat they manage somehow — manage because 
 they are railroad men and made to manage just 
 such affairs as these. To them operating details 
 come naturally. They know by instinct, it seems, 
 the workings of signals, the use of flags, the 
 meaning of raised or lowered arms of a sema- 
 phore, or the blasts of the locomotive whistle. 
 They are railroad men and when that is said a 
 lot is implied, for railroad men represent a class ; 
 a type of men that stand head and shoulders 
 above the average run of human beings. They 
 are Americans of the one hundred per cent. 
 
THE STATION AGENT 97 
 
 variety. They are of the same stock as the 
 pioneers, the Indian fighters, the men who built 
 the Republic and the men who 4,000,000 strong 
 showed Europe and the whole world what 
 America and the American people stand for. 
 
CHAPTEE V 
 
 SECRET SERVICE STUFF 
 
 There is a department of railroad operation 
 about which very little is known to the outside 
 world and even to railroad men themselves. 
 Hardly anything is heard about this department 
 save for occasional mention in the newspapers 
 that some particularly bold " bad man," yegg, or 
 tramp, or railroad hold-up man was finally ar- 
 rested by Detective So-and-So of the detective 
 bureau of such-and-such railroad. But for these 
 occasional glimpses into the " inside " of the busi- 
 ness the average individual would never guess 
 that almost every one of the big railroads oper- 
 ates a special secret service department or, as it is 
 generally termed, detective bureau. 
 
 These men are the railway police and their op- 
 erations are as varied as those of the sleuths of 
 the average city police force. These detective 
 bureaus are composed of some of the best sleuths 
 or secret service men in the country and the work 
 
SECRET SERVICE STUFF 99 
 
 they do is as clever as that of the well-known but 
 fictitious character, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. 
 
 Why does a railroad want to go to the trouble 
 and expense of operating a detective bureau? 
 How does the railroad benefit? You only have 
 to use your imagination to figure that out. 
 Here is a company with property extending over 
 hundreds, yes thousands of miles of country. 
 There is valuable property in every town on the 
 line and there is valuable property moving up 
 and down across the country every hour of every 
 day and night. I refer to the rolling stock and 
 equipment of the railroad alone, and the various 
 buildings, offices, stations and baggage rooms, 
 freight sheds, coal pockets, wharfs, grain eleva- 
 tors and so on. 
 
 In addition to this all of these buildings, cars, 
 piers and what not, contain millions of dollars' 
 worth of valuable property in the form of mer- 
 chandise being shipped to all corners of the coun- 
 try. And while this property is in the hands of 
 the railroad for shipment the railroad is entirely 
 responsible for it. If any part of a shipment is 
 missing, no matter how trifling it is, the shipper 
 or the one to whom it is consigned, or being 
 
100 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILROADS 
 
 shipped, is bound to come down upon the rail- 
 road for damages, and in the end the railroad has 
 to pay the bill. 
 
 It can be very easily understood that with so 
 many millions of dollars' worth of goods on hand 
 at all times and scattered so widely there is every 
 opportunity for the railroads to lose a great deal 
 by theft. Although the average railroad has a 
 tremendously long list of employees, these men, 
 efficient though they are, are just as widely scat- 
 tered as the property. Under such circum- 
 stances there are bound to be points on the system 
 that are rather loosely guarded, and it is gen- 
 erally at these places that thieves in general try 
 their luck. 
 
 There is one type or class of criminal who looks 
 to the railroads almost entirely for loot. This 
 class includes the tramp, hobo, or yeggman, all 
 of the same criminal brand, but each a distinctive 
 type. Not only these men look to the railroads 
 for illegal transportation to any point they 
 choose to go, but they mark railroad property 
 as especially desirable and easily stolen. They 
 will force their way into railroad storehouses, 
 freight sheds, or ticket offices whenever the op- 
 
SECRET SERVICE STUFF 101 
 
 portunity presents itself and steal everything 
 that they feel they can carry away without diffi- 
 culty. They will force their way into loaded 
 freight cars and appropriate anything in them 
 that they feel in need of, whether it be a case of 
 canned condensed milk or ham or slab of bacon. 
 
 For years, ever since the Civil War, in fact, 
 the tramps, hobos and yeggs have been an or- 
 ganized menace to the railroads of this country. 
 Old timers insist that before the Civil War this 
 country knew no such denizens as these. They 
 say that this country was in such a chaotic state 
 immediately following the close of the war that 
 thousands of soldiers returned to civil life to find 
 that there was nothing for them to do in the way 
 of work. They proceeded then to go to other 
 towns, and being generally without funds they 
 stole their transportation from the railroads by 
 riding in empty cars, or on brake beams, trucks 
 or between cars. They found their grub too by 
 stealing from the railroads, or " plinging " it 
 (begging it) from door to door in towns at which 
 they stopped. 
 
 This wandering life seemed to appeal to a 
 tremendous lot of these former soldiers, rovers 
 
102 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 and dare-devils that they were, and gradually 
 they stopped looking for occupations and pro- 
 ceeded to live on their wits and the railroads. 
 And thus was born an entirely new type of 
 citizen, a disreputable type to be sure, and one 
 that the railroads have had to reckon with eve? 
 since. 
 
 Gradually these tramps, as they were then 
 termed, began to organize into a regular under- 
 world fraternity, with a vernacular of their own, 
 and cabalistic signs by means of which they com- 
 municated with each other. They would chalk 
 up those queer signs on fences, gate-posts, water 
 tanks, box cars and even jail doors, and by their 
 presence other members of the fraternity would 
 know which houses in town could be "pan- 
 handled " for a meal or which house had an ugly 
 dog. They could tell whether certain towns 
 were wide open so far as they were concerned, or 
 whether the police of certain communities had 
 an eye out for tramps and put them into the 
 town lock-up readily. They had individual signs 
 too and descriptive mames and the Chicago Kid 
 could tell from certain chalk marks on a water 
 tank along a railroad right-of-way whether his 
 
SECRET SERVICE STUFF 103 
 
 pal, Bull McCabe, had gone east or west and 
 where he was headed for. 
 
 They had rendezvous and camps too almost 
 always hard by a railroad right-of-way. These 
 rendezvous were usually in a woods where shacks 
 or caves afforded them protection from the 
 weather, and where frying pans, pails and cans 
 were to be found snugly stored away in which 
 they could make their " slum " and other descrip- 
 tively named concoctions that they were accus- 
 tomed to making, for these ex-soldiers of the 
 Civil War were good cooks and all-around good 
 campers as you may believe. 
 
 And so the fraternity of tramps grew out of 
 this group of wanderers, and others besides 
 former Civil War soldiers were attracted to the 
 life. Men with trades, such as printers, um- 
 brella menders, tinsmiths, and even plumbers 
 and mechanics joined their ranks. They became 
 the hobos of a little later date, riding via " side 
 door Pullman," the same being empty freight 
 cars, from town to town or city to city, stopping 
 off to do just enough work (when they were not 
 successful at begging) to earn sufficient money 
 to buy their meals for a few days. Then they 
 
104 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILEOADg 
 
 would move on " hoboing it " from coast to coast 
 and from Canada to the Gulf. The writer is 
 acquainted with one of these former hobos, a 
 printer, who " hoboed " through every state in 
 the Union, stopping at nearly every town and city 
 of more than 5,000 population, but never remain- 
 ing in the same place longer than two days. He 
 was " on the road " six years. He is, fortunately, 
 reformed and has since become the foreman of a 
 large printing plant in a western city. 
 
 Among these two classes of rovers, the tramp 
 and the hobo, there developed a third type, the 
 yeggman. They were the lawless, fearless, hu- 
 man wolves of the clan, the worst feared of them 
 all, for they stopped at nothing, not even killing, 
 when it became necessary. 
 
 The yeggs are the worst of all the denizens of 
 the underworld, for they are not content to lead 
 the careless irresponsible life of the tramp or 
 the hobo. They are criminals at heart and they, 
 more than the others, are responsible for the 
 hold-ups on fast mail trains, the blowing of post- 
 office and station safes, the wholesale thefts from 
 freight sheds, storehouses and freight cars, and 
 all the other crimes that occur on the railroads. 
 
SECRET SERVICE STUFF 105 
 
 All of them are expert makers of " soup n or 
 nitro glycerine, which they develop from stick 
 dynamite, and most of them carry weapons of 
 one sort or another, usually automatic pistols, 
 and a small kit of burglar tools. With this 
 equipment, like wolves, they travel across the 
 country, jimmying their way into freight sheds, 
 or storehouses here, and the next night, miles 
 away (having traveled via freight cars), they 
 will blow the safe of a station ticket office or 
 hold up a station agent while they appropriate 
 the contents of his cash drawer. 
 
 Many an honest, clean living, fearless railroad 
 man has met death at the hands of these fellows, 
 while protecting railroad property, and many a 
 bloody fight has taken place along the railroad 
 right-of-way, when a group of these yeggs come 
 face to face with the fighters of the railroad 
 detective squad. 
 
 With such men abroad and preying on the rail- 
 road, one can readily understand why all of the 
 big systems of the country maintain a special 
 squad of secret service men to guard property 
 and round up these criminals whenever the op- 
 portunity occurs. The yeggs and the railroad 
 
106 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 " Bulls," as the detectives are called, are sworn 
 enemies and neither misses a chance to square 
 accounts with each other, even welcoming gun 
 play to even up matters. 
 
 Shrewd and ingenious, and crafty to a high 
 degree, the yeggman almost always meets his 
 match in a railroad detective, for none but the 
 keenest and quickest of men are employed by 
 the railroads for this sort of work. Usually they 
 are men with a broad knowledge of criminals in 
 general and yeggmen in particular and for the 
 most part they are recruited from among the 
 experienced detectives of some of the big city 
 police departments. 
 
 But that does not always follow, for more than 
 once big, broad-shouldered, fearless men of the 
 line, real railroad men, are selected to join the 
 detective force. Such men usually have an un- 
 commonly good understanding of the ways and 
 methods of railroad thieves, with a pretty broad 
 knowledge of the yeggmen as individuals. They 
 doubtless have come in contact with these bad 
 men so frequently in their railroad work that 
 they know Philadelphia Jack, or the Koco Kid, 
 and the rest of them by sight; they know their 
 
SECRET SERVICE STUFF 107j 
 
 records as criminals too and they know their 
 favorite hang-outs and their methods of operat- 
 ing. It is these men then, with that background 
 of knowledge, who make the best railroad detect- 
 ives, for some of them are so familiar with ways 
 and means of the yeggman world and know their 
 language so thoroughly that it is not difficult for 
 them to disguise themselves in old clothes and a 
 week's growth of beard and join one of these 
 groups of criminals any time. Indeed, if it were 
 possible (which it is not) to secure some of the 
 reports that are turned in to the chief of the 
 railroad detectives, many a thrilling story could 
 be had of the operations of some of these experi- 
 enced "operatives." 
 
 Some of these stories have come to the writer 
 in fragments, as it were, and with just these few 
 details it is not difficult to judge just how serious 
 some of the situations are that these railroad 
 detectives often find themselves in. There is the 
 story told of one man, who, suspecting a certain 
 pair of yeggmen of a particularly neat safe blow- 
 ing job in one of the stations along the line, set 
 out to get them. But they were a slick pair of 
 yeggs, as he well knew, and when he started out 
 
108 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILROADS 
 
 on the case lie told his chief that it might take 
 him months to find the men and get the " drop " 
 on them. 
 
 He proceeded to become a member of the yegg- 
 man's world by being a yegg himself and after 
 weeks of " bumming " about the country in the 
 company of first one yeggman and then another, 
 he had the fortune, or misfortune, if you will, of 
 running across his men one night in an empty 
 freight car attached to a freight bound out of 
 Chicago for some western city. 
 
 But he was not alone with them in the freight 
 car. Indeed this side door Pullman seemed to 
 be a special excursion car, for there were no less 
 than six yeggmen in it all traveling together. 
 
 By the light of a stolen railroad lamp, on the 
 floor of the car a card game started in which he 
 joined with the rest of the yeggs. And it was 
 some card game, from what the writer can learn. 
 It began to get disorderly right off, the two yegg- 
 men under suspicion by the detective being the 
 chief aggressors. They proceeded to bulldoze 
 the other players and act in general like the 
 " bad men " that they were. They seemed to be 
 particularly nasty to another pair of yeggs and 
 
SECRET SERVICE STUFF 109 
 
 the detective learned afterward that they " had 
 it in " for these men for double-crossing them on 
 a particular " job " that they had tried to " pull 
 off" some time previous. One word led to an- 
 other and suddenly, without a great many pre- 
 liminaries, the two suspected thieves flashed their 
 " gats " and a shooting began in the narrow con- 
 fines of the freight car. But the other yeggs 
 were as handy with their guns as were the first 
 two, and they were on their feet almost as soon 
 as their enemies. The first shot shattered the 
 lantern and put it out and then the car was in 
 darkness. 
 
 You may be sure the detective and another 
 " innocent bystander " scuttled for the nearest 
 corners and flattened out on the floor, hopeful 
 that the lead that presently began to fly would 
 not come hissing in their direction. 
 
 The shooting began immediately and for a few 
 seconds stabs of light punctured the darkness 
 everywhere, it seemed, and there were curses and 
 groans and some lively scuttling about. 
 
 Then, as suddenly as it began, the firing 
 stopped. All of the gunmen were wounded, but 
 apparently not seriously. They realized too that 
 
110 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILEOADS 
 
 banging away in the darkness was getting neither, 
 side very far, and they proceeded to hunt each 
 other out so that they could come to grips and 
 make quick work of it. Softly and stealthily 
 they began creeping around the darkened freight 
 car feeling for their victims, and meanwhile the 
 detective huddled close to the floor realized that 
 at any moment one of them might stumble over 
 him and, feeling him and not knowing who he 
 was, put a bullet through him. He drew his 
 gun too, determined to shoot first if he could. 
 
 Presently a grunt came from the far corner of 
 the car. In the other end a shot ripped out, 
 aimed blindly at the corner from which the sound 
 came. The flash brought an answering flash 
 from the other end of the car and the fusillade 
 was on again until all the automatics were 
 emptied. Then the combatants were silent again 
 as they softly filled their weapons and proceeded 
 to search for each other. 
 
 Five times these outbursts of firing took place 
 in the car, and all the time the bullets were 
 thumping about the detective, splintering the 
 floor and the side walls on either hand. But 
 finally the firing from one end of the car stopped 
 
SECRET SERVICE STUFF 111 
 
 entirely, nor did there come answering shots 
 when an occasional flash ripped the darkness 
 from the other end. It was evident to the de- 
 tective and what combatants were left that one 
 side had been put entirely out of the encounter. 
 
 Silence reigned for ten, fifteen, twenty min- 
 utes. Then from the blackness came a husky 
 whisper. 
 
 " Fargo." 
 
 A groan answered. 
 
 " Fargo." 
 
 " Huh." 
 
 " Did they get yuh? " 
 
 A groan was the only response. 
 
 " Fargo, did they git yuh? " came the husky 
 voice again. 
 
 "Yeh, got me hard. Guess I'm goin' t' 
 croak," 
 
 " Aw cut that. They got me, too. Twice. In 
 the shoulder and hand. I ain't no cripple, though. 
 Guess we've croaked 'em. Where are you? " 
 
 Once more Fargo groaned by way of an an- 
 swer. 
 
 " Stay there, I'll find yuh," called the voice, 
 and the detective knew by this time that the 
 
112 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 two men he was after had survived the fight, but 
 he knew too that both were wounded. 
 
 A moment later the white rays of a pocket 
 batter lamp punctured the darkness. The de- 
 tective knew that Fargo's pal was looking for 
 him. The yegg staggered uncertainly across the 
 swaying freight car in the direction from which 
 Fargo's groans sounded. He found him and, 
 leaning over, examined him. 
 
 "They sure got you, pal," he said rather 
 lugubriously as he searched Fargo for injuries. 
 
 Fargo groaned. 
 
 " Don't play the baby." 
 
 Fargo muttered something ugly to him. 
 
 " That sounds more like yuh." 
 
 Again a groan answered him. 
 
 The yeggman stood up and flashed the light 
 about the car. In the far corner was a pathetic- 
 ally huddled heap, while not far away sprawled 
 face downward on the car floor was another 
 silent form. Over near the door crouched an- 
 other yeggman, wild-eyed with fear, and beyond 
 was the detective sitting up now, and rolling a 
 cigarette. 
 
 " Youse guys come give me a hand," said the 
 
SECKET SERVICE STUFF 113 
 
 yeggman aggressively as he waved his automatic 
 about. The yeggman near the door got to his 
 feet almost timidly. As for the detective, he 
 finished rolling his cigarette, then got up and 
 brushed off his clothes before he came over to- 
 ward where Fargo lay. 
 
 " You're a fresh guy, ain't you? " said Fargo's 
 pal as he surveyed the detective. 
 
 " What's it to you? " answered the detective, 
 but with no show of aggressiveness. 
 
 " Don't git lippy," snarled the yeggman, mak- 
 ing a threatening gesture with his gun. " See 
 them guys?" he motioned toward the two still 
 forms. " That's what will happen to you if you 
 ain't careful. Then I'll drop you out of the side 
 door and under the wheels of the train. When 
 they find you on the tracks to-morrow morning 
 they'll think you're another Bo that's been hit by 
 a train or dropped off some brake beam and been 
 run over. Here, git busy, that's your job now. 
 Pry open that side door and swing these two 
 croaked guys off between the wheels. The fur- 
 ther up the line we can leave them, the better it'll 
 be fer all of us. Come on, git busy while this 
 guy helps me with Fargo." 
 
114 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 The detective looked the yeggman over. He 
 was of a mind to come to a show down with him 
 then. But on second thought he realized that 
 the yegg had his gun drawn and ready while he 
 had discreetly put his away when the fighting 
 stopped. Then, too, he was not quite sure how 
 friendly the other yegg might be, and Fargo, 
 though badly wounded, was still able to hold his 
 pistol. No, the time was not ripe. Yet he 
 loathed to have a hand in the nasty job the yegg- 
 man had allotted to him. 
 
 " No," he said. " Let me tend to Fargo with 
 you. I know a little about first aid work." 
 
 " A educated Bo, eh? " 
 
 " Nope, was drafted in t' army. First aid guy 
 there. Know a lot about it." 
 
 " All right. Git busy. You guy " (he poked 
 his gun at the other yegg), "jimmy open that 
 side door and swing these stiffs down under the 
 wheels. Get busy now. We don't want no wise 
 railroad bulls trailing us fer this, see." 
 
 The yegg proceeded to open the side door with 
 alacrity while the detective, watching every move 
 of the yegg with the gun, proceeded to dress 
 Fargo's many wounds. In the course of his 
 
SECKET SERVICE STUFF 115 
 
 work, he was careful to move Fargo's gun out of 
 his reach, and then he watched the movements of 
 the other yegg, who with his one good hand and 
 his bandaged and only partly serviceable other 
 hand, helped him. Presently the yeggman slipped 
 his automatic into his pocket so that he could 
 work the easier, and that was what the detective 
 was watching for. 
 
 Like a flash he jumped to his feet and whipped 
 out his own gun, at the same time flashing a 
 battery lamp too. 
 
 "Now you Frisco Ed, up with those hands. 
 That's the boy. Come over this way a step while 
 I remove your gat." 
 
 The yeggman put up his hands with the single 
 exclamation, " Bulls ! " 
 
 " Yep, one of those ' fresh railroad bulls ' you 
 been talking of. Been after you and Fargo for 
 weeks. Got you dead to rights now. You'll 
 swing for this and so will Fargo if he lives. Step 
 this way. Easy now, and keep the hands 
 up." 
 
 The yeggman came over to him and with his 
 pistol pressed against the thief's ribs, the de- 
 tective " frisked " his gun and battery lamp. 
 
116 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 " Now over in a corner there. That one. Sit 
 down and be nice. I can shoot some." 
 
 The yeggman obeyed with muttered impreca- 
 tions. 
 
 The detective gathered up Fargo's gun, who 
 now was unconscious. 
 
 " Hi, you other yegg, cut that. Leave the side 
 door open and leave those stiffs alone. Git over 
 in the corner too and sit down. Wait, come over 
 here first and let me remove your gat. Hands 
 up. That's it." 
 
 But this yegg had no shooting irons. He was 
 more a tramp than a yeggman, the detective could 
 see that. He was not used to rough work like 
 that that had taken place in the car that night. 
 He obeyed the detective's command with fright- 
 ened looks. 
 
 "Need you for a witness anyhow," said the 
 detective crisply, as he sat down in such a posi- 
 tion that he could command a view of the whole 
 car. 
 
 And there he sat with the yeggman and tramp 
 at the point of his pistol and the three dead men 
 in the car (for Fargo passed out without regain- 
 ing consciousness) for the rest of the night, and 
 when dawn showed through the still open side 
 
SECRET SERVICE STUFF 117, 
 
 door of the freight car, the long train of empties 
 pulled into the freight yard of a big western city 
 and shortly after the prisoners were in the hands 
 of the local police and the detective, having made 
 good on his job of finding Frisco Ed and Fargo 
 the Frog, was calmly having breakfast in the 
 railroad station lunch room while he scribbled 
 out telegrams to his chief and wired to his wife 
 to send him on some respectable clothing so that 
 he could return home in a real Pullman, as a 
 gentleman. 
 
 But the experiences of this detective are not 
 unusual in the life of a railroad detective. They 
 face unbelievable situations sometimes, and more 
 than once in the course of their work life or death 
 depends on their quick wits and quick thinking, 
 not to mention the quick right hand. 
 
 The writer knows of one railroad detective who 
 will wear a silver plate in his skull for the rest 
 of his life as a result of an encounter with a 
 yeggman in which he was felled and almost killed 
 by a railroad spike that was hurled at him. And 
 there is another one who belongs to the same 
 force whose front teeth are missing and whose 
 nose is flat and bridgeless as a result of a " free 
 for all " with a pair of yeggmen. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 OPERATING THE ROAD 
 
 The heart of a railroad, as well as the brains, 
 are located in the dispatcher's office. Here the 
 entire control of the operating end of the road 
 is centered, and here if a mistake is made a 
 catastrophe results. The dispatcher has his 
 finger on everything that is moving on the road. 
 He knows every minute, day or night, where 
 every train — freight, passenger or work train is. 
 He knows whether they are on time or behind 
 schedule, and he knows within a few minutes 
 after the train has finished its run every detail 
 of the trip and what has occurred. He is re- 
 sponsible for the entire operation of each train, 
 so far as providing a clear road for it is con- 
 cerned, and if he makes an error hundreds of 
 lives and thousands of dollars are liable to be 
 destroyed. 
 
 From this it can be gathered that the position 
 of dispatcher is a highly responsible One, as in- 
 deed it is. Only picked men who have stood the 
 
 118 
 
OPERATING THE ROAD 119 
 
 test of emergencies, who have clear brains and 
 who can think quickly and carry a hundred de- 
 tails in their minds without getting one confused 
 with the other, are selected to hold these posi- 
 tions. 
 
 At eleven o'clock at night, when there is a 
 change of tricks and a new dispatcher comes on 
 to relieve the one who has been at his desk since 
 three o'clock in the afternoon, the road is run- 
 ning smoothly. Every through passenger train 
 is booming along on time, every long crawly 
 freight train is moving over the darkened land- 
 scape, with orders how to proceed and where to 
 pull in on sidings. 
 
 It looks like a comparatively quiet night and 
 the relieved dispatcher pulls on his coat, says 
 good night to the man who has slipped into 
 his chair, jokes a moment or two with the rest 
 of the dispatchers in the room, then goes out 
 into the terminal and turns homeward. The 
 relief operator slips into the chair, adjusts 
 head-piece and mouth-piece (if 'phones are be- 
 ing used) or turns the resonator box at the 
 proper angle so that he can hear the constantly 
 clicking Morse key while he glances over the big 
 
120 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 chart sheet on the desk before him that tells him 
 the complete story of every train that has left 
 the terminal that day. 
 
 He notes with interest that No. 137 was five 
 minutes late at Scarston. He sees that No. 317, 
 a slow freight, is in the siding at Warton, the 
 next station above, patiently waiting until No. 
 137 shall pass her. Even while he is looking the 
 sheet over a voice comes in on the wire. 
 " N. X.? " it queries. " This is W. N.» 
 " All right, W. N.," the dispatcher replies to 
 the man in the tower at Warton, whose tower is 
 known as W. N. 
 
 u No. 137 under the bell. Three minutes late." 
 The dispatcher translates this into the facts 
 that the passenger train, No. 137, that he had 
 noted was five minutes late at Scarston has made 
 up two minutes between Scarston and Warton, 
 where she is just coming into the station. " Un- 
 der the bell" means that the crossing bell at 
 Warton is ringing to warn vehicles that the train 
 is approaching. The dispatcher knows that in a 
 few minutes W. N. should call him up and tell 
 him that No. 137 has cleared the station and the 
 siding and that No. 317 has pulled out of the 
 
OPERATING THE ROAD 121 
 
 siding and is proceeding again on the main line! 
 on her necessarily slow way westward. 
 
 Presently a voice conies in on the line again. 
 
 "X. X. (the terminal call), this is W. X." 
 
 "All right, W. N.," acknowledges the dis- 
 patcher. 
 
 " There's a nasty mess up here/' says the man 
 in the TVarton tower, in a very deliberate, un- 
 hurried voice, " Xo. 317 is wrecked. Split a 
 switch going out onto the main line and eight 
 freight cars are spread all over the right-of-way, 
 all four tracks are blocked." 
 
 All of which means that things have " busted 
 wide open with a bang," to quote the dispatcher, 
 and the chances are good for about &ve hours of 
 terrific work and quick thinking. 
 
 Does the dispatcher lose his nerve? Indeed 
 not. If he did the chances are the whole rail- 
 road system would be tied into a double bow knot 
 that would take twenty-four hours to untangle 
 with the chances of more and very serious wrecks 
 occurring, resulting in a tremendous loss of life 
 and thousands of dollars' worth of property. 
 
 He keeps his head. He has to or things will 
 go to smash in a jiffy. He knows that in the 
 
122 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 quickest possible time lie has to have that wreck 
 cleared up, and while it is being done he can't 
 let a wheel stop anywhere on the line. With 
 lightning swiftness he proceeds to think himself 
 out of the tangle. 
 
 His first move is to send out a call for the 
 wrecking train. This is done by his assistant or 
 student dispatcher, who proceeds to get in touch 
 with the wrecking boss. Meanwhile the dis- 
 patcher secures for the wrecking train a clear 
 track from the terminal to the wreck. This he 
 does by flashing orders along the line to points 
 where he knows certain trains are proceeding. 
 A quick summary of the chart shows him that 
 eight miles this side of Warton there is a short 
 line that leaves the main line at an angle and 
 reaches north for seventy miles, where it crosses 
 another road's tracks. These tracks reach south- 
 westward and ninety miles above Warton cross 
 the main line again. 
 
 He sees in this angle of tracks the possibilities 
 of a big detour that will take the trains of his 
 line around the wreck and put them onto his 
 main line ninety miles above where the freight 
 cars are piled up. 
 

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OPEKATING THE KOAD 123 
 
 He immediately flashes orders to every train 
 between the terminal and the short line to swing 
 in on this line and proceed on the detour as di- 
 rected. Those trains that are not near enough 
 to the short line to reach it before the wrecking 
 train goes through he orders to put in on certain 
 sidings along the way until the wrecking train 
 is cleared, after which they are to proceed on the 
 detour. 
 
 All this takes time, although the dispatcher 
 is working with every bit of energy he has to ac- 
 complish the task. And while he is doing this 
 the wrecking train has cleared the terminal yard 
 and is booming along up the main line at a fifty- 
 mile-an-hour clip, for the dispatcher has re- 
 minded the wrecking boss that the wreck is lo- 
 cated in the path of all of the fast commutation 
 trains and that by daylight these will be coming 
 through on the main line and must have a clear 
 track. In other words, between eleven-fifteen, 
 when the wreck occurred, and five o'clock, the 
 following morning, at least two of the four tracks 
 of the main line must be cleared to let the com- 
 mutation trains, twenty of them between five 
 o'clock and nine, come through on time. These 
 
124 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 trains can't be a minute later or the " howl " 
 that will be raised will be enough to make the 
 " super " come storming down on everybody. 
 
 Is the wreck cleared away? Of course it is. 
 The road must be kept open and that must means 
 exactly what it says and nothing less. 
 
 That is only one type of scores of emergencies 
 that come up every day in the life of a dispatcher. 
 It illustrates only one of the reasons why he must 
 know at every minute of every twenty-four hours 
 why and where each wheel is turning on the line. 
 It also serves to indicate how swiftly and accu- 
 rately a dispatcher must think and why he 
 can't afford to make a single error. Oh, 
 yes, errors have been made by dispatchers. A 
 story is told of one who let two fast 
 passenger trains from opposite directions in 
 on a single track at the same time. After 
 he had done it he saw with horror the mistake 
 he had made and he knew how terrible the con- 
 sequences were going to be when those two trains 
 out there in the mountains miles away crashed 
 together. He knew there was no way of avert- 
 ing the crash. Even then he did not get excited. 
 He thought out the best thing to do under the cir- 
 
OPERATING THE ROAD 125 
 
 cumstances. That was to order out a hospital 
 train filled with doctors and nurses and the 
 wrecking train to follow it. Both were ordered 
 out, cleared and on the way to the point where 
 the two trains would crash before the wreck had 
 occurred. After that was finished the dispatcher 
 turned his telegraph key over to his student for 
 a few minutes, stepped out of the room and, plac- 
 ing a revolver to his head, shot himself. He 
 knew he could not live with it always on his con- 
 science that a mistake of his had caused the 
 tremendous wreck that did follow and the result- 
 ing heavy toll of human lives. 
 
 We can picture the dispatcher as a man who 
 sits in an offl.ce with a number of strings in his 
 hands ; each string is attached to a train that is 
 moving over the landscape sometimes a hundred 
 miles away. He knows, just as well as if he 
 could see each train, exactly what they are do- 
 ing. He, figuratively speaking, has a finger on 
 each one of them and he moves them up and down 
 the division in the best possible way to avoid 
 trouble, to get them through the fastest, the most 
 economically and to the best advantage of trav- 
 elers and shippers of freight. 
 
126 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILKOADS 
 
 The dispatcher's office is at the business or 
 yard end of the division. Nearly all roads are 
 divided up into sections called divisions, that in- 
 clude a hundred or more miles of out and in 
 bound track, with yard areas and all the mechan- 
 ical equipment that goes with that section of the 
 road. Usually a division includes the trackage 
 reaching from one big city to another, with a 
 division terminal and yards in each city. 
 
 Along the tracks of the entire division, you 
 know, wires parallel the right-of-way. These 
 are both telegraph and telephone wires, and each 
 one touches at every switch or signal tower along 
 the line. On some roads they touch each station 
 and the station agent functions instead of the 
 tower men. 
 
 The dispatcher sits in his office with either 
 key before him or telephone set clamped to his 
 head, with an open wire that extends from his 
 office to the other end of the division. At every 
 tower or station along the line another man sits 
 in with key and resonator before him or tele- 
 phone set clamped to his ear. These men in the 
 towers are the eyes and ears of the dispatcher 
 back in the office and it is through them, 
 
OPERATING THE ROAD 127 
 
 through what they see or hear, that the dis- 
 patcher keeps in touch with the trains on the 
 division. 
 
 Generally a division is split up into districts, 
 or sections of between thirty and fifty miles of 
 tracks, and each dispatcher is given one of these 
 districts to care for. He has absolute control of 
 everything moving east or west on his section and 
 his responsibility lasts until the train is clear of 
 his territory and is picked up by the dispatcher 
 who controls the next section up or down the 
 line. 
 
 Usually two dispatchers sit opposite each 
 other across a table and each has an assistant 
 dispatcher, or student dispatcher, as they are 
 called by the railroad men. They have a large 
 sheet in front of them, on which appears a full 
 history of the day's operation of every train on 
 the road. For an instance, the sheet is made 
 out with first the train's number appearing, as 
 for example No. 9, which designates the train 
 as No. 9 (on the out sheets the numbers are all 
 odd and on the in sheets the numbers are all 
 even) . In the next column on the blank appears 
 the number of the engine that is hauling the 
 
128 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 train, as No. 786. In the next column is the 
 name of the engineer. Following there are ten 
 paralleling columns with the letters, " C. B., 
 Ex., C. P. B.; 0. M. B., Pro., P. P. C. Mail; 
 S. Fr't"; each of these groups of letters distin- 
 guish a certain type of car, as for instance C, in 
 the first column means passenger coaches, 0. M. 
 B. in the fourth column means combination mail 
 coach and baggage car, and Fr't in the last col- 
 umn means freight cars. In some of these col- 
 umns numbers appear opposite the number of 
 the train, as for instance, 9 under 0. means that 
 there are nine passenger coaches attached to the 
 train, 1 under C. M. B. means that there is a 
 combination mail and baggage car also with the 
 train. The next column gives the name of the 
 conductor. Thus the dispatcher knows that 
 train No. 9, drawn by engine No. 786, of which 
 Mr. Blank is engineer, has nine coaches. It is 
 a mail train and it also carries baggage, and is 
 in charge of conductor Mr. So-and-So. There 
 are still more columns on the blank, a series of 
 them extending to the right and at the head of 
 each one strange letter combinations, such as 
 RS ; HI ; ZY ; NO ; etc. These are the call names 
 
OPERATING THE ROAD 129 
 
 of the various towers along the line past which 
 the train will go and from which a man will be 
 watching for her to pass. 
 
 As she rushes by each of these points the man 
 in the tower will report back to the dispatcher 
 that she has passed or cleared his point and that 
 she was running on time or, if late, behind time, 
 and give the number of minutes. As each of the 
 towers report on a train the dispatcher enters 
 upon the blank her time. Thus he follows her 
 on her run, checking her passing of each tower, 
 and if at the end of the run she is late, there is a 
 space on the blank labeled remarks, in which is 
 entered the conductor's report and his reasons 
 for being late. 
 
 So it goes throughout the entire twenty-four 
 hours. The dispatchers and students work in 
 shifts of eight hours, the first shift reporting at 
 seven o'clock in the morning and being relieved 
 at three in the afternoon by men who work until 
 eleven at night and then give over their chairs 
 to men who come in and work until the seven 
 o'clock men appear again. The same shifts pre- 
 vail on the towers along the line and thus there 
 are eyes on every train moving at all times. 
 
130 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 These dispatchers' sheets are made out with 
 accurate care and every morning at eight o'clock 
 their contents is made up into a report which is 
 placed on the desk of every official of the road, 
 so that these men can see what has transpired, 
 and how well their railroad has operated during 
 the past twenty-four hours. 
 
 But it is hardly as simple as it might appear 
 set down here. Those dispatchers' sheets in a 
 few cryptic remarks may convey a story that will 
 occupy columns in next morning's papers. There 
 may be a big difference in time figures between 
 two columns, which means that somewhere be- 
 tween one tower and another something has hap- 
 pened. 
 
 One tower has reported the train clear while 
 the next tower up the line has been looking 
 down the track in vain for her to put in her ap- 
 pearance. Presently he gets a telephone call 
 from the outside somewhere. It is the conductor 
 of the expected train two miles down the line 
 telephoning him that the train has struck a 
 spreaded rail and jumped the track. Cars are 
 piled over the right-of-way and the line is 
 blocked. A wrecking train is needed. 
 
OPERATING THE ROAD 131 
 
 And so it goes. All sorts of trouble can hap- 
 pen, after which all sorts of trouble happens for 
 the operator, for with the road blocked he must 
 take care to see that every other train he has 
 running on the line does not run foul of the 
 wreck, nor be slowed up or hampered any more 
 than is necessary. At the same time he must 
 see that the mess is cleared up as soon as pos- 
 sible. 
 
 But there are a thousand other details to a dis- 
 patcher's job. Not only must he keep the line 
 moving but he must be the medium through 
 which all orders affecting individuals and trains 
 are passed along the line. He must be a veri- 
 table news bulletin concerning the condition of 
 the line. 
 
 There is a Special Order book maintained at 
 the dispatcher's office into which are entered 
 all special orders. These must be read and 
 signed for by every conductor and engineer 
 at the beginning of a run. This special order 
 book contains everything of importance that 
 a conductor or engineer should know about 
 the condition of the line. As these special or- 
 ders come in copies are made and posted at vari- 
 
132 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 ous points on the line where these Special Order 
 Books are kept. A copy is promptly posted in 
 each book, and the conductors and engineers are 
 supposed to read them and sign their names on 
 the opposite page, thus indicating that they have 
 read the order and that they are familiar with 
 the condition or matter the order speaks of. 
 
 Before beginning a run the conductor may 
 find in the order book the statement that a sec- 
 tion gang is repairing tracks at such and such a 
 point, that a mistake has been made in a new 
 time table, that his train is required to make a 
 new stop, that it is snowing at a certain point on 
 the line, or raining, or there are high winds, or 
 perhaps there has been a wash-out or a wreck 
 that he must look out for. In that way, through 
 this special order book the men on the line are 
 kept in touch with every condition of affairs so 
 that they have no excuse for a mistake. 
 
 At the beginning of each run the conductors 
 must report to the dispatcher's office for orders. 
 These orders are read over carefully, and read to 
 the members of the crew, who repeat them back 
 to him to show that they have a clear understand- 
 ing of them. 
 
OPERATING THE ROAD 133 
 
 5t the end of each run the conductor's first 
 duty is to make out a train slip giving a full 
 report 'of the run and all excuses for lateness. 
 These reports get back to the dispatcher's office, 
 where they are carefully noted. 
 
 The dispatchers also see to the ordering out 
 of all special trains, such as extra sections of 
 passenger trains or special freights; they ar- 
 range for the engines from the master mechanic's 
 department or roundhouse boss, they arrange 
 with the callers for engine crew and train crew, 
 they make up all special orders for the train and 
 see that it gets out on time and has a clear track 
 to the end of its run. 
 
 Mention of the callers reveals a special little 
 department closely associated with the dis- 
 patcher's department that is highly interesting. 
 The callers operate a telephone system all their 
 own. Their responsibility is to call the train 
 and engine crews and to this end they maintain 
 a little telephone system, and a group of willing 
 errand boys. 
 
 In this department is listed the names, ad- 
 dresses, and telephone numbers of all fire- 
 men, engineers, brakemen, trainmen, and con- 
 
134 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILKOADS 
 
 ductors working for the division. There iare 
 men on duty day and night and the minute the 
 dispatchers ask for a crew for a special train or 
 engine the callers get busy with telephone or 
 errand boy, routing men out of bed if needs be, 
 to fill each crew. The callers have the respon- 
 sibility entirely of furnishing men to do the work 
 of the road and sometimes they are called upon 
 to do some quick work in the way of manning 
 trains in the middle of the night, especially the 
 wrecking train that stands ready and waiting to 
 be sent out upon the line at any hour, to clear 
 up a mess that may be blocking the tracks. 
 
 A variety of details come under the head of 
 duties in the dispatchers' office. Such un- 
 thought-of things as saving coal and fuel is part 
 of their work. The cutting down of stops for 
 trains is part of their work a that to the average 
 person looks to be unimportant, but when it is 
 considered that in fuel and wear and tear on 
 equipment each stop and start of a train costs 
 the company never less than five dollars and in 
 the times of high costs as much as $9.60, it can 
 readily be seen that the dispatchers are eager to 
 eliminate all unnecessary stops. Then, in addi- 
 
OPERATING THE ROAD 135 
 
 tion to other details, the dispatchers are sup- 
 posed to render a full report of every incident, 
 such as the breaking of a driving rod on an 
 engine, the loss of a brake-shoe, a bent journal, a 
 smashed freight car and things of a similar na- 
 ture that may be reported by conductors or 
 engineers. 
 
 They must follow up each report with still 
 other reports on the situation until the whole 
 thing is explained and the incident finally 
 closed. The work of the dispatchers is unend- 
 ing, it seems, and when all things are considered 
 the dispatchers' office can truly be said to be the 
 heart and brains of the division. 
 
 Over all the dispatchers, these men who work 
 at the desks operating telegraph or telephone 
 lines, whichever the case may be, is a chief dis- 
 patcher, and he is held responsible for the entire 
 department and all that goes on. He must, as 
 you can readily see, be a man of remarkable 
 capabilities, as accomplished as the superin- 
 tendent himself. Indeed, many a chief dis- 
 patcher steps up from his position to the office 
 of executive of the division. 
 
 "The dispatcher must be a live wire indi- 
 
136 THE BOYS' BOOK OP RAILROADS 
 
 vidual," said a chief dispatcher to the writer. 
 " He must have, besides the qualifications for the 
 job, a pleasant disposition, a cool head and no 
 nerves. He must never be a grouch or a pes- 
 simist. The dispatching staff of a railroad is 
 the heart of the line and if the men are full of 
 pep the road moves. If the men are grouches 
 the road stands still. They must have intelli- 
 gence and drive but they can't be offensive. They 
 must be real chums with the men on the line, 
 willing to listen to the other fellow. A dis- 
 patcher who growls over the telephone or snaps 
 a conductor up at every turn soon makes the 
 other men afraid of him. They don't want to 
 call him on the 'phone, they don't want to have 
 anything to do with him. They fight him in- 
 stead, and where there's that sort of friction a 
 road can't go ahead. In other words, a dis- 
 patcher must be a ' regular fellow ' plus a keen 
 brain, a quick ear, and intelligence, and the 
 ability to think his way out of trouble in the 
 shortest possible time." 
 
 All dispatchers must be experienced telegraph 
 operators. True, to-day the telephone is used 
 to a great extent in dispatching trains, but the 
 
OPERATING THE ROAD 137 
 
 telegraph is still maintained for emergencies and 
 the ability to operate a key and read Morse code 
 is the first requirement of a man who hopes to 
 become a dispatcher. 
 
 It is a long hard row to that responsible posi- 
 tion, however, covering a period of from ten to 
 fifteen years, depending somewhat of course on 
 the capabilities of the candidate. A chap just 
 out of high school could master telegraphy in a 
 few months, but to become a really qualified ex- 
 pert, of the type that dispatchers must be, he 
 must spend at least a year and a half of hard 
 practice work at the key, taking and sending all 
 types of messages. 
 
 After that he must get out upon the line, as a 
 member of a train crew, perhaps. Here he must 
 absorb all of the romance of railroading and 
 learn everything that he can learn about the 
 movement of trains and all that goes with this 
 fascinating work. He can spend &ve years 
 profitably with a train crew or in some other 
 branch of railroading. 
 
 Then if he has showed unusual brightness, has 
 been studious, careful, and indicates that he has 
 a sense of responsibility, he will one day be asked 
 
138 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 to report to the dispatcher's office. Here he be- 
 comes a student dispatcher, or assistant to a dis- 
 patcher. From five to eight years are required 
 to learn all the details of this job, but meanwhile 
 he has already attained and is taking care of a 
 worth-while position. If he shows cool judg- 
 ment, is not too nervous, can think quickly and 
 has the pep and drive required, one day the man 
 whom he is assisting will be moved up to the job 
 of chief dispatcher and he will take the dis- 
 patcher's chair and have a student of his own. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE MAN IN THE TOWER 
 
 Closely allied with the dispatcher's office and 
 part of the force under the chief dispatcher of 
 the terminal division of a railroad is the starter. 
 He is an important personage, and a very ca- 
 pable individual. He must be when one stops to 
 consider his work. He is the man who sends 
 each train away on time, and in a terminal where 
 there are two hundred passenger trains going 
 out upon the line every twenty-four hours, you 
 can well imagine that there is keen work to be 
 done. 
 
 But those figures do not tell half the 
 
 story. At most terminals there are a great many 
 
 commuters' trains to be handled and this creates 
 
 a strenuous rush hour between half -past five and 
 
 seven o'clock each afternoon. At such times the 
 
 starter is on the jump every minute and, watch 
 
 in hand, he is sending trains away almost as fast 
 
 139 
 
140 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 as they can clear the terminal yards. Indeed 
 he often sends three away at once at the very 
 climax of the rush period. 
 
 To start the trains may not seem to be such a 
 hard job, but when all the details of the starter's 
 work is taken into consideration it is seen that 
 the man who occupies that little bay-window- 
 shaped balcony in a terminal train shed has got 
 to be a keen, quick-thinking individual. 
 
 The starter's tower, for it really is a tower, al- 
 though it appears to be only a balcony in the 
 terminal train shed, is equipped with a formi- 
 dable looking board of push buttons, buzzers, 
 drops and telephone plugs. Some of these con- 
 nect with the tracks in the train shed, some with 
 the gates, some with the ferry house and others 
 with the switch and signal towers out in the 
 train yard. All of these come into play in the 
 single operation of starting a train. 
 
 Let us step into the starter's balcony of the 
 Erie Railroad terminal in Jersey City at a few 
 minutes before six in the evening at the very 
 height of the rush hour. This terminal, although 
 among the smallest of the railroad terminals 
 serving New York City, stands second in the 
 
THE MAN IN THE TOWER 141 
 
 number of commuters handled during each rush 
 hour. 
 
 Here we find the starter, a bright young 
 chap in his early thirties, standing, watch in 
 hand, before this big key board. Despite the 
 rush and turmoil of crowding commuters in the 
 station below him, despite the din and confusion 
 of a hundred different types of noises always 
 heard in a terminal, not the least of which is 
 the chugging and snorting of locomotives, the 
 rumble of baggage truck and the thumping of 
 trunks and baggage being loaded, he stands there 
 as cool and unruffled as if he were almost any- 
 where else. But he is alert and as keen as a man 
 can be, for there is something new happening out 
 there in the train shed every minute and he is 
 responsible for all that goes on that has anything 
 to do with starting the trains. 
 
 At the moment we enter there are three trains 
 due to go out at once, three trains that should 
 start at 5.52, for the Erie terminal not only 
 serves the Erie main line but five branch lines, 
 the Greenwood Lake, the Northern Railroad, the 
 Susquehanna and Western, the New Jersey and 
 New York, and the Newark Branch line, a short 
 
142 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 line that does a heavy commuting business. On 
 three of these five branch lines trains are due to 
 go out together, while a fourth will start out on 
 the main line four minutes later. 
 
 Three minutes before train time a buzzer an- 
 nounces to the starter that the ferries serving 
 these trains are in the slip and that the pas- 
 sengers are streaming up the gangways toward 
 the ferry terminal. The starter knows that three 
 minutes is enough to unload the passengers from 
 the ferry and load them aboard the trains. He 
 knows then that he does not have to hold the 
 train because of a ferry delay. But the terminal 
 is also served by a subway by which just as many 
 passengers reach the trains. This is the next 
 point of interest that the starter must think of, 
 as he notes the hands of his watch. 
 
 Twenty seconds before the trains are to leave, 
 by push buttons he announces in this subway 
 station the fact that the train is ready to start. 
 There is a different ring for each track and his 
 hands slip hurriedly from one button to another 
 flashing the call. At the same time he signals 
 to the man in the main waiting room to give the 
 "all out" call. 
 
THE MAN IN THE TOWER 143 
 
 Every one is on his toes now, for in twenty 
 seconds the trains must be in motion, three of 
 them, and not a minute can be lost in this rush 
 hour jam, for every minute means that a much 
 needed track is blocked and that thousands of 
 anxious commuters are figuratively " piling up " 
 waiting to be hauled to their homes. 
 
 Twenty seconds is up! 
 
 Again the starter's fingers hop from one push 
 button to another. Down in the train shed green 
 lights pop out giving the conductor his "All 
 aboard " sign, gates slam, and the train begins 
 to rumble out of the station. 
 
 But while all this has been going on new trains 
 have been backing into the shed and made up, 
 word of each being flashed to the starter, other 
 ferries have been coming in, preparatory signals 
 must be flashed for other trains that will be ready 
 to leave a few minutes later, and so on. So 
 many are the details that it seems almost beyond 
 the human brain to keep track of them all, yet 
 everything must be done exactly at the right 
 second, and with the utmost care. 
 
 And that is not all. If a train is delayed in 
 starting for any reason it is up to the starter to 
 
144 THE BOYS' BOOK OF BAILROADS 
 
 record the delay and investigate it. If it is en- 
 gine trouble, he must find out every detail and 
 the reason for it, for he keeps a careful and ac- 
 curate record of each train starting, in a book in 
 front of him, and if he cannot put a cryptic "Ot." 
 after the number of the train he has to write out 
 a report of why the train is late in starting. 
 And there are still other details. 
 
 There is a report book in his office and each con- 
 ductor must report there and sign the book to in- 
 dicate that he is on time himself and ready to 
 take his train out. There is also a special order 
 book here in which all personal orders for the con- 
 ductors are noted. A conductor on finding his 
 name posted in the book asks the starter for his 
 personal orders. It may be an order informing 
 him that he can have a day off on Tuesday as he 
 has requested or it may tell him that he is to have 
 a special car attached to his train, or that there 
 will be a group of prisoners for Elmira loaded 
 aboard his train at a certain point on the line. 
 All these special orders must come through the 
 starter. 
 
 Besides this each conductor, as you know, 
 makes out a train slip before starting a 
 
THE MA3J IN THE TOWER 145 
 
 run. This slip tells the number of the train, the 
 number of the engine, the destination and similar 
 details. These slips are dropped into a box as 
 the train is about to leave the terminal and later 
 they are gathered up and taken first to the 
 starter, where, in a space calling for remarks he 
 must note the reason for any delay in starting if 
 there has been any, before the slips are passed 
 on to the dispatcher's office, there to help the dis- 
 patchers make out their train sheets. 
 
 But if the work of the starter seems compli- 
 cated and nerve wrecking, consider that of the 
 man, or men rather, in the tower out in the 
 yard — the terminal switch tower. 
 
 All things considered, there is probably no 
 other job in railroading that can compare to that 
 of the tower director, in the demand it makes on 
 his nervous energy. 
 
 His work reduced to its simplest terms is 
 this : — the terminal is equipped with ten tracks 
 in the train shed onto which trains are 
 backed to be loaded. These ten tracks all lead 
 into the four tracks of the line, the whole layout 
 resembling very much a big long-necked bottle, 
 the tracks in the train shed being the bowl of the 
 
146 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 bottle and the four tracks leading out onto the 
 main line the neck of the bottle. The director 
 of the switch and signal tower must pour the 
 traffic of the road in and out of the bottle's neck 
 without causing a jam, or a minute's delay to the 
 traffic, or worst of all a collision. And he must 
 do it all by the manipulation of a hundred or 
 more switches and twice as many semaphore sig- 
 nal arms. 
 
 With commutation trains rumbling in and out 
 at the rate of one every few minutes, with emp- 
 ties backing down to be made up into trains, with 
 puffing switch engines chugging in and out and 
 big mastodons of engines dragging in the impor- 
 tant trains of the line, snorting and pawing for 
 train shed space, all at the same time, it seems 
 almost impossible that it can all be done, and 
 done as it is in almost perfect safety. The man 
 or men in the terminal tower seem almost super- 
 human in their work. 
 
 A visit to the terminal tower of a big railroad 
 convinces one immediately that this is one of the 
 most vital points of the whole railroad system. 
 Inside the tower one gets the impression that 
 here watchfulness and extreme care are used, for 
 
THE MAN IN THE TOWER 147 
 
 every order that crackles out from the tower di- 
 rector is snapped up and repeated by the men at 
 the battery of levers. Every movement is made 
 swiftly but with- care and accuracy and every one 
 seems at every moment to be " on his toes." 
 
 The terminal tower is located where it com- 
 mands a view of the four main tracks of the line 
 and all the tracks in the train shed. There is a 
 bay or balcony here, too, and in this the tower 
 director and his assistant sit, the latter with a 
 battery of push buttons, keys, drops and tele- 
 phone plugs in front of him and a telautograph 
 at his elbow. 
 
 Behind the two executives is a huge boxlike 
 affair that takes up the entire room and con- 
 tains the delicate and complicated mechanism 
 of the interlocking switch and signal sys- 
 tem. All of the mechanism that is visible is a 
 series of crank-like levers and blinking telltale 
 lights. It is these levers, operated by three men 
 who man the board, that accomplish the great 
 work done in the tower. 
 
 The switches and signals of this interlocking 
 system are of the electric-pneumatic type. That 
 is the switches are operated by air pressure that 
 
148 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILKOADS 
 
 is controlled electrically from the tower. As 
 these levers are moved electricity actuates the 
 valves that control the air pressure at the switch, 
 and by this pressure the switch is moved over or 
 back as is necessary. 
 
 In days gone by all this work was done by 
 the strength of a man's arm rather than the 
 force of compressed air (as was also true of 
 hand brakes on cars before the coming of the 
 present-day air brakes). In those times the 
 terminal tower, in fact all towers, had quite a 
 different appearance. Instead of the tiny levers, 
 there were batteries of huge hand levers, and as 
 a switch was moved a man used all his strength 
 and braced his feet against the iron frame 
 of the lever to help him in his effort. There 
 are still many towers in which these great hand 
 levers of the " Manual type," as they were called, 
 are used, but fortunately they are fast giving way 
 to the safer, swifter, and more accurate electric- 
 pneumatic system. 
 
 The rest of the tower equipment consists of a 
 set of tiny semaphore signals set above the direct- 
 or's head, but where he can see them without 
 effort. One group of these tells him which of the 
 
An old type of switch tower where switches and signals 
 are turned by hand 
 
 
 Inside the Terminal Tower where electricity does every- 
 thing except the thinking 
 
THE MA2T IN THE TOWER 149 
 
 ten tracks in the train shed are clear and which 
 are being used, while the other tells hiin the con- 
 dition of the signals on his four main tracks and 
 other points in the yard. 
 
 Outside on a bridge across the tracks are the 
 real semaphores that give the signals to the engi- 
 neers. There are two signal arms to a track, one 
 suspended downward from the bridge and 
 slightly smaller than the upper one. This, in the 
 slang of the railroader, is the " low ball " and 
 means when its arm is dropped that he can pro- 
 ceed with caution. The upper arm or "high 
 ball " is the " all clear " signal, and when this 
 drops the engineer knows that he has a clear 
 track ahead. 
 
 The normal position of both is at right 
 angles to the post supporting them and this 
 position means " danger." At night when they 
 are set at normal they show a red light which 
 also calls out " danger." When they are dropped 
 they show a green light which tells the engineer 
 that " all is clear." These semaphore arms with 
 their lights are all moved by the movement of 
 the levers in the tower. 
 
 Such is the equipment of the terminal tower, 
 
150 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 and by means of it the tower director has control 
 of every switch and signal leading in or out of the 
 yard. From his balcony he has to create new 
 pathways for trains moving in or out, nor can he 
 make a single error, for that error might mean 
 death to hundreds of commuters as well as the 
 loss of a great deal of money to the road. 
 
 Of course when all trains are running on 
 schedule the tower director can in a measure 
 plan his work. He knows that at certain times 
 certain trains are to be made up and he knows 
 which track they are to be made up on. Then 
 too he knows that certain trains are due at cer- 
 tain times and he can set his switches to throw 
 them in on their accustomed tracks. But al- 
 though all railroads have schedules and every 
 effort is made to make them as inflexible as possi 
 ble, emergencies are constantly arising that 
 throw the tower man all out of his stride, so to 
 speak, and he has to use all sorts of snap judg- 
 ment and quick thinking to keep things moving 
 properly. 
 
 An accident out upon the line that might 
 delay a train ten minutes on its run will 
 bring it to the terminal just at the time when 
 
THE MAN IN THE TOWER 151 
 
 some other train is occupying the track it would 
 have gone in on ten minutes before. It can't be 
 left standing in the yard. It must be put some- 
 where. The tower director has to find a place for 
 it in the face of the scores of trains passing in 
 and out on their own time. Meanwhile this de- 
 layed train may be delaying others. Presently 
 the tower man finds trains piling up on him. The 
 yard is perilously near a jam that might tie it 
 up for an hour. He can't let that happen. He 
 must work in a perfect frenzy to get the mess 
 cleared up. 
 
 Of course he has some assistance in the flexi- 
 bility of the four tracks that lead into the yard. 
 Under normal operation these tracks are divided 
 equally, two for outbound trains and two for 
 inbound trains, but during rush hour he can con- 
 vert one of the tracks to suit his purpose so that 
 there are three tracks to dispose of his heaviest 
 traffic. There may be three tracks carrying out 
 the heavy evening traffic while the single re- 
 maining track handles the lighter incoming 
 traffic. 
 
 But even with this his work is strenuous and 
 nerve wrecking. At night for an instance, there 
 
152 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILEOADS 
 
 are a thousand lights blinking at him out of the 
 dark. He must know them all; some are train 
 lights coming in, some are signal lights, some are 
 train lights going out, but he cannot become con- 
 fused by any of them. Or in winter when a 
 heavy snow has blocked some of his switches or 
 frozen them solid, he must handle his rush 
 crowds even though switches are blocked or 
 frozen and an army of men is out there in the 
 yard trying frantically to dig them out and keep 
 them in working order. 
 
 Winter is hard on the tower director because 
 it is then that he has all sorts of switch trouble. 
 When a cold spell comes, or snow starts falling, 
 men are assembled in the yards and given the 
 job of keeping the switches open. Sometimes 
 this is done with burning oil that keeps a fire 
 blazing around the switch, melting snow and ice 
 and keeping them sliding smoothly. Sometimes 
 the plain old-fashioned pick and shovel are used, 
 but they must be used carefully, for the mecha- 
 nism of the interlocking electric-pneumatic 
 switch is in a measure delicate ; so delicate that 
 there is a rule for engineers that forbids them 
 sanding the tracks in the vicinity of the switches 
 
THE MAK IN THE TOWER 153 
 
 for fear that the sand may cripple the mecha- 
 nism. 
 
 The more progressive roads have installed 
 in some yards electric heating units that during 
 cold spells or snow-storms are kept glowing hot, 
 thus preventing the switches from freezing. 
 
 It can be well understood that the men who 
 work in the terminal switch and signal tower are 
 constantly under a terrific nervous strain which 
 is liable to tell upon them physically too. They 
 must have nerves of steel and they must be able 
 to keep calm and collected under the most stress- 
 ing conditions, and goodness knows situations in 
 which an ordinary chap would get badly 
 " rattled " occur far too often in their day's work. 
 
 Like the operators in the dispatcher's office the 
 men at the levers work in "tricks" of eight hours 
 each, although their schedule is arranged a little 
 differently than the one on which the operators 
 work. 
 
 They come to their task at six o'clock in the 
 morning and quit at two in the afternoon, 
 when they are relieved by another group of men 
 who come into the tower at two and work until 
 ten at night. Then there is a shift that comes 
 
154 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 on at ten to complete the twenty-four hours, for 
 they work until relieved at six the next morning 
 by the first group. But the men could not stand 
 up under the strain of working eight hours 
 steadily even in these shifts, so another group 
 known as a " split trick " is provided for. These 
 men come on at half-past seven each morning 
 and work until eleven, when they " swing," in the 
 language of the railroad men, until two o'clock 
 in the afternoon, when they appear again and 
 work until half -past six. These " split tricks " 
 men come on just at the beginning of the morn- 
 ing and evening rush hour when the strain is 
 the greatest, and fresh for their work they carry 
 on until the rush of trains in and out of the ter- 
 minal is over with, when they rest until the next 
 rush period. This eases up on the hard grind of 
 things for all concerned. 
 
 There is still another group of tower men who 
 are known as "student lever men." They are 
 subject to call as relief men at any time, day or 
 night, taking the places of men who may be ill 
 or away. They also fill in at towers when extra 
 men are needed. 
 
 The life of a student lever man is hard because 
 
THE MAN IN THE TOWER 155 
 
 of the irregularity and uncertainty of his hours. 
 He may be called on for night work for several 
 nights in succession, then called to fill in on day 
 tricks for a week or more, only to be shifted to 
 another trick after that. But then that is rail- 
 roading and somehow that is part of the fun rail- 
 road men find in the game. 
 
 There is one more man attached to the tower 
 director's staff and he is the expert electrician 
 and all around mechanical man who must always 
 be on hand to see that things are working 
 smoothly from a mechanical standpoint. Of 
 course he must know everything there is to be 
 known about the electrical apparatus in the 
 tower as well as the pneumatic devices and the 
 switches in the yard. When things go wrong 
 he is a busy man, for all his work is of the rush 
 variety with a capital R. A slip in the mecha- 
 nism is liable to smash the system in the whole 
 yard and throw the operation of the line into 
 chaos for the time being, so he must work fast 
 and furiously while he works and he must work 
 with care, nor can he leave a job with the work 
 partly done, for this might mean that a train 
 sent over the switch he has been working on 
 
156 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 would be derailed and wrecked and then the 
 yard would be tied up seriously. 
 
 The towers out upon the line are far different 
 than the towers in the terminal. They are 
 switch and signal towers, too, but they usually 
 guard a single track junction or a cross over 
 switch or the switch of a siding and these are 
 only used at intervals during the day, so that 
 there rarely are any tense moments in the lives of 
 the men who watch the tracks from these points. 
 
 However, on the roads where these towers are 
 used as points for watching and clearing trains 
 the man in the tower has a really great respon- 
 sibility. Besides caring for the switches and 
 the semaphore signals that help to guard these 
 switches he is required to report on all train 
 movements in the section of track that comes 
 under his observation. As you already know he 
 is connected by telephone and telegraph with the 
 dispatcher's office at the terminal of the divi- 
 sion and it is through him that the movements 
 of both the outgoing and incoming trains are 
 made known to the dispatcher. As each train 
 passes the tower the man aloft takes note of it. 
 From his schedule he knows the number of the 
 
THE MAN IN THE TOWER 157 
 
 train, or if it is an unscheduled freight train he 
 identifies it by means of the number of the 
 engine or by word previously sent out from the 
 dispatcher's office. 
 
 He knows, too, the make-up of the train, how 
 many cars and of what type they are, and as 
 the train passes under his tower window he 
 makes note of the fact that the entire train 
 is in order. In the old days before the invention 
 of air brakes it was possible, especially in the 
 case of big freight trains, to have trains part. 
 Some of the cars of the rear end would be left 
 standing on the track while the engine and the 
 forward cars would go blithely upon their way, 
 not knowing anything about the cars that had 
 been left behind, standing without motive power, 
 on the rails somewhere back in the distance. 
 Such accidents, though fortunately rare, were 
 very serious in those days, for the cars left be- 
 hind blocked the tracks and were an obstruction 
 into which some oncoming train could plunge or 
 at best they would block the tracks and keep 
 them blocked until some form of motive power 
 could be brought up to move them out of the way 
 or push or pull them into some siding or finally 
 
158 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 move them to some destination where they could 
 be hauled out of the line of traffic until they were 
 picked up by a new freight train. 
 
 If a train passing a tower is not intact the 
 tower man does not clear it, but sounds a 
 signal either by bell or whistle. At night, 
 of course, it is difficult to count the cars as 
 they go by and that is one of the reasons for the 
 tail light on a train. The man in the tower at 
 night will not clear a train until it has passed 
 his point of vision and he finds that two red 
 lights are burning on the rear. 
 
 The lights (or flags in daytime) displayed by 
 trains all have meanings to railroad men. For 
 an instance all trains running under normal con- 
 ditions are supposed to display two red lights (or 
 flags) on their rear end. If a train is on a siding 
 waiting for another train to pass it the lights 
 displayed are green. A blue light (or flag) is 
 displayed by a train that is being inspected for 
 mechanical troubles. This signal is displayed 
 so that the inspectors, who may be under a car, 
 are protected. 'No train burning a blue light can 
 be moved. 
 
 Two white lights are burned on the loco- 
 
THE MAN IN THE TOWER 159 
 
 motive of an extra train on the line, and if 
 a train is running in two sections green 
 lights are burned ahead. Under normal condi- 
 tions the locomotive displays only its headlight. 
 
 Aside from watching out for trains and oc- 
 casionally operating the switches and signals 
 under his control the men in the towers out upon 
 the line lead a lonesome life indeed. He always 
 has the gossip of the wire to listen in on, of 
 course, and if it happens that on his road the 
 telephone is used for dispatching work he has 
 the companionship of human voices up and down 
 the line. 
 
 But that is not the companionship he 
 often craves. To be stuck out in a desert in a 
 tower, miles from civilization, or to be isolated 
 on some mountainside or in the center of a huge 
 meadowy swamp is not the happiest sort of a 
 situation, at least it would not appear so to the 
 average man, but somehow the tower men are 
 willing to take it as it comes — "all in a day's 
 work," which after all is the philosophy of the 
 railroad men. Some of them find real pleasure 
 in their isolation despite its apparent drawbacks. 
 
 Away from human companionship and human 
 
160 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILBOADS 
 
 aid some of these tower men have queer adven- 
 tures. More than one of them has been held up 
 by desperate characters, tramps or yeggmen. 
 Indeed only recently a story came to the writer's 
 attention of an attempt on the part of some 
 tramps to force their way into a tower station 
 on a forlorn and deserted section of a certain 
 line. The tower man fought them off as best he 
 could and kept the door securely barred. They 
 laid siege to his tower all night long, finally re- 
 sorting to a bombardment of stones that broke 
 every window in the tower. When morning 
 came the place was indeed a sad sight and so was 
 the operator. He was cut and bruised and well 
 shaken up. 
 
 While the stone bombardment was going 
 on he reported the situation over the wire to 
 division headquarters, but his tower was so 
 remote that it was impossible to get help to him 
 that night. However, the next evening a train 
 stopped at the tower and let off a member of the 
 road's police force (yes, railroads have an exten- 
 sive police force and an excellent corps of detect- 
 ives, too). The policeman had with him a shot- 
 gun, the most effective weapon in the world for 
 
THE MAN IN THE TOWER 161 
 
 jobs of that sort, and when the tramps put in 
 their appearance the next night, as they did, 
 they went away again as fast as their legs could 
 carry them. And they took with them, too, a 
 goodly quantity of fine bird shot which was dis- 
 tributed over their anatomy in such a way that 
 they found difficulty in attending to all their 
 wounds at one time. 
 
 There is a story, too, of a tower man out in the 
 Rockies who was besieged in his tower by a 
 grizzly bear, and an ugly customer he proved to 
 be. He climbed the tower stairs twice and tried 
 to get through the windows at the tower man, 
 against whom he seemed to have a particular 
 grudge, and it was only by beating him on the end 
 of his sensitive nose with an iron coal shovel that 
 the man was able to drive the beast away. At 
 that he did not go until he had practically 
 wrecked the stairs leading to the tower, by tear- 
 ing the rails out and smashing them to splinters. 
 
 Some tower men in very remote sections, like 
 the men in the lighthouse service, live at the 
 tower or very handy to it, but the majority of 
 them live in the nearest town and go out to the 
 towers on the trains. They too work in shifts; 
 
162 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILBOADS 
 
 in the busier towers their shifts correspond with 
 the shifts of the dispatchers, but in the remote 
 towers there are frequently a night and a day 
 operator, each working twelve hours. 
 
 The signal systems employed on these remote 
 sections of a railroad are often quite different 
 from the interlocking systems operated in the 
 terminal tower. Usually the lines as they reach 
 out into sparsely settled sections of the country 
 are of the single track variety, trains bound in 
 both directions using the same track. It can be 
 easily understood that a very accurate signal 
 system is needed to prevent two trains from oper- 
 ating in opposite directions on the same section 
 of tracks ; for that reason the " block " system is 
 used. 
 
 In this case the track is divided into " blocks " 
 or sections varying from one to five miles in 
 length. Each section is protected by a set of 
 semaphore arms located on a post at the right of 
 the tracks. There are two arms to each post and 
 each arm tells its own story. These semaphores 
 are operated electrically, the lines being con- 
 nected up with the rails of the track. As a train 
 passes a semaphore post and goes into a " block " 
 
THE MAN IN THE TOWER 163 
 
 or section of track, both arms of the post at the 
 beginning of the block register their normal sig- 
 nal of danger. They remain so as long as the 
 train is traveling in that "block." When it 
 passes on into the next "block" or section of 
 track, the lowest arm on the first or "home" 
 post drops. This is a caution sign that tells the 
 engineer of the following train that the first 
 " block " is clear but that the next " block " be- 
 yond is occupied by a train. He knows then that 
 he can go into the first " block " without danger 
 of a rear end collision but that he must watch 
 carefully as he approaches the section of track 
 ahead of him. 
 
 When the first train has cleared the second 
 " block " or section of track the upper arm on the 
 first or " home " semaphore post also drops, thus 
 giving the signal " all clear," meaning that there 
 is no train within two " blocks " of that point. 
 
 Of course where single track systems are in 
 operation tower men, or station agents, if they 
 are handling orders from the dispatcher's office, 
 must hold all trains traveling in opposite direc- 
 tion on sidings until the line is clear for them to 
 pass on to the next siding. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 IN THE ROUNDHOUSE 
 
 Railroad romance centers in the roundhouse. 
 This squat semicircular building, that always 
 looks grimy, and wreathed in a pall of smoke and 
 steam, is the most interesting point on the whole 
 division for those who love the romance of the 
 game. 
 
 Perhaps it is because this strange building 
 is the home of those great steel animal-like 
 locomotives that are the life of the railroad, that 
 the roundhouse strikes the fancies of every one, 
 even the railroad men themselves, as an ideal 
 loafing place where good companionship is to be 
 found and where railroad gossip is the news of 
 the day. 
 
 Not alone the engineers and firemen, and the 
 
 " hostlers " and wipers gather there during their 
 
 leisure hours, but the trainmen, too, especially 
 
 those of the freight crews, find their way there to 
 
 exchange the news of the day and listen to the 
 
 164 
 
IN THE KOUNDHOUSE 165 
 
 railroad yarns that are always on tap when a 
 group of blue, jumper-clad, oil-blacked railroad- 
 ers are gathered together. Koundhouse gossip is 
 roundhouse gossip the country over and every 
 division has its group of story tellers, who gather 
 there to tell how Murphy with 928 made the run 
 the night of the big blizzard, or how Jones with 
 the big new " freight hog " of the K91 type 
 hauled twenty-eight coal gondolas up the grade 
 at Summit without a pusher. 
 
 By means of these same groups news of the 
 road is carried up and down the line. An 
 engineer and fireman, finishing their run over 
 the terminal division, may stop an hour or 
 two in the bunk house, where are gathered 
 the men of the next division of the line. 
 The latest news from headquarters is dissemi- 
 nated by them. They tell of the new system that 
 the recently promoted roundhouse foreman has 
 established, or the gossip about the men of the 
 terminal division, of how Dave Jordan got 
 caught between two cars and would likely lose 
 an arm as a result of the accident, or how Lafe 
 Crawford twisted his leg hopping a freight in the 
 yard. 
 
166 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 This gossip is all absorbed by the men in 
 the bunk house and when they go out upon the 
 line and reach the bunk house of the next divi- 
 sion they pass the stories on to other men, and so 
 railroad gossip is carried clear across the coun- 
 try for hundreds of miles, and by word of mouth 
 friends hear from friends in all corners of the 
 country. 
 
 This all makes for a fine feeling of fellowship 
 among railroad men, for it is easy enough for 
 Jim Smith in "New Jersey to get word to Dick 
 Clark in Colorado, or California. Many of the 
 " footloose " unmarried railroad men are adven- 
 turers at heart too and always craving for new 
 fields of travel, and certain groups of them are 
 constantly changing jobs, railroading one year 
 in "New England and perhaps the next in the 
 southwest, riding the tops of cars across the 
 plains of Texas. In that way they make hosts 
 of friends in all sections of the republic, and 
 their roundhouse gossip is always rich with tales 
 of adventures in remote corners. 
 
 But although the roundhouse, or rather the 
 bunk house adjacent to it, is the place of gossig 
 and many stories, the big " engine stable " is also 
 
IN THE EOUXDHOUSE 167 
 
 a place where a great deal of hard work is accom- 
 plished, for it is here that the giants of the line 
 are housed and cared for. 
 
 The roundhouse and the section of the yard 
 it occupies is frequently the most unprepossess- 
 ing in appearance of any corner of the division's 
 terminal, but then how could it be otherwise 
 when there are great coal pockets there, and ash- 
 pits, and water cranes, not to mention the grease 
 and oil that are used there and the constant rain 
 of cinders and soot from the belching locomo- 
 tives. 
 
 The semicircular structure forms the center of 
 a group of queer shaped buildings, the most con- 
 spicuous of which are the coal pockets. On 
 some lines these coal pockets are in the form of 
 great round silos that look like huge hogsheads on 
 stilts. They are arranged so that locomotives 
 can pass under them and pause there while their 
 tenders are filled with coal from chutes protrud- 
 ing from the bottom of the pockets. 
 
 Hard by are several gruesome, gallows-like 
 affairs that stand up beside the track with a huge 
 arm extending over the right-of-way. These are 
 big and round, however, and their roundness indi- 
 
168 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 cates that they are made of big six or nine inch 
 hollow iron pipes. They are the water towers, 
 or cranes which, while the locomotive is being 
 coaled, fill the tender's water tank with hundreds 
 of gallons of water. 
 
 Close at hand is a long track that looks very 
 unlike other tracks in the yard in that its sleep- 
 ers or ties are not of wood but of iron, nor do 
 they extend from rail to rail. They are, rather, 
 iron blocks that support the rails while the space 
 between the rails is , excavated to a depth of 
 several feet, some of them having a line of mov- 
 able buckets on a chain belt running through the 
 pit to scoop up the ashes and carry them to wait- 
 ing gondola cars near by. In some yards a 
 steam shovel or scoop digs the ashes out and 
 loads them into the gondola cars. 
 
 Entering the broad portals of the roundhouse 
 one sees first of all a queer wheel-like affair of 
 huge proportions. This is balanced on heavy 
 but interesting looking mechanism and the whole 
 is enclosed in a pit just deep enough to make the 
 surface of the movable platform even with the 
 many lines of tracks that converge toward it. 
 This is the turntable, and by means of it the 
 
IN THE KOUNDHOUSE 169 
 
 great one hundred and fifty or two hundred ton 
 locomotives can be turned as easily as — as — well, 
 as a caboose cook can turn a flapjack. 
 
 This turntable is situated much as a hub is 
 situated in a wheel, and radiating from it are 
 short lines of tracks like spokes, each leading 
 to the stalls in the roundhouse, for this resting 
 place of the locomotives is made up entirely of 
 stalls, each large enough to contain a single loco- 
 motive. 
 
 Each stall is fitted with a door that can 
 be closed and locked when desired. This 
 arrangement, coupled with the fact that the word 
 " stall " is used by railroad men, and that there 
 are certain employees about the roundhouse that 
 are called " hostlers," leads one to suspect that 
 the roundhouse is a survival of the days before 
 the coming of the steam engine when all rail- 
 roads were " horse car lines " and when the 
 roundhouses were the resting places of four- 
 legged horses of flesh and blood instead of the 
 steel, steam-driven steeds of to-day. 
 
 The roundhouse is still the home and resting 
 place of the motive power of the line, for like 
 animals of flesh and blood, these mastodons of 
 
170 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILEOADS 
 
 steel need resting periods. They get tired out, 
 too, after a fashion, and they need rest and food, 
 and a good brushing and curry-combing, so to 
 speak. For that reason after each long run, if 
 it is possible an engine is given a rest period in 
 the roundhouse, and as they are called out again 
 they come out in the order of their going in, that 
 is, those that have had the longest rest periods 
 are used first. 
 
 The care and attention that an engine gets in 
 the roundhouse is of the best, for while the 
 engines only represent about eight per cent, of the 
 total value of a railroad's complete property, 
 they are in a sense the life of the entire line and 
 upon their efficiency depends the efficiency of 
 everything else. 
 
 Of course first of all is the care that the 
 engineer and the firemen give these pet giants of 
 theirs. The firemen are entirely responsible for 
 that portion of the engine above the running 
 board, or running gear. It is his job to polish up 
 its bulging round back, its brass bell, valves, 
 pipes and headlight and keep it up to mirror-like 
 brightness. This work he does just before or 
 just after a long run, wiping off the dust, polish- 
 
IN THE KOUNDHOUSE 171 
 
 ing all bright metal parts and applying blacking 
 wherever it is needed. 
 
 The engineer does his share of this work of up- 
 keep on the portion below the running board, 
 and he is constantly to be seen crawling about 
 the big drive wheels poking into inaccessible 
 places in the engine's vitals, with his long-necked 
 oil can. 
 
 The mechanism in the cab he cares for in a 
 similar manner while the fireman polishes up 
 the brass cups and gauges, dials and such like 
 and keeps them always sparkling. There are 
 some roads on which a constant competition is 
 maintained among the engine crews, and the 
 engines on each division that are kept in the 
 best condition carry on the sides of the cab the 
 name of the engineer in charge. This honor is 
 taken away from the engineer if he is so unsuc- 
 cessful as to have a collision, or any other acci- 
 dent in which he can in any measure be held 
 responsible. 
 
 But this is by no means all the care that an 
 engine receives. When it comes panting in after 
 a long hard run of several hundred miles the fire- 
 man dusts it off and polishes it and the engineer 
 
172 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 does a little pottering here and there, just before 
 it is turned over to the hostlers and wiper of the 
 roundhouse. 
 
 They take charge as soon as the locomotive is 
 driven into the roundhouse section of the yard, 
 and their first attention is to the fire box. If the 
 engine is likely to have a long rest in the round- 
 house the fires are entirely drawn; that is that 
 ashes and clinkers are shaken down and the fire 
 box entirely cleaned out. A hose is applied 
 after the fire box is cooled off and all the tiny 
 clinkers and cinders are flushed out of the big 
 ash pans. 
 
 If, however, the engine is likely to be called 
 into service again within a few hours the 
 fires and ash pans are merely cleaned; that is, 
 the accumulation of ashes is dropped down into 
 the ash-pit, the grates are shaken, all the clinkers 
 cleaned out of the fire, the live coals raked over 
 smoothly and the fires banked. 
 
 While this is being done a hose is used on the 
 big drive wheels, the tender and other sections 
 where dust and grime have accumulated. When 
 these portions have all been soused down thor- 
 oughly the wipers get busy and rub the washed 
 
IN THE KOUNDHOUSE 173 
 
 parts thoroughly, just as a stableman would rub 
 down a horse after a long run. 
 
 This done the engine is moved over to the turn- 
 table. The man in charge of the electrical mech- 
 anism or the stationary engine that operates the 
 table turns the platform with the engine on it 
 slowly around until it is in the proper position 
 to run onto the tracks that lead into its stall, 
 then the engine moves to its accustomed sleeping 
 quarters, as it were, and settles down for its well- 
 earned rest. If there is any tinkering to be done 
 on it, mechanics potter around it meanwhile. 
 
 When a call comes for it to go back into serv- 
 ice the hostlers back it out and by means of the 
 turntable get it out onto the tracks again. Here 
 another careful going over is given it, and mean- 
 while a mechanical inspector peers into its vitals 
 carefully to see that there are no cracks or lose 
 bolts or lost nuts that might cause an accident 
 out on the line. 
 
 Everything being given an official O. K. by the 
 inspector and the wipers having completed their 
 task the banked fire is revived, and a full head 
 of steam is worked up. 
 
 Then the engine is backed down toward the 
 
174 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 coal pockets, the chutes swung out and the tender: 
 loaded with ten or twelve tons of coal, the 
 amount to be consumed on the run that she is 
 about to make. The coal loaded, one of the gal- 
 lows-like arms of the water tower is swung over 
 and the water tank in the tender is filled with 
 hundreds of gallons of water. The water of 
 course is used in the engine boiler to make steam. 
 It is fed or rather pumped from the tank in the 
 tender to the boiler by means of pipe lines con- 
 nected between the two points. 
 
 There is still another operation to be per- 
 formed before the engine is ready to be turned 
 over to the engine crew. One of the iron domes 
 atop the engine boiler, that looks very much like 
 an inverted iron kettle, is the sand chest of the 
 locomotive. 
 
 This chest contains hundreds of pounds of 
 dried sand (kept dry usually by the heat from 
 the boiler). There are long copper pipes that 
 lead over the bulging sides of the boiler and 
 down to a point just ahead of the drive wheels 
 and within a few inches of the tracks. Through 
 this the sand can be spread over the rails on 
 steep grades, or on wet or icy tracks, to pre- 
 
IN THE ROUNDHOUSE 175 
 
 vent the locomotive from slipping and to give 
 it traction where under ordinary circumstances 
 the big drivers would spin around hopelessly try- 
 ing to grip the rails. The filling of this sand 
 chest is as important almost as the filling of the 
 tank or the coal compartment, and great care is 
 exercised by the roundhouse men to see that 
 every engine has a full supply of sand before it is 
 turned over to the engineer. Just how important 
 this sand is can be gathered from an incident 
 that occurred recently while the writer was sit- 
 ting in the dispatcher's office of a big railroad. 
 A report had come in of a delay of a certain train. 
 The delay occurred in the vicinity of a steep 
 grade, and fifteen minutes were wasted by the 
 engineer in trying to climb the rise. When the 
 run was finished and the conductor filed his train 
 report it came over the wire to the dispatcher's 
 office with the explanation that the delay was due 
 to wet sand that had been put into the sand 
 chest. It seems that when the train struck the 
 grade the engineer pulled the lever to let the 
 sand down, but no sand came through the pipe. 
 He tried and tried and tried again. 
 He began to think that the engine had been sent 
 
176 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILEOADS 
 
 out of the roundhouse without having its sand 
 chest properly filled. He sent the fireman out on 
 the running board to find out. He peered into 
 the depths of the sand chest and much to his sur- 
 prise found it filled with sand, but it was wet 
 sand and it had caked and clogged up the pipe. 
 Without the sand it took the engineer fifteen 
 minutes to get the train up the grade. 
 
 When this report was read by the dispatcher 
 he immediately wired to the roundhouse of the 
 division and demanded to know how wet sand 
 happened to be put into the sand chest. An 
 hour was spent investigating the situation before 
 it developed that the sand box had been left open 
 at the roundhouse and the nozzle of a water 
 tower carelessly turned had dripped water into 
 the sand. This had frozen and the moisture was 
 retained by the sand until it had been put into 
 the steam chest, where the heat had thawed it 
 out and caused the sand to cake. You may be 
 sure a roundhouse helper was thoroughly talked 
 to by his foreman for that. 
 
 Most big roundhouses are directly in charge 
 of a roundhouse foreman, who is responsible for 
 all that goes on in his domains, but where the 
 
INT THE KOUNDHOUSE 177 
 
 division is small and the motive power not so 
 varied or extensive the roundhouse comes under 
 the supervision of the yardniaster. 
 
 Here is a minor railroad official who has a 
 tremendous responsibility and who has to be 
 hustling every moment of his working day to 
 keep track of the thousand and one details that 
 are all a part of his work. 
 
 There is on each division a trainmaster, who is 
 entirely responsible for all the trains, both pas- 
 senger and freight, to go out upon the line from 
 the yard or yards of the division. Next in line 
 under him is the hard-working yardmaster, who 
 does a great deal of the work and lifts much of 
 the responsibility off the shoulders of the train- 
 master. There is a yardmaster for each yard on 
 the division and where the division is big enough 
 or busy enough to maintain one yard for passen- 
 ger trains and one for freight trains there is a 
 yardmaster in charge of each. Under him is a 
 night yardmaster who stands the strain of the 
 work when the yardmaster is not on duty. 
 
 Every train that comes into the yard must be 
 cared for by the yardmaster, trackage provided 
 for it and care taken that each car is given the 
 
178 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 individual attention that its freight demands. 
 He must see to the proper making up of each 
 train that leaves the yard, he must see that an 
 engine of the proper hauling capacity is provided 
 by the roundhouse, he must see that the callers 
 provide a train crew, he must see that all orders 
 for each train are received by the train crew and 
 the engine crew, he must be sure that all cars and 
 engines in the yard are carefully and regularly 
 inspected, he must see that all trains leaving the 
 yard are properly cleared and he must be certain 
 that a host of other details are attended to. 
 
 Of course he is given an adequate and com- 
 petent staff to take care of all this work, but that 
 does not relieve him of a single responsibility. 
 If his yard gets choked or blocked with freight 
 or empty cars, if his motive power is not prop- 
 erly cared for, if there is a derailment or wreck 
 in his domains, he is the one who has to answer 
 to the superintendent of the division. 
 
 Of course all yardmasters do not have to do 
 the same amount of perspiring and worrying, for 
 all yards are not the same size, nor do all yards 
 have to handle the same amount of traffic. But 
 it can easily be seen that the life of a yardmaster 
 
IN THE KOUNDHOUSE 179 
 
 in charge of the big terminal yards where trains 
 are coming in and going ont at the rate of one 
 every ten minutes, is full of hectic moments and 
 situations that demand the best of his ability. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 IN THE FREIGHT YARD 
 
 Although the limited makes an impressive 
 appearance as she comes roaring down a 
 straightway stretch of track at better than a mile 
 a minute as if she were the all-important train 
 of the line, and although the lesser passenger 
 trains demand with imperious whistles the right 
 of way over everything that turns a wheel ahead 
 of them, when considered in the light of earning 
 power, they are, so to speak, hollow shams, all 
 front and appearance with little to back them 
 up. 
 
 True enough, the road spends a great deal 
 of money in advertising them, boasts of their 
 records, and spends thousands in keeping them 
 immaculate with varnish and gilt paint, yet 
 when it comes to returning earnings to the rail- 
 road's treasury, they cannot hold a candle to the 
 
 grimy, red and yellow vertebrae of clanking 
 
 180 
 
IN THE FREIGHT YARD 181 
 
 freight cars drawn up on a siding and looking 
 very humble as they roar by. The earnings of 
 the passenger service of the average road is 
 rarely as much as a third of the earnings of the 
 line, and it is left to the humble freight trains to 
 make up the remaining sixty-six and two-thirds 
 per cent, of the railroad's income. 
 
 Measured in romance, too, there is little to the 
 passenger service of a line when one considers 
 the romance that trails along with the snake- 
 like freight trains that in the dark of the night 
 go rumbling on their way through sleeping city, 
 town, or hamlet, hauling hundreds of thousands 
 of dollars' worth of merchandise from one corner 
 of the land to the other. 
 
 True, there is romance to the speed of the 
 limited, but this factor is not lacking in the 
 freight service. There are fast freights, too, 
 that never give way to the passenger trains, 
 indeed there is no need to, for they can and 
 do pound out their forty-five and fifty miles 
 an hour on their long night runs. These are the 
 trains that carry the preferred freight, the food 
 and milk with which to feed the cities. Where 
 is the romance, pray, in rushing a few hundred 
 
182 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 human beings from city to city to keep business 
 engagements or visit friends, compared with the 
 romance of feeding the population of a great 
 city? 
 
 Think of the thousands of tons of flour, or 
 fruit in pre-eooled cars, or fish or meat iced 
 down in refrigerator cars that each night come 
 roaring down the polished rails toward every big 
 town or city to supply the wants of the workers 
 there. Think of the long black trains of milk 
 cars that each day pick up the cans and cases of 
 bottles at a thousand sidings in the dairy dis- 
 tricts and rush them forward, a hundred miles 
 and more, so that it can be served on the break- 
 fast tables of the city homes next morning, fresh 
 and pure. Where can one find greater romance 
 or be of greater service to his fellow men than in 
 this work of bringing food to the cities? 
 
 Trains of preferred freight have almost as 
 much reason for demanding a clear road as the 
 haughty limited herself, for cities cannot wait 
 to be fed, and food delayed may mean food 
 spoiled, and thousands of dollars wasted. Food 
 trains are fast trains with huge engines, that are 
 both fast and powerful. True, these trains of 
 
IN THE FKEIGHT YAED 183 
 
 perishable freight may waste a few precious min- 
 utes on a siding to let the limited pass, but all 
 other trains stand aside for them, and slow old 
 freight trains put in on sidings and middles to let 
 these long lines of refrigerator and ventilated 
 cars go whirling by. 
 
 Then there are the coal freights, long heavy 
 ugly looking steel gondola cars that seem to wind 
 interminable lengths on the track through the 
 mountainous coal districts. They are not of the 
 preferred freight variety, they are too slow and 
 cumbersome for that, and food is consumed 
 faster than coal is used. They go plodding on 
 their tortoise-like way across the lines of the 
 country. 
 
 But there are times when they are the 
 most important trains on the line. When, 
 through strikes or for some other reason, coal 
 famine threatens a town or city in the middle of 
 the winter they are given clear way and fast lo- 
 comotives, for it is upon the railroads that all in- 
 land communities to-day depend for their fuel to 
 keep their factories going and their homes warm. 
 Here is romance indeed in rushing fuel to a com- 
 munity that even while the train is roaring down 
 
184 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILROADS 
 
 through the mountains is burning the last of its 
 reserve supply. Sickness, death or financial dis- 
 aster may follow the delay of the coal train. No 
 city's fire department performs a greater service 
 to the community than do the railroads at such 
 times as these. 
 
 So, although the passenger service of a rail- 
 road may appear to the casual observer to be the 
 really vital part of railroading, it is after all no- 
 where near as important to the nation as is the 
 freight trafiie. 
 
 It would seem to the casual observer also that 
 the handling of freight by a railroad calls for 
 nothing more than the crudest facilities and the 
 crudest labor, but here again the average person 
 makes a grave error. One has only to stop to 
 consider that passengers can walk and think. 
 They can load and unload themselves. They 
 know when they have reached their destination 
 and can leave the train at their own accord. 
 Freight unfortunately has none of these facul- 
 ties. 
 
 Even the most inconsequential fifty-pound 
 box of soap or case of condensed milk cans re- 
 quires the individual attention of a man with a 
 
IN THE FKEIGHT YAED 185 
 
 brain that thinks clearly, otherwise it is likely to 
 land on the Pacific coast instead of New Orleans. 
 
 Infinite details and the hardest kind of work 
 surround the movement of freight from one sec- 
 tion of the country to another, and although the 
 man engaged in its transportation may wear blue 
 jumper and overall, and look far from prepos- 
 sessing when compared with the immaculate con- 
 ductor of a special train of Pullman cars, they 
 must have just as comprehensive a knowledge of 
 railroading as he has. 
 
 Night is the time that freight is moved over 
 the railroads. One of the reasons for this is that 
 the heaviest passenger traffic is in the daytime, 
 and the rails are less crowded with trains of 
 coaches during the hours of darkness. Another 
 reason is that all day long the freight cars in the 
 yards and at the various freight depots are re- 
 ceiving goods from shippers. The business 
 houses deliver their packages and barrels and 
 what not during the daylight hours, and the rail- 
 roads undertake their transportation at night so 
 as to conserve as much time as possible. 
 
 That is the reason why at night the freight 
 yards of the modern railroad are filled with 
 
186 THE BOYS' BOOK OP RAILROADS 
 
 gnome-like figures of men in blue jeans, with 
 winking lanterns hooked over their arms. Al- 
 most weird they seem as they hurry in and out 
 among the clanking freights or flit across the 
 burning white searchlight rays of engine head- 
 lights. What a picture a railroad freight yard 
 presents at night! Here is railroad romance 
 indeed. 
 
 Let us visit the freight yard of a modern rail- 
 road. Here is a great stretch of level territory 
 covered with, an appalling number of paralleling 
 and intersecting tracks and with switches that 
 run up into the thousands. Perhaps there will 
 be a huge roundhouse with its turntable, too, 
 and its coal pockets and water towers, for often 
 the freight engines of a busy division are kept 
 separate from those of the passenger service. 
 Likely enough there will be other interesting 
 sights ; the wrecking train for an instance with 
 its squat but powerful derricks on a siding all 
 clear so that quick access can be had to the 
 tracks of the main line. There are likely to be 
 repair shops handy, too, where quick repair can 
 be made to freight equipment temporarily use- 
 less because of some minor accident. 
 
IN THE FREIGHT YARD 187 
 
 But the most conspicuous section of this great 
 railroad plant, and at all times the busiest por- 
 tion of the yard, will be the " gravity hump " that 
 stands up almost in the heart of the yard with 
 tracks leading up its gradual incline from both 
 sides. This gravity hump is a product of modern 
 railroading, and there are many freight yards 
 that do not have them. 
 
 In the old days of puffing and snorting freight 
 engines, several of them, sometimes a perfect 
 horde of them, were employed to shunt the freight 
 cars back and forth from track to track, cutting 
 them out of some trains and adding them on to 
 others. Now all this work is done by a single 
 switch engine or two or three at the most, and it 
 is all accomplished by means of the gravity 
 hump. 
 
 Here is a long freight train coming in from the 
 west, bumping and rattling over switches as she 
 comes into the yard. Her track has been picked 
 by the man in the signal and switch tower that 
 overlooks the yard, and presently with a wheeze 
 of air and several gasping sighs, as if tuckered 
 out after her long all-night run, she comes to a 
 stop. 
 
188 THE BOYS' BOOK OF BAILKOADS 
 
 Almost before her own big freight hauler is 
 uncoupled and started slowly back toward tlie 
 roundhouse, a saucy freight engine comes chug- 
 ging up to her rear end, uncouples her caboose or 
 " hack " and shunts it over to a side track where 
 it will remain until its occupants, the conductor 
 and his crew of brakemen, are called upon to 
 take out another freight in the evening, per- 
 haps. 
 
 There on the siding, like a many-jointed red 
 and yellow snake, the freight train reposes. It 
 has come in from Chicago with a varied lot of 
 cars. Here are refrigerator cars of meat, bound 
 for cities further east, New York, Boston, 
 Albany. Here are cars of merchandise bound 
 for Philadelphia, and cars of raw silk scheduled 
 for New York, or Baltimore ; here are pre-cooled 
 fruit cars, a few of them picked up at Chicago 
 from an overland freight from the Pacific coast 
 and bound for the eastern seaboard, in all a 
 varied and strange collection of commodities, all 
 on their way somewhere. 
 
 The job confronting the railroad men in the 
 yard, the yardmaster in particular, for this is his 
 domain, is to break up this long train into sec- 
 
IN THE FREIGHT YARD 189 
 
 tions and get each car, or group of cars, attached 
 to a train bound for the city in which the cars are 
 expected. It is in this work that the gravity 
 hump is used. 
 
 Almost before the yard inspectors have gone 
 over the newly arrived freight looking for in- 
 jured or crippled cars which must be drilled out 
 of line and sent to the shops for repairs, snorting 
 switch engines begin to break apart the line of 
 cars, taking several cars at a time and scurrying 
 off with them toward this gravity hump. 
 
 The arrangement of tracks in the vicinity of 
 the hump is interesting. Again we have the 
 bottle as a fine example. At the foot of the 
 hump on the ground are a number of paralleling 
 tracks. 
 
 On each of these tracks trains are being made 
 up, one for New York, another for Philadel- 
 phia, and so on. As these tracks reach to- 
 ward the hump they gradually converge by 
 means of switches until by the time they reach 
 the crown of the rise they have converged into 
 one or two tracks. 
 
 Now the snorting switch engine that is dis- 
 mantling the newly arrived freight drags or 
 
190 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 pushes the cars it breaks loose from the group 
 up to the crown of this hump. Here they are 
 uncoupled and by gravity they start to move 
 downward toward the trains that are forming 
 below. 
 
 As they rush downward switches are thrown, 
 so that a car bound for Baltimore is shunted 
 in onto the track where the train for that 
 city is being formed, the car for Philadel- 
 phia is shot in onto the track where the Phila- 
 delphia train is forming, and the car for New 
 York goes on across the switches to the point 
 where it swings in onto the tracks where the 
 New York train is being made up. And so it 
 goes, hour after hour, cars are drilled up the 
 hump and shot down into the slots where they 
 belong, brakemen a-top of each handling the 
 brake wheels to see that these cars that seem to 
 be running wild across the yard do not bump 
 into the fast-forming trains too hard to smash 
 things. 
 
 And as each train is formed on the level 
 stretch at the foot of the hump, cabooses are 
 brought forth from the sidings where they have 
 been resting, engines come rumbling from the 
 
IN THE FREIGHT YARD 191 
 
 roundhouses where they too have been catching 
 up their wind, so to speak, all are coupled on to 
 the newly formed trains, orders are received by 
 conductors and engineers, from dispatchers by 
 way of the yardmaster, and presently a train 
 composed of cars all bound for New York, or 
 Philadelphia or Baltimore, cars that had come 
 into the yard on a dozen different trains, go 
 bumping over the switches and onto the main 
 line, off on another lap of their journey toward 
 their destination. 
 
 It is a wonderfully efficient system and it is 
 truly remarkable how swiftly trains can be 
 broken up and reassembled into new trains by 
 means of the puffing switch engines and the 
 gravity hump. But it must needs be efficient 
 nowadays, for in the big freight yards of a busy 
 railroad division there can be no lingering or 
 delay. Trains come rumbling into some yards 
 at the rate of one every ten minutes. That 
 means that they must be broken up, reassembled 
 and started out again just as swiftly or the yard 
 will become congested and the line blocked, 
 which is the most serious situation that can 
 develop in railroading. 
 
192 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILEOADS 
 
 All this is the responsibility of the yardmaster. 
 We did not exaggerate then when we mentioned, 
 back a little, that he mnst be a genius and a man 
 able to think quickly and accurately every sec- 
 ond. Fancy how it must seem to be in his posi- 
 tion with all these trains thundering in on top of 
 you, knowing all the time that trackage must be 
 found for them, that they must be sorted and 
 drilled into place as units of a new train, and 
 that they must be started on their way again 
 without any delay. 
 
 Nor is that all that this genius must have in 
 his mind. There are freight houses connected 
 with his yards probably where merchandise is 
 being received. He must provide cars for this, 
 too. He must see that there are no " empties " 
 standing around idle on his siding, for empty 
 freights mean money lost. He must keep in 
 mind, too, the number of cars from foreign lines 
 that he has on his division, and at every oppor- 
 tunity he must see to it that these cars get 
 started back toward their home lines with mer- 
 chandise bound in that direction, for there is a 
 daily charge for each car of a foreign line that 
 he has on his tracks, and the only way to get 
 
IN THE FREIGHT YARD 193 
 
 rid of this charge is to hustle the car toward its 
 home line as fast as it can be arranged. 
 
 And so it goes. The yardmaster must indeed 
 be a genius, but the men under him must be just 
 as capable in their work. There can be no time 
 lost or no false moves made in the ever busy- 
 freight yards. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE WRECKING TRAIN 
 
 Dawn was breaking behind the mountains to 
 the eastward and the sun, still hidden, was send- 
 ing out cheerful tokens of a pleasant, warm 
 spring day, with its great splashes of orange 
 that painted the clouds and the mountain tops. 
 Down the converging steel threads of railroad 
 tracks, out of the darkness of the west, thun- 
 dered a fast freight of perishable commodities, 
 fruit from California and beef from Chicago and 
 the west. 
 
 The big mogul engine, headlight still lit, 
 came roaring onward, black smoke belching, 
 white plumes of steam curling outward, looking 
 for all the world like some sinister night-borne 
 monster charging out of the west to meet the 
 day. 
 
 Because her products were perishable the 
 
 194: 
 
THE WRECKING TRAIN 195 
 
 freight was making fast time. She approached 
 the treacherous S turn at the head of the valley, 
 traveling thirty-five miles an hour. But fortu- 
 nately Jim Folsom, the engineer, was not will- 
 ing to snap the long heavy freight around those 
 turns at that rate, and began to let in the air and 
 ease down considerably on the speed. Just then 
 something happened. What it was neither Jim 
 nor any of the rest of the train crew knew. Per- 
 haps a rail spread. Perhaps the spring rain 
 had eroded the embankment and caused the 
 tracks to shift slightly under the weight of the 
 engine, but whatever it was, it accomplished a 
 quick and effective job in wrecking the freight. 
 
 The big mogul hit the curve, seemed to pause 
 and shiver for a moment, as if staggering under 
 a blow. Then it reared slightly on its big drive 
 wheels, its head swung to the left and with a 
 hissing roar, amid a cloud of steam and smoke 
 and scattering fire, it rolled over on its side and 
 plunged down the high embankment into the 
 ditch. 
 
 It was a horrible spectacle. It was like wit- 
 nessing the death of some huge prehistoric ani- 
 mal, for the big mogul, struggling, coughing, 
 
196 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 sputtering there in the ditch, resembled in every 
 way a terrifically big and strong mammal, mor- 
 tally wounded. 
 
 What followed resembled more the results of 
 an earthquake. The long red and yellow verte- 
 brsB of freight cars shivered and clanked and 
 groaned from one extremity to the other. Three 
 of the forward cars went rolling and tumbling 
 down the embankment with the engine. A 
 fourth shot off at a tangent and, crashing 
 through iron fence at the bottom, rolled end over 
 end into a field of wheat beside the tracks. The 
 fifth and sixth in line staggered over and crashed 
 into a heap of splinters across the west-bound 
 tracks, while several behind crawled up on top 
 of each other in a mighty pyramid. The rest of 
 the long train, after a shudder or two, stayed on 
 the track. 
 
 An eye-witness to the wreck would have 
 viewed, beside the spectacle of the dying loco- 
 motive, two figures in blue overalls and jumper 
 sprawled apparently lifeless, one on the track, 
 the other stretched out part way down the em- 
 bankment. They were Jim Folsom, the engi- 
 neer, and Lafe O'Neill, the fireman. Both had 
 
THE WRECKING TRAIN 197 
 
 jumped to save themselves when they saw the 
 situation was hopeless. 
 
 First one stirred, then the other. Then the 
 man on the tracks sat up and looked about in a 
 dazed way. He was scarcely conscious. O'Neill 
 on the cindered slope began suddenly to claw his 
 way up the embankment. Presently he reached 
 the tracks and stood up, brushing his hand 
 across his eyes with the uncertainty of a dazed 
 man. He felt as if he were gradually awaking 
 from a bad dream. Then he saw Folsom sitting 
 upright, and his brain cleared quickly. He 
 helped the engineer to his feet. 
 
 By that time three men came running along 
 the line of cars, climbing over the wreckage. 
 They were Dolson, the conductor, and the front 
 and rear brakemen, who had been in the " hack " 
 having breakfast when the crash came. 
 
 "Alive ! Hurt ! No ! Thank heavens," cried 
 Dolson, clutching at the shoulders of the still 
 dizzy engineer and fireman. 
 
 " Great snakes, what a mess," groaned Folsom 
 as he gazed out at the wreck. 
 
 " No fire, thank goodness." 
 
 Dolson gave the scene a hasty survey. 
 
198 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 " Bad wreck," lie said crisply. Then, " Come 
 on, boys. Out with the flags. You, Meyers, 
 take the east track. Hurry. No. 87 will be 
 along in twenty minutes. You, Lewis, take the 
 west track. Go up there and flag everything the 
 other side of the bridge. I'm off for Maple Cor- 
 ners station." 
 
 And Dolson, although he was gray and forty- 
 five, started off at a run to cover the half mile 
 between the scene of the wreck and the nearest 
 telegraph station. As for Folsom and O'Neill, 
 they sat down on a rail of the west-bound tracks 
 and, still dazed, said nothing. 
 
 It took Conductor Dolson nearly ten minutes 
 to reach Maple Corners. Arthur Canner, the 
 station agent, was just unlocking the door of the 
 box-like station house when he saw Dolson come 
 panting around the curve and down the station 
 platform. 
 
 " Hello, Dolson — for the love of Pete what's 
 happened? You are white and all out of breath." 
 
 " We're— puff —in— puff— the ditch— puff- 
 down at the — puff — curve," panted Dolson, 
 struggling with his breath. 
 
 Canner asked no more. He plunged into the 
 
THE WRECKING TRAIN 199 
 
 station, kicked open the ticket office door and 
 the next minute his fingers were ripping out two 
 letters that called for a clear wire to New City, 
 division headquarters. 
 
 " W.K— W.K— W.K— W.K," he ticked out, 
 and up and down the line every one who heard it 
 knew that he was calling for the wrecking train. 
 
 Down at New City the dispatcher heard the 
 call. Swiftly he cut in and called for details. 
 
 "Fast — freight — No. 417 ditched — at — curve 
 — below — Maple Corners/ 7 rapped out Canner, 
 and turning asked Dolson for details. 
 
 "No one hurt. Engine in the ditch. Seven 
 cars piled up. West-bound tracks blocked/' 
 snapped Dolson. 
 
 Canner rapped out the facts with expert speed 
 while the dispatcher at the other end took them 
 down as calmly as if he were listening to a train 
 report or the news of a ball game. 
 
 " Right. Set— flag— for— No. 18— Side-track 
 — at Maple Corners — to — let — wrecking — train 
 — through," he snapped back to Canner, who 
 knew by this i* it somewhere between his station 
 and the trnt^rurther west was the early morning 
 passenger train. He must flag her and run her 
 
200 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILEOADg 
 
 up onto a siding to clear the line for the 
 wreckers. 
 
 From the dispatcher's office other messages 
 were being shot out to clear the line. Every- 
 where that a wheel was turning between New 
 City and the point of the wreck, trains were be- 
 ing stopped and side-tracked to clear the line 
 for the wrecking crew. 
 
 Meanwhile at division headquarters things 
 were humming. Out in the yard the best loco- 
 motive in the roundhouse was being coupled to 
 the wrecking train, which day and night stands 
 in readiness on a siding waiting to shoot out 
 onto the main line and make a record run for 
 the point of trouble. 
 
 While the engine was being coupled up 'phone 
 messages were flying, routing the members of 
 the wrecking crew out of bed in the cases where 
 they were still asleep, or hauling them from 
 their breakfast tables. They came on the run. 
 Inside of two minutes after the 'phone call the 
 first of them came running into the yard pulling 
 on his coat. In Hye minutes they were all there, 
 a round dozen of husky, big-chested, clean-eyed 
 men trained in the work of wrecking by years of 
 
THE WRECKING TRAIN 201 
 
 experience in railroading. They tumbled aboard 
 the wrecking train like firemen manning the 
 hook-and-ladder truck just before it rolled. Big 
 Mike O'Rourk, boss of the wreckers, was every- 
 where. He was hurrying the engineer, yelling 
 for the wrecking crew's cook, checking up his 
 men and in other ways putting things in ship- 
 shape for a hard job and hours of almost frantic 
 work. 
 
 In twenty minutes after Canner had snapped 
 the sharp " W.K" over the wires, the wrecking 
 train, fully manned and ready for anything, 
 rolled out of the siding onto a cleared main 
 line. 
 
 The engineer opened up and they were off 
 at a fifty-mile-an-hour clip for the scene of trou- 
 ble twenty miles away. No speed laws ham- 
 pered them, no blocks were set against them. 
 Every semaphore arm beckoned them, and what 
 a run they made! They burned up the rails, 
 flashing by everything. Even the Overland Lim- 
 ited, the pride of the line, was held fretfully on 
 a siding to let them pass. It was a record run, 
 and as the wreckers ploughed their way through 
 slumbering Maple Corners, grizzled old Arthur 
 
202 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 Canner swore lie had never seen a train travel 
 that way before. 
 
 In less than twenty minutes from the time they 
 left the yard they were at the scene of the wreck, 
 the men tumbling from the flat cars, crowbars 
 and axes in hand, Mike O'Rourk, the wrecking 
 boss, in front of them all. 
 
 For a minute this veteran of a score of wrecks 
 surveyed the scene. Then he began to rip out 
 orders that started the men attacking the two 
 freight cars piled up across the west-bound 
 tracks. These must be cut away first and one 
 set of rails opened, anyway. The rest could 
 wait until this was done. 
 
 With shouts that sounded more like battle 
 cries, the men plunged in and with axes swing- 
 ing and crowbars clanking, they began their 
 work of demolishing the wreckage that blocked 
 the west-bound tracks. Meanwhile the aproned 
 cook from the wrecking car appeared on the 
 scenes with a bucket of steaming coffee and 
 sandwiches prepared during the rail-burning 
 run. The men ate as they worked and paused 
 only long enough to swallow cups of steaming 
 coffee. Folsom and O'Neill and the crew of the 
 
THE WRECKING TRAIN 203 
 
 wrecked freight joined in the feast and in the 
 work, too, for they were as eager as the wreckers 
 to get at least one set of rails cleared. 
 
 Under the frantic efforts of the men the two 
 cars that blocked the west-bound tracks disap- 
 peared as if consumed by a fire. Inside of an 
 hour the wreckage had been cleared, and the big 
 steel crane of the wrecking train was slowly feel- 
 ing her way forward to get a grip onto the 
 trucks of the cars and lift them out of the way 
 and onto the flat car. Then the west-bound line 
 was clear and word was flashed along that would 
 let the majestic Overland Limited and the rest 
 of the waiting trains through. 
 
 Boss O'Rourk, the emergency met and over- 
 come, now turned his attention to the rest of the 
 wreckage. He scattered his army of workers 
 into little groups and set them attacking at va- 
 rious points, for he was a master wrecker, and 
 his experienced eye had been able to pick out the 
 vital points of the whole hopeless-looking mess 
 before him. 
 
 Here was the key to one situation. There 
 was the key to another. He knew that these 
 were the points of attack by which the whole 
 
204 THE BOYS; BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 mass could be cleared up in tlie shortest possible 
 time. 
 
 The men leaped to the work like fighters 
 plunging to an attack. Axes flashed, crowbars 
 rang, the long arm of the crane reached in and 
 out like the trunk of a giant elephant, picking 
 out great chunks of wreckage here and there and 
 depositing them on the side of the right-of-way 
 or on the flat cars of the wrecking train to be 
 hauled back to the shops and salvaged. 
 
 For hours they worked. The cook served din- 
 ner, meat salvaged from the wrecked refriger- 
 ator cars and cooked as only wrecking crew 
 cooks know how, with side dishes of cooked 
 prunes and raisins taken from one of the scores 
 of smashed crates scattered on the right-of-way, 
 and oranges for dessert, these also gathered 
 from the wreck of the fruit cars. 
 
 Again the men worked and ate between times. 
 They seemed hardly human in the way they 
 sweated, and panted, and labored. Where, save 
 among railroad men, could one possibly find men 
 who could, or would, work so ceaselessly, so tire- 
 lessly? The afternoon wore on. The wreckage 
 on the east-bound tracks was cleared away, and 
 
THE WRECKING TRAIN 205 
 
 a section gang summoned to the scene began re- 
 laying sleepers and rails that had been ripped 
 up. 
 
 Meanwhile an engine called from New City 
 arrived, passed on the west tracks to the nearest 
 cross over, backed down to the rear end of the 
 freight and hauled all the cars that were still on 
 track out of the general mess and back to the 
 yards, where they could be made up into a new 
 train and sent on their way. 
 
 The tracks cleared, O'Rourk's men began sal- 
 vaging the wreckage in the ditch. Two cars, 
 not so badly smashed, were lifted bodily by the 
 big steel wrecking crane and placed back upon 
 their trucks on the tracks and hurried away to 
 the yards. 
 
 Then the big wounded mogul, its steel sides 
 dented and its cab shattered, became the 
 object of the attention of the wrecking crew. 
 Here, it would seem, was a real test for the 
 sturdy, stock-looking crane. Steel cables and 
 chains were belted about the engine and then, 
 with scarcely any apparent effort, the crane set- 
 tled to its task, brought the heavy steel monster 
 out of what looked to be its grave, and set it back 
 
206 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 on trucks to be hauled limpingly back to the 
 shops. It seemed to be scarcely a real task 
 when the wreckers put their shoulders to it, so to 
 speak. 
 
 Then all that could be salvaged was salvaged 
 by the still toiling wreckers, and when the flat 
 cars were piled high with all sorts of things, men 
 with cans of oil and torches went about among 
 the debris and cleaned up the rest. What a 
 blaze it made! The wreckers lined the track, 
 their task done, and watched the licking flames 
 and the curling smoke complete their work. 
 Then as night came on and the fires burned to 
 embers and the wrecking train departed, the 
 men, dog tired, sprawled out on flat cars or in 
 the single coach, wearied to the point of utter 
 exhaustion, but happy in the consciousness of a 
 task well done. 
 
 ******* 
 
 The wrecking trains of a railroad and the 
 crews that man them are ready for any emer- 
 gency, day or night. They are to the railroad 
 what the fire companies are to a large city, for 
 they are subject to call day or night, and the call 
 may mean to them an hour's work or a round of 
 
THE WRECKING TRAIN 207 
 
 twenty-four hours of constant back-breaking 
 toil, for it is on them that the company depends 
 to keep its line open and traffic moving, no mat- 
 ter how great the catastrophe. 
 
 In the yard of every division headquarters, 
 ready and waiting, stands a wrecking train on a 
 track of its own that is always clear and has 
 quick access to the main line. The train is 
 composed of from four to six cars equipped with 
 every sort of tool or implement that might be 
 needed in an emergency. One car is equipped 
 with a sturdy but squat-looking steel crane. 
 This is built low to give clearance through tun- 
 nels and under bridges. But in spite of its pro- 
 portions it is of Herculean strength, able, as we 
 have seen, to lift bodily into the air a one-hun- 
 dred-ton locomotive and swing it in any direction. 
 The other cars of the train are flat cars, piled up 
 with blocks and tackle, great jacks, spare wheels 
 or trucks, pickaxes, crowbars, shovels and the 
 like, and a host of other equipment too varied to 
 mention. 
 
 The rear car of the train is usually a 
 coach, and this is the quarters of the wrecking 
 crew when on duty. There are bunks or cots 
 
208 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILEOADS 
 
 here, a mess hall and a kitchen, the domain of 
 the cook, for every wrecking crew has its own 
 "hash slinger," as the wreckers dub the cook. 
 An army travels and fights on its stomach. So 
 does a wrecking crew, and the railroad officials 
 know that it is highly necessary to provide these 
 men, who are willing to sweat and toil cease- 
 lessly on a job, the best of grub to keep them 
 happy. The " hash slinger " of a wrecking crew 
 is always the best of his kind to be found. 
 
 The wrecking crew does not always live with 
 the train. Perhaps one or two members, who 
 are unmarried and have no other homes, bunk in 
 the coach of the wrecking train, but the majority 
 of the members of the crew have their own 
 homes within a reasonable distance of the yard. 
 But they are sure to have telephone sets at the 
 head of their beds, by means of which they can 
 be summoned at a moment's notice. 
 
 When a wrecking train rolls, to use the par- 
 lance of the fire fighters, it is always the best 
 and fastest locomotive in the roundhouse that is 
 called out to do the work of getting the train and 
 its crew to the point of trouble. Some record 
 runs have been made by the wrecking train's 
 
THE WRECKING TRAIN 209 
 
 speeding engine, for no time can be lost when a 
 call for action comes. There is only one train 
 that can have the right-of-way over the wrecker, 
 and that is the hospital train, which fortunately 
 is rarely needed except when big passenger train 
 accidents occur, and these are few and far be- 
 tween. 
 
 The thought and desire that spurs on these 
 men of the wrecking crews is that the line must 
 be kept open under all circumstances. A blocked 
 line may mean a great deal, ranging from the 
 loss of money to the railroad and shipper to life 
 and death. Should a milk train supplying a 
 large city be held up for a day, it means that 
 there will be a shortage of milk somewheres and 
 babies will go hungry, weak ones becoming 
 weaker and possibly ill ones dying. Should 
 food trains be stalled for any length of time and 
 the food will spoil in transit, there will be a 
 shortage at some point which may result seri- 
 ously. 
 
 Should the speeding passenger service be 
 stopped untold harm may result. Physicians 
 may be kept from dying patients, men of big 
 business affairs may be kept from appointments 
 
210 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILROADS 
 
 that may mean a loss of millions of dollars or 
 the crippling of an important industry of the 
 country. Indeed there is no limit to the catas- 
 trophes that might result if the line is blocked. 
 
 So the most important task in the world to the 
 railroad man is the necessity of keeping the line 
 open. Wrecks must not be permitted to block it 
 any longer than is absolutely necessary, and 
 floods or storms must be fought and conquered 
 before they can cripple traffic, and sometimes 
 this task is far more difficult than that of clear- 
 ing away wreckage. 
 
 A severe winter storm will do more to upset 
 traffic and block the line than the most disas- 
 trous of wrecks, especially in mountain districts. 
 One of the biggest difficulties that some of the 
 western roads encounter are the heavy winter 
 storms that over night pile up drifts on the 
 right-of-way that will delay traffic for hours or 
 even days. , 
 
 These roads, and in fact all northern roads, in 
 addition to having their wrecking trains con- 
 stantly awaiting a call, have other emergency 
 equipment in the form of snow-plows. These 
 vary from the flange-like affairs that can be 
 
■- 
 bo 
 
 O 
 
 U 
 
 £ C 
 0) 
 
 £ o 
 
 II 
 
 I 5 
 
 b£ 
 
 a 
 
THE WRECKING TRAIN 211 
 
 bolted to the front of a locomotive to the huge 
 rotary plows that are employed by the big 
 western roads, and which can cut through drifts 
 higher than the average dwelling with as much 
 ease as the flange plows of the eastern roads 
 push aside a six-inch fall of snow. 
 
 The rotary snow-plow is an ingenious piece of 
 mechanism that has been developed by Ameri- 
 can railroad genius to fight the storms of winter 
 and help the men keep the line open. It is in 
 reality a huge sucking fan driven by a powerful 
 engine that pushes its way into a snow-drift and 
 literally eats through it, sucking the snow in 
 and spraying it out through a huge nozzle at the 
 side which throws a stream of snow away from 
 the right-of-way that would bury a house in 
 short order. 
 
 Pushed forward by two or three heavy loco- 
 motives, these plows can conquer almost any 
 drift if given time, and few are the storms that 
 can snow in these mountain divisions nowadays 
 and hold them blocked for any length of time. 
 The rotary snow-plow can eat its way through a 
 veritable mountain of snow if need be. 
 
 Keeping the road open in snow weather calls 
 
212 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILBOADS 
 
 for all sorts of emergency work, and it is not 
 only the men on the line, but the generals in the 
 of6.ce as well, who spend hours in harness, disre- 
 garding the necessity of sleep or meals or any- 
 thing else until the emergency is passed. Out 
 on the line switchmen, section men, laborers, 
 station agents, engineers and firemen are all 
 busy bucking and trying to conquer a snow- 
 storm, for there are drifts to clear, crossings to 
 clean, frozen switches to be thawed out and kept 
 open, signals that must be cared for and a host 
 of other disagreeable details that the big snow- 
 storms bring on ; while in the offices the superin- 
 tendent and his assistants are giving orders, 
 backing up the men in their work, flashing 
 words of encouragement over the wires, suggest- 
 ing changes and doing everything in their power 
 to help out, for they know that under any and 
 all circumstances the road must be kept open 
 and the men on the line must do it. 
 
 But there are a host of other men besides the 
 wrecking crews and the snow-plow brigade who 
 have that slogan close to their heart. It is part 
 of the gospel of the humble track walker, for 
 instance, that solitary individual who day after 
 
THE WRECKING TRAIN 213 
 
 day and night after night walks countless ties 
 and innumerable miles in his own effort to keep 
 the line open. 
 
 It is for him to watch for defects. If a storm 
 has eroded the embankment or a stream seems 
 to be encroaching too seriously on the right-of- 
 way of the line, he must report it. If he finds 
 a loose bolt or a loose fish-plate, he must stop 
 and repair the trouble if it is possible, or if 
 it is beyond him, do all that he can and then 
 report the condition to the section boss. If he 
 finds loose spikes, he carries with him one of 
 those long-headed track sledges with which to 
 drive in a new spike where it is necessary. If he 
 finds badly worn or splintered ties he marks 
 them for the further inspection of the section 
 boss, for he knows that any one of these details 
 might result in something more serious, even a 
 wreck, and the line would be blocked. 
 
 Then there is the section gang, that group of 
 laborers, track builders, and shovelers of ballast. 
 They, too, have at heart the necessity of keeping 
 the line open. The section gang is in reality the 
 track repair crew. These gangs, under the di- 
 rection of a section boss, are given a section of 
 
214 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 from two to ten miles of track to keep in repair. 
 They have at their command a hand car, and 
 with this bug-like contrivance they scurry up 
 and down their section to points where new ties 
 are to be put in or new rails laid, or where the 
 grade, constantly settling under the pounding 
 of heavy trains, needs rebuilding. Always at 
 hand they have equipment to work with, for the 
 hand car carries their picks and shovels, sledges, 
 tamping bars, stone forks, jacks, track gauges 
 and what not, and work trains appear occasion- 
 ally and drop by the track side at various points 
 on their section new ties or rails or kegs of 
 spikes, bolts or fish-plates, so that the section 
 boss shall never be without the necessary sup- 
 plies to help his men in their work of keeping the 
 line open. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 GIANTS OF THE LINE 
 
 There is a story told of an engineer, of Irish 
 extraction, who let one of those tiny puffing toy- 
 like engines, that were used on a city elevated 
 railroad line, play such a part in his life that 
 the loss of it made a moral and physical wreck 
 of him, and it was not until fifteen years later, 
 when he once more had the responsibilities of 
 caring for that same engine, that he got back on 
 his feet and made a success of life. Such is the 
 sentiment of an engineer for his locomotive. 
 
 The engineer of the story was Danny Carroll 
 
 and the engine was No. 9, once the pride of the 
 
 Third Avenue elevated line in New York City. 
 
 Danny petted and pampered and cared for that 
 
 puffing, snorting " fuss-budget " of an engine for 
 
 five years. He came to regard it as his very own 
 
 — almost a companion, a chum, and he endowed 
 
 215 
 
216 THE BOYS' BOOK OF BAILBOADS 
 
 it with, a personality. He even talked to it as a 
 chap might talk to a horse or a dog. He oiled it 
 and pottered about its steel limbs with the care 
 and evident affection of a cavalryman and his 
 favorite charger. 
 
 Then came the blow that took No. 9 out of 
 Danny's life and made a wreck of him. The 
 Third Avenue elevated line was electrified — a 
 third rail was laid down, motors were installed 
 in the hauling cars and in a year's time the last 
 of the sputtering, coughing little engines of the 
 line disappeared — No. 9 among them. Danny, 
 with all the other engineers of the road, was 
 given an opportunity to learn how to drive these 
 new forms of locomotives. But Danny refused 
 in no uncertain language and proceeded to con- 
 demn to the nethermost regions the civil engi- 
 neers who had installed the electric system. 
 Doing away with the steam engines was to him 
 a hideous crime and not to be countenanced 
 without a protest. 
 
 Protest he did, but it did him little good and 
 the day he witnessed the dismantling of No. 9 in 
 the shops of the company preparatory to its being 
 shipped via steamship to Central America, where 
 
GIANTS OF THE LINE 217 
 
 it with several companions was to serve out the 
 remainder of its years hauling sugar cane across 
 the big plantation, Danny Carroll took to drink- 
 ing. 
 
 That was Danny's downfall. From a sober, 
 industrious, hard-working young chap he be- 
 came a frousy, disreputable creature in the 
 course of time, always bemoaning the loss of 
 No. 9 and condemning the engineers who were 
 responsible for it. Year after year slipped by. 
 Danny went from bad to worse until he became 
 a denizen of the underworld, not actually a 
 criminal, but so closely associated with crime 
 that the mere sight of a police uniform struck 
 fear to his heart. 
 
 One night, fifteen years after he had lost 
 No. 9, he was caught in a police raid on a dive 
 that had become the hangout of a gang of 
 thieves. Danny was there because he had not 
 the money or friends to be in more respectable 
 quarters. 
 
 The raid burst upon the disreputable charac- 
 ters in the rendezvous so unexpectedly that a 
 terrific fight resulted between police and gang- 
 sters and in the mel6e, somehow, Danny Carroll 
 
218 THE BOYS' BOOK OP KAILBOADS 
 
 detached himself from the mob, slipped through 
 an unguarded window, and presently found him- 
 self in a water-front street with the yawning 
 doors of a darkened pier inviting him to hide 
 within. 
 
 Danny seized the opportunity and slipped in- 
 side, only to disturb the night watchman, who 
 began searching for him. To avoid capture the 
 erstwhile engineer climbed a hawser hand over 
 hand and presently let himself down onto the 
 deck of a steamship moored to the pier. But 
 this was hardly a secure hiding place, so he 
 slipped along the deck rail until he came to an 
 open hatchway, where he let himself down into 
 the hold of the vessel. Then being very tired, 
 and with his brain fogged with drink, he lay 
 down on some bales of cotton cloth and promptly 
 fell asleep. 
 
 When he awoke Danny found to his conster- 
 nation that the vessel was at sea, and after three 
 days of hiding and starving in the hold Danny 
 appeared on deck and was promptly put to work 
 with a scrubbing brush. 
 
 The first port the ship touched at had an un- 
 pronounceable Spanish name to it, but that 
 
GIANTS OF THE LINE 219 
 
 made no difference to the chief officer of the 
 ship. He put his super-cargo off there and the 
 ship sailed away, with Danny standing mourn- 
 fully on the dock, trying to decide what to do 
 next. 
 
 About that time he heard shouts and the 
 clank of a sledge-hammer and the hiss of steam, 
 out beyond a long storage shed. Danny hied 
 himself in that direction and presently came 
 upon a motley crew of pajama-clad soldiers gath- 
 ered around a dinky locomotive. They were try- 
 ing to repair it with a sledge and cold chisel. 
 For a moment Danny was struck dumb with as- 
 tonishment, for in the snorting little engine he 
 recognized old No. 9, his friend of fifteen years 
 back. 
 
 With a roar of rage he plunged in among the 
 crowd of soldiers and scattered them right and 
 left. He acted for all the world like an en- 
 raged bull as he seized the man who was wield- 
 ing the sledge and flung him end over end 
 along the dock. The man with the coal chisel 
 ran before he could get his hands on him. 
 Single-handed Danny whipped the entire army, 
 for they all fled in panic. 
 
220 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 Danny took charge of things immediately. 
 Once more associated with his engine he became 
 the same forceful man he had been fifteen years 
 before. He found that the soldiers were the 
 government force of the little republic and that 
 the engine had been captured from the forces of 
 a revolutionary army. The engine promised to 
 be of real value in their military campaign if 
 they could somehow get it to move. Something 
 was out of order, however, and their efforts to 
 mend it looked hopeless until Danny had ap- 
 peared on the scene. 
 
 Of course Danny repaired the engine and got 
 it to operate, and for his efforts he was made 
 chief of the republic's single railroad by the 
 president. He became a man of prominence and 
 responsibility immediately and at the throttle 
 of No. 9 he played a real part in putting down 
 the revolution and getting the country in order. 
 And he is still the country's most prominent 
 railroad man for all the writer knows, and No. 9, 
 hopelessly crippled in the fighting, now occupies 
 a huge granite block in the public square of the 
 republic's capital as the hero engine. 
 
 If this dinky, little, snorting "stove on 
 
GIANTS OF THE LINE 221 
 
 wheels," as the railroad men characterize the 
 old-tiine elevated railroad engine, conld exercise 
 such an influence over Danny Carroll, think 
 what an influence one of the present-day giants 
 of the line must be to the average railroad engi- 
 neer. True, to wax sentimental over one of 
 these huge freight hogs would seem like an at- 
 tempt to coddle a mastodon, but nevertheless the 
 average engineer is almost as devoted to his big 
 steel horse as Danny was. 
 
 An engineer, and his fireman, too, take a tre- 
 mendous lot of pride in their engine. They also 
 seem to endow these animate man-made crea- 
 tures with a personality, and they watch over 
 them and care for them as carefully as they 
 would a pet horse or dog. 
 
 But well they might, for these giants of the 
 line are conceded to be the greatest engines in 
 the world. American locomotives are the big- 
 gest, speediest, strongest and finest in the whole 
 world, and it is an honor indeed to be in full 
 charge of one of them — an honor that carries 
 with it a salary amounting to almost as much as 
 that of a division superintendent, and real pres- 
 tige among railroad men. 
 
222 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 There seems to be no limit to the massiveness 
 and power of the railroad locomotive, and al- 
 though perfectly enormous ones have been built 
 and are being used to-day, railroad men agree 
 that the limit has not yet been reached. In- 
 creasingly heavy freight traffic rather than 
 passenger traffic has been responsible for the de- 
 velopment of the locomotive to its huge propor- 
 tions of to-day. To haul some of the immense 
 trains of freight cars over the steep mountain 
 grades of the west veritable giants are required. 
 
 One of the biggest type of locomotive in use 
 to-day is in the service of one of the western 
 roads, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Lines, 
 where they are used to push huge freight trains 
 over the steep grades of the section of the south- 
 west traversed by these lines. Those great 
 engines are one hundred and twenty-one feet 
 long and have sixteen drive wheels. In reality 
 they are two locomotives served by the same 
 steam system and fire box. The drive wheels are 
 divided into groups of four and are served by 
 separate sets of cylinders, and the massive giant, 
 although it is too long to conveniently navigate 
 sharp curves, is made almost flexible by an in- 
 
GIAOTS OF THE LIKE, 223 
 
 genious set of joints in its steel frame. It weighs 
 better than fonr hundred tons and the amount 
 of freight that it can move is enormous. 
 
 This is known as the Mallet type of locomotive 
 and is without a doubt the most powerful rail- 
 road engine in the world. Other Mallets not so 
 big but almost as powerful are in use on other 
 lines of the country, the Delaware and Hudson 
 Company having some with sixteen drive wheels 
 that are ninety feet long and weigh two hundred 
 and twenty-three tons. These too are used as 
 pusher engines for the huge freights of coal cars 
 that are operated by that company in the moun- 
 tainous region of the line. 
 
 It is interesting to know that this last named 
 road was the first in America to use a steam 
 locomotive and the first locomotive used was not 
 American but English. It was a tiny seven ton 
 machine imported from England and named the 
 Stourbridge Lion: It is interesting to compare 
 this little fellow with the giants who travel the 
 same right-of-way now weighing thirty times as 
 much and having the power of a perfect fleet of 
 these little fellows. 
 
 Rivaling these giants both in size and in power 
 
224= THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 are the new engines that the Erie Railroad re- 
 cently added to its powerful equipment of 
 pushers in the coal fields district of the line. 
 This type, new to the Erie, is an engine well 
 over the four-hundred-ton variety, having a total 
 weight of 853,000 pounds with a tractive force 
 of 160,000 pounds. It has a water tank capacity 
 of 10,000 gallons and a coal consuming capacity 
 of sixteen tons. Its length is one hundred and 
 ^.ve feet. 
 
 These engines have six cylinders, two of them 
 high pressure, thirty-six inches by thirty-two, 
 and four low pressure of the same dimensions. 
 The drive wheels are huge affairs of sixty-three 
 inches diameter. 
 
 Some idea of the terrific pulling power of this 
 engine can be had when it is explained that in a 
 test one hauled two hundred and fifty-one fully 
 loaded fifty-one ton gondola cars, making a train 
 of 35,824,000 pounds. But this is not its limit by 
 any means, for it is said that it can haul a train 
 four and three-quarter miles long (containing 
 about six hundred and forty cars) . A train this 
 size would weigh 90,000,000 pounds. 
 
 As mentioned before, it was the freight serv- 
 
GIANTS OF THE LINE 225 
 
 ice, and not the passenger service that is re- 
 sponsible for the development of these wonderful 
 Mallet type of engines that are built for 
 power rather than speed. But America has 
 outstripped the world in speed locomotives, 
 too. 
 
 There are three tremendously swift types 
 being used in the passenger service in this 
 country to-day. They are known as the At- 
 lantic type, the Pacific type and the Prairie 
 type, all of which are huge things with great 
 drive wheels and they can whizz a train of pas- 
 senger coaches over the landscape at better than 
 a mile a minute with great ease. 
 
 It is interesting in digging back into the his- 
 tory of locomotives to find that sixty miles an 
 hour — a mile a minute — was not unheard of on 
 American railroads very early in their history. 
 Indeed it is said that a train driven by a locomo- 
 tive built in the foundries of Matthias Baldwin, 
 a watch-maker, and the man who founded the 
 now famous locomotive works that bears his 
 name, drew a train of special coaches on the 
 Pennsylvania Bailroad, one of them the private 
 car of President Zachary Taylor, at the rate of 
 
226 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 sixty miles an hour during Taylor's term of 
 office. 
 
 But before that even greater speed was 
 attained, for this same famous locomotive 
 builder constructed an engine for the Vermont 
 Central Railroad that from a standing start 
 covered a measured mile in forty-three seconds. 
 The speedsters of to-day have only been able to 
 shave this a matter of a few seconds, ten to fif- 
 teen at the most. 
 
 It was this performance, along with others of 
 a different character but equally as important, 
 that made American locomotives famous the 
 world over and has ever since kept Europe's eyes 
 turned to us for all things new and wonderful in 
 railroading. 
 
 In the early history of the locomotive it was 
 difficult to construct one that was capable of 
 hauling a great load up a grade. Until then 
 England was considered to be building the best 
 locomotives in the world, but her best were not 
 capable of power enough or traction enough to 
 conquer grades. 
 
 Among the pioneers in locomotive building 
 was one Norris of Philadelphia, who had been 
 
GIANTS OF THE LINE 227 
 
 experimenting with locomotive construction. 
 He finally developed the engine since become 
 famous as the " George Washington," which 
 succeeded in climbing a heavy grade drag- 
 ging two cars behind. It not only made the 
 grade, but midway up came to a dead stop and 
 started to climb again. This was indeed a re- 
 markable achievement and news of it traveled 
 around the world. But England, jealous of her 
 prestige as a builder of locomotives, jeered and 
 scoffed and the British papers said that the 
 stories told of the Norris engine were fairy tales. 
 This nettled the Philadelphian as it nettled 
 many other Americans, and Norris promptly 
 built another engine and packing it up shipped 
 it to England, where he had it assembled again. 
 Then he demanded to know the stiffest grade 
 they had to test it on, and when the grade was 
 made known to him he made his engine climb it 
 and come down again, stopping and starting 
 midway in the journey, as his American engine 
 had done. 
 
 That was enough. Doubting old England 
 believed. It stretched its head and sighed, 
 but it believed, for the representatives of 
 
228 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILROADS 
 
 Germany, France and Italy, as well as other 
 European nations, promptly acclaimed America 
 the leader in locomotive construction, and Nor- 
 ris returned to America with so many orders 
 that he could not fill them all in the time speci- 
 fied. It was then in 1835 that America out- 
 stripped England as the nation of railroads and 
 we have continued to run well ahead of her ever 
 since. 
 
 One of the early British engines to make a 
 record for itself in this country was the " John 
 Bull," which is now on exhibition in the Smith- 
 sonian Institute in Washington. There are 
 other American made engines of the early days 
 of railroading that were just as conspicuous as 
 this one. The engine known as the " Best Friend 
 of Charleston " was the first American built lo- 
 comotive to be successfully operated in this 
 country. It was built in the West Point foun- 
 dries in New York City. 
 
 The " De Witt Clinton " was the first locomo- 
 tive to travel the rails that were laid along the 
 historic Indian trail up the Hudson valley. The 
 " Arabian " is another famous early American 
 engine, so is the " Tom Thumb," that was built 
 
GIANTS OF THE LINE 229 
 
 by Peter Cooper and used on the Baltimore and 
 Ohio. 
 
 From these strange specimens to the present- 
 day Mallet is a far cry, but the steps in between 
 have been many and labored. For years wood 
 was the fuel of the engines. Then coal became 
 the fodder for the fire boxes. Now there are 
 fast locomotives that are known as oil burners, 
 their tenders being huge tanks that supply them 
 with petroleum. There are steps that hardly 
 look like progress in the development of the 
 steam locomotive, such as the adoption of the 
 steam whistle in addition to the original bell, 
 and the headlight for use at night. All these 
 represent the ingenuity of American engineers. 
 
 To-day's locomotives, for there are a variety 
 of types for a variety of work, are real triumphs. 
 They are the reasons for our nation's supremacy 
 in railroading. Good motive power, although it 
 represents scarcely ten per cent, (about eight per 
 cent.) of the investment of a railroad, is really 
 the life of the road itself, for the money-earning 
 capacity of the road depends entirely upon how 
 modern its haulers are and how well they are 
 cared for and maintained. 
 
230 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILKOADS 
 
 Every railroad takes good care of its engines. 
 In truth every railroad takes good care of its 
 rolling stock, whether it be engines, flat cars, 
 freights or coaches, for it is on these that the 
 wear and tear of traffic first shows itself, and it 
 is by the appearance of these that prospective 
 patrons, whether shippers or passengers, judge 
 the road. They must keep their equipment look- 
 ing nice and they must keep it mechanically flaw- 
 less in every detail as a safety measure. 
 
 To this end every railroad maintains special 
 groups of men who, while their work is not as 
 romantic as that of the engineer or the brake- 
 man atop the swaying cars, is every bit as neces- 
 sary to the safety of the road. There are in- 
 spectors who day and night go over the equip- 
 ment of the road. They are trained men who by 
 the tap of a hammer on a car wheel can tell from 
 the sound given off whether crack or flaw is 
 there. 
 
 Tirelessly by day and by night they are 
 to be found crawling under cars or climbing over 
 them, working by torch-light or sunlight, but al- 
 ways working, looking, searching, testing, in 1 
 quest of the flaw that might mean a wreck ancl 
 
GIANTS OF THE LINE 231 
 
 the death of a score of human beings or the loss 
 of thousands of dollars in freight. 
 
 And back of the inspectors are the shops with 
 their thousands of trained employees who can do 
 anything from casting a car wheel in the foun- 
 dry to rebuilding a locomotive. 
 
 The shops are an important department of a 
 railroad, for it is on them that the road depends 
 to keep its rolling stock in service order. On 
 the care with which repairs are made depends 
 the safety of its equipment, and on the speed 
 with which this repair work is done depends the 
 earning capacity of the rolling stock. To keep a 
 car in the shops a week means that hundreds of 
 dollars is being lost by the road. To keep a lo- 
 comotive in the shop overlong means that thou- 
 sands of dollars are being lost by the road. 
 
 As a rule, shops for minor or light repair work 
 are maintained on each division, with larger and 
 more complete shops at some central points 
 where locomotives or cars can be sent when their 
 overhauling is to be of an extensive nature. One 
 road, the Pennsylvania, maintains at Altoona, 
 Pennsylvania, a tremendous plant where not 
 only repair work is done, but where equipment 
 
232 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 is manufactured. Facilities are provided at Al- 
 toona for the manufacture of one thousand cast- 
 iron car wheels every twenty-four hours and for 
 the building of complete locomotives or steel 
 passenger coaches. 
 
 But not all roads have gone in for the manu- 
 facture of equipment the way the Pennsylvania 
 has. Most of them are content to buy locomo- 
 tives and new equipment from the foundries of 
 private companies and keep them in repair at 
 their own shops. 
 
 The giants of the line make periodical visits 
 to the shop, there to undergo attention. It is 
 estimated that every locomotive after it has 
 traveled from 50,000 to 70,000 miles of rails 
 should be turned into the shops to be thoroughly 
 overhauled. And thorough is the overhauling. 
 
 The shops are provided with huge traveling 
 cranes that can lift a locomotive clear off the 
 tracks and swing it into the air as easily as one 
 lifts a ten-pound bag of sugar. When a locomo- 
 tive reports for an overhauling it is entirely dis- 
 mantled ; this huge crane lifting the boiler from 
 the trucks and taking the huge cylinder weigh- 
 ing tons to the far end of the shop deposits it in 
 
GIAOTS OF THE LINE 233 
 
 the boiler maker's department where men tinker 
 up the tubes and scrape it and otherwise put it 
 in order. 
 
 Meanwhile other workmen begin on vari- 
 ous other parts, some caring for the drive 
 wheels, others the cylinders, and still others the 
 pumps and other machinery. They work swiftly, 
 these men of the shops, for they realize that 
 every minute the locomotive is out of commis- 
 sion means just so much loss to the road. But 
 with all their swiftness they work carefully, too, 
 for they realize that upon the carefulness of their 
 work depends a tremendous lot. Just how 
 swiftly they do work can be realized when some 
 of the records for complete dismantlement, over- 
 hauling and reassemblying of a locomotive are 
 given. Two shops of the Erie Railroad hold the 
 records. The first was made by the men at the 
 Hornellsville shops when they took down a loco- 
 motive, cleaned and repaired all of its five to 
 seven thousand parts and reassembled it again 
 in twenty-four hours of solid work. 
 
 This stood as a record for a short time until 
 the workmen of the Susquehanna shops under- 
 took to smash it. And smash it they did. From 
 
234 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 seven o'clock in the morning until thirty-four 
 minutes after seven at night they did all that 
 their rivals in the Hornellsville shops accom- 
 plished, and the night of the same day that the 
 big locomotive came to the shop she was out on 
 the line dragging a long clanking vertebrae of 
 red and yellow freight cars westward. That is 
 the last record, and it is questionable whether 
 the best of organized shop crews will ever reduce 
 it by many minutes. 
 
 An interesting phase of the work of keeping 
 the rolling stock of a railroad in working order 
 is found in the work that is done by many lines 
 on cars that are not their property. You are 
 familiar now with the method of interchanging 
 cars and the rental basis that prevails among 
 the roads. In order to keep these cars con- 
 stantly in service the line on which the car is in 
 use at the time it breaks down repairs it whether 
 the car belongs to them or a rival line, or a line 
 clear across the continent. It would obviously 
 be an act of folly to try and send a crippled 
 freight car back to the shops of its own' line to 
 be repaired. It might be two thousand miles 
 away from the nearest shop of its own line and 
 
GIANTS OF THE LINE 235 
 
 in the ordinary course of events it might take 
 weeks to get it back to its own base. This would 
 be a waste of space and equipment and time, not 
 to mention the power required to haul an empty 
 car two thousand miles. For that reason the 
 road on which it is being used at the time it 
 breaks down sends it to its own shop, makes the 
 repairs that are necessary, puts it back into serv- 
 ice and charges the home company for the repair 
 work. 
 
 With all the lines in the country doing 
 this, it is evident that a tremendously compli- 
 cated bookkeeping system is necessary, but some- 
 how, through good management and system, 
 they are all able to keep track of this repair 
 work. 
 
 Nearly all roads of any size maintain carpen- 
 ter shops and freight car building shops, in 
 which the most of the wooden freight cars are 
 constructed. Building the bodies of these 
 wooden cars is not difficult. But now that steel 
 cars are fast replacing cars of wood construction 
 it is likely that these car building shops will 
 gradually be reduced to shops in which the old 
 type of freight car will simply be repaired and 
 
236 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 rebuilt until it is ready to be declared unfit for 
 further service. 
 
 Then there are the paint shops. Just as im- 
 portant are these shops as are the foundries and 
 machine shops, for few structures are called 
 upon to face the weather conditions that the cars 
 of a railroad must withstand. The freight cars 
 are out in all sorts of weather. They are hauled 
 through blizzard, sleet and rain-storms, they face 
 the salt winds and spray of the seaboard, only to 
 be hauled in a few days across the blistering 
 sands of the desert, they are snow-bound, mud 
 spattered, dust caked and begrimed with oil and 
 soot until sometimes the lettering on them is un- 
 recognizable. 
 
 Such conditions are bound to make wooden 
 structural work depreciate unless liberally 
 protected with paint. Liberal is the word. 
 Freight cars are not painted with brushes 
 and buckets of paint as are houses. In the 
 railroad paint shop they are literally deluged 
 with paint. It is squirted onto them through 
 hose lines and the coating they get is thick in- 
 deed. But it must be to protect them against the 
 elements. Red or yellow are the colors usually 
 
GIANTS OF THE LINE 237 
 
 selected, and they are spattered from end to end, 
 after which they are left to dry out before other 
 painters come along with stencils and number 
 them and letter the name of the line on their 
 shining sides. But in spite of this paint bath 
 they are destined to visit the paint shops again 
 inside of a year, so roughly are they treated on 
 the road. 
 
 Passenger coaches must survive almost the 
 same conditions as the freight cars are called 
 upon to face, and they too must make their pe- 
 riodical appearance at the paint shop where, al- 
 though their treatment is not quite so rugged, it 
 is just as effective. Several coats of paint are 
 applied to their sides while men inside are wield- 
 ing varnish brushes. Three coats of varnish is 
 finally applied to the exterior of the coaches and 
 thoroughly rubbed and polished before they are 
 turned loose to face the elements once more. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE DIVISION'S KING 
 
 A veritable king is the superintendent of a 
 division. He is king in that his word is law. 
 His is the hand of authority over the division. 
 He rules the several hundred miles of trackage 
 that composes his division along with the yards, 
 roundhouses and equipment. But unlike the 
 kings of old, the style of kings that disappeared 
 with the great World War, the superintendent 
 can't sit back in his throne room or office in ease 
 and comfort, speaking with authority and yet 
 passing on the hard work and trouble to the 
 prime ministers and others gathered around him 
 and keeping his own hands clean. 
 
 " ]STo sirree," with the " super's w authority goes 
 
 for all the responsibilities of his empire. Every 
 
 problem of the division is laid before him and it 
 
 is his head that gets gray and bald thinking out 
 
 situations. He is a czar all right, but he's a czar 
 
 who has his coat off and his shirt sleeves rolled 
 
 up, sweating royal sweat over his job, and sweat- 
 
 238 
 
THE DIVISION'S KING 239 
 
 ing sometimes fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty- 
 four, yes, sometimes twice twenty-four hours 
 without any sleep when his division is facing a 
 crisis. It's fun to be a king in the railroad world 
 but it is also " bloomin' " hard work. 
 
 The men out on the line may struggle with 
 real tasks, but the head of the division toils 
 harder. His are all the problems of his territory 
 and he is constantly busy trying to meet them. 
 Daily he faces the necessity of providing better 
 facilities to increase the road's business. His 
 division must stand up and keep pace with the 
 rest of the line or else the power behind the 
 throne, the general manager, and the men he rep- 
 resents, the directors and stockholders, demand 
 to know the reason why. He must be constantly 
 on the alert to provide means of unloading cars 
 faster and getting them back into service so as 
 to earn more money for the road. He must see 
 that his division has enough equipment, and that 
 it is in good condition. He must see that the 
 heads of a score of departments under him are 
 doing their work and in turn getting the best 
 results out of their men and equipment. He 
 must see that the men who are working under 
 
240 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 him are kept satisfied and happy with their jobs. 
 He must keep in constant touch with the service 
 that is being maintained on his end of the line. 
 He must know, and in a measure help shape the 
 road's policies. 
 
 He must be ready to pacify all disgruntled 
 patrons of the road, whether they be the humble 
 holders of a one-way ticket to Askog or the mer- 
 chant prince who is shipping freight over his 
 division in car-load lots. He must do a million 
 and one things as a regular part of his job and 
 after he gets those done he must do a few mil- 
 lion more. 
 
 Then in addition to all this he is the man to 
 meet every emergency of the road. If a freight 
 train is wrecked and a dozen cars of coal are 
 scattered over the right-of-way, blocking the 
 tracks of his division, he has got to think out 
 the way of keeping everything moving. This 
 happened recently on the terminal division of a 
 big road serving New York, and it will serve as 
 a good example of how a superintendent must 
 work in an emergency to keep his division oper- 
 ating. 
 
 The wreck occurred between one and two 
 
THE DIVISION'S XING 241 
 
 o'clock in the morning when most men, except- 
 ing of course railroad men, are supposed to be in 
 bed and asleep. The cars tore up several hun- 
 dred yards of tracks, bending rails, ripping out 
 sleepers like so many match sticks, smashing 
 freight cars, and bending the heavy steel coal 
 gondolas all out of shape, while coal piled upon 
 the right-of-way in a veritable mountain, be- 
 tween three and four hundred tons of it. There 
 was a mess. 
 
 Of course word of the wreck was flashed to the 
 dispatcher's office and when the chief dispatcher 
 got the news, he recognized it as an emergency 
 that he was not expected to tackle alone, so he 
 immediately got the superintendent on the wire. 
 Yes, he routed the sleeping king out of bed. A 
 half hour later, with eyes still blinking with 
 sleep, the superintendent whizzed up to his of- 
 fice in his swift little roadster and climbed into 
 his chair behind his desk. A report on the entire 
 situation was before him and the chief dis- 
 patcher was at his elbow, a ready and willing 
 assistant. 
 
 The wrecking train had already been ordered 
 out and was clear of the yard and booming along 
 
242 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 at high speed toward the scene of trouble. Other 
 emergency measures had also been adopted and 
 the decks were clear for the superintendent to 
 work out the problem. 
 
 Chewing an unlighted cigar the " super " 
 scanned the report and sat back to think a mo- 
 ment. 
 
 "Rotten mess. Two o'clock now. In three 
 hours the commuting trains will start down. 
 We will have to get 30,000 people around that 
 wreck and not lose a minute's time." Thus he 
 summed up the situation. 
 
 Then he began popping out orders. Out and 
 incoming trains were rerouted, some of them 
 making a detour of two hundred miles on other 
 lines to avoid the wreck. Then additional mo- 
 tive power was requested from near-by points 
 and a brand new train schedule was worked out 
 with emergency trains made up to run from the 
 terminal to the wreck. 
 
 As dawn began to paint the sky across the 
 river and throw into a golden relief the impress- 
 ive sky-line of the mighty city across the Hud- 
 son River, the first of these trains were started 
 out toward the wreck. Meanwhile wreckers had 
 
THE DIVISION'S KING 243 
 
 built a foot-path around the piled up jam of coal 
 cars and when the first commutation train came 
 down the line the passengers were detrained, 
 walked around the wreck and reloaded into 
 trains that were constantly arriving to meet 
 them. They reached the city just fifteen min- 
 utes later than usual. That was an achievement 
 
 It sounds simple when set down here in cold 
 print, but think of the work involved. Think of 
 the army of men needed during the night hours. 
 Think of the care and attention demanded by 
 these trains with their loads of human freight. 
 It all had to be done without an accident and 
 with as little inconvenience to passengers as 
 possible. And the burden of the responsibility 
 for it all fell upon the superintendent. 
 
 And in the general order of things emergen- 
 cies demanding as much work may occur with 
 great frequency. Indeed in the winter time 
 there seems to be no limit to the number of dis- 
 agreeable situations that can come up as the re- 
 sult of the traffic-blocking storms. Many a night 
 this same superintendent has been routed out of 
 bed or prevented from going to bed in an all- 
 night fight to keep the line from being blocked 
 
244 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 by snow. Many a time with but little notice lie 
 has mobilized a veritable army of men to shovel 
 out the switches and keep them from being 
 frozen solid with burning oil torches. 
 
 And then there may be still other emergencies 
 resulting from situations developing within the 
 road's organization. Within recent years there 
 have been several unfortunate railroad strikes. 
 It is not difficult to believe the concern and 
 sleepless hours of the superintendent of a divi- 
 sion under such circumstances. Or it may be 
 that suddenly so much business is dumped onto 
 one division of the line that the entire equipment 
 of the division is used up and there is still a 
 tremendous bulk of stuff to be moved. All the 
 reserve motive power at one point on the divi- 
 sion may be in use and the superintendent finds 
 that he still needs more and needs it in a hurry. 
 Then it is that the engines from some other point 
 must be requisitioned. But there is heavy traf- 
 fic at this point, too. The superintendent plays 
 a regular war game then, shooting engines to the 
 first point and clearing up the jam there, then 
 rushing them back to the place from which they 
 were borrowed and getting the situation there: 
 
THE DIVISION'S KING 245 
 
 untangled before it gets too serious. Oh, the 
 division superintendent's life is a busy one and 
 no mistake. 
 
 But there are men constantly striving and 
 working to attain that position. It is the goal 
 to which all ambitious railroad men's eyes are 
 turned and the high school boy who comes into 
 the service of the line as a call boy begins to 
 dream immediately of the day that he will oc- 
 cupy the " super's "job and have the reins of the 
 division in his hands. 
 
 And all roads lead to the position of superin- 
 tendent. The humblest employee, in the most in- 
 consequential position on the line, can hope to 
 be a superintendent, and by hard work can at- 
 tain that pinnacle if he has the background of a 
 high school education, the never-say-die spirit 
 of railroading in his make-up, and a brain that 
 he has trained to be keen, quick and observing. 
 
 The operator in a tower can hope to be super- 
 intendent. If he has the qualities needed he can 
 soon become a train dispatcher, then chief of the 
 dispatchers, and from there step up into the posi- 
 tion of division superintendent. The fellow out 
 on the track, the ambitious, bright-eyed fellow of 
 
246 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 sixteen who carries water for the section gang, 
 can become superintendent if he is willing to 
 work hard days and study nights. He can be- 
 come the foreman of that gang first, then with 
 time and study of technical subjects, he can be- 
 come track foreman and later track superintend- 
 ent, then perhaps division engineer, and if he is 
 the right man from there he will eventually move 
 up to superintendent. 
 
 Even the chap who goes in as office boy or 
 clerk on the big staff that is always employed in 
 the superintendent's office can hope to have his 
 chief's job some day. If he has the backbone 
 and fighting qualities to forge ahead and become 
 chief clerk, and after he has mastered all the 
 office details, go out upon the line for four or 
 five years to get the practical experience of rail- 
 roading, he, too, can hope to occupy the position 
 of chief of the division. 
 
 Take the career of the superintendent who 
 solved the problem of getting the commuters 
 around the wrecked coal cars. It is a mighty 
 good example of just what a boy can do for him- 
 self if he works hard. 
 
 John Campbell (we will call him that because 
 
THE DIVISION'S KING 247 
 
 he prefers to keep his identity a secret) loved 
 railroading. He thought, ate and slept railroad- 
 ing, it seemed, while he was in school. After 
 school hours he was always to be found some- 
 where about the railroad, but usually at the big 
 interlocking signal tower that was situated near 
 the station of his home town. 
 
 He made friends with the operator of that 
 tower, a typical railroad man and always inter- 
 ested in any one who was interested in railroad- 
 ing. The tower man called him Jack and taught 
 him all that a chap of fifteen could learn about 
 railroading. Best of all, he learned to become a 
 fair telegraph operator. 
 
 At sixteen Jack Campbell graduated from 
 high school. He decided then to take a position, 
 and of course the one thing uppermost in his 
 mind was to get a position with the road. He 
 got it. Viewed in the light of his present posi- 
 tion as superintendent, his first job was humble 
 indeed. He was employed as combination night 
 ticket agent, baggagemaster and express agent 
 at a tiny station on the line known in railroad 
 circles as the Big 4. His salary was the magnifi- 
 cent sum of twenty dollars a month — less than 
 
248 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KAILKOADS 
 
 five dollars a week. But to him it was a real job 
 with real responsibilities, and he made up his 
 mind that he was going to do his work with real 
 enthusiasm. Every night he trudged to the sta- 
 tion, his lunch pail on his arm. It was hard to 
 have to keep awake and work, struggling with 
 baggage trucks that were so big he could hardly 
 see over them (for he was short for his age) 
 while the whole town, his boy chums included, 
 were fast asleep. But he worked with a will and 
 he grasped every opportunity to learn railroad- 
 ing. Every time a freight was held over on his 
 station siding for orders Jack was out frater- 
 nizing with the train crew. He always sought 
 the company of men older than himself, for he 
 knew that he could learn things from them 
 where he could not learn anything from chaps 
 his own age. And learn he did. He absorbed 
 railroad gossip and information as a sponge ab- 
 sorbs water, and he was doing his job well at the 
 same time. 
 
 Then came his first jolt. He lost his job. A 
 wave of economy struck the road and it was de- 
 cided to cut down the force. His station was 
 considered too unimportant to demand a night 
 
THE DIVISION'S KING 249 
 
 ticket agent and it was closed for night service. 
 This future superintendent was fired. 
 
 But that did not make him disgruntled at rail- 
 roading. Instead he promptly began scouting 
 around among his now big list of railroad ac- 
 quaintances and inside of a few weeks landed a 
 job as yard clerk on another line for which he 
 was paid at a better rate, his salary being thirty- 
 five dollars a month. Here, too, he worked 
 nights. But he did not mind that, for it gave 
 him some daylight hours to study and work for 
 himself. Still he pursued the policy of chum- 
 ming with the men who were older in the service 
 than he was, learning all he could from them 
 about their part of the business. 
 
 He began to show real ability then and quite 
 unexpectedly he was given the job of night yard- 
 master with all its responsibilities. He was then 
 in full charge of the make-up of all trains in and 
 out of the yard at night. That was only a step 
 behind being in full charge of the yard as day 
 yardmaster, and in a surprisingly short time he 
 was promoted to that post. And he was still 
 comparatively a boy, not yet having cast his first 
 vote. He was sure now that hard work and con- 
 
250 THE BOYS' BOOK OF KXILEOADB 
 
 stant application to Ms job were well worth 
 while. 
 
 About this time lie began to analyze himself 
 and felt a little discontented with things. He 
 knew there was a lot about railroading still for 
 him to learn. So he gave up his position as 
 yardmaster and went to work for another big 
 transcontinental line as brakeman, a member of 
 a freight train crew. There from the tops of the 
 swaying cars he saw the Rockies in all their 
 grandeur, and California. It was a wonderful 
 experience for him. And still he worked and 
 learned by doing the things that were important 
 in railroading. Before long he became a con- 
 ductor of a freight train, and a high grade one 
 at that. Indeed the superintendent of the divi- 
 sion on which he worked soon saw that he had an 
 exceptional man in this chap who had come to 
 him a brakeman from a smaller road, and when 
 he needed a first class yardmaster he picked 
 Jack Campbell for the job. Thus it was that he 
 came back to a position similar to the one he 
 had occupied, but with a larger road. He had 
 more responsibilities but he also had a broader 
 knowledge of railroading. 
 
THE DIVISION'S KING 251 
 
 Eight there Jack Campbell set his eyes on the 
 position of division superintendent and he never 
 let his gaze waver. He adopted a policy, too, of 
 training a man under him for the job he occu- 
 pied, for he said to himself that the superintend- 
 ent might hesitate to take him out of a position 
 and put him into a better one if there was no 
 one to take his place. So he trained a man to be 
 ready to take his job when he left it and held 
 him ready. 
 
 Meanwhile he studied the job of the man 
 ahead of him until he knew that thoroughly, 
 and the result was that he was soon made in- 
 spector, then trainmaster over the trains of the 
 entire division. Still he trained men to fill his 
 job and kept his eyes on the next position above 
 him, and when the time was ripe he stepped into 
 the position of assistant superintendent, and 
 from there he moved to the head of the division, 
 becoming a superintendent while still in his thir- 
 ties and one of the youngest men to occupy that 
 position in the history of his road. Nor has he 
 stopped climbing, and likely enough this boy 
 who spent all his spare time hobnobbing with 
 the towerman back in that little middle western 
 
252 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 town at the age of sixteen, will one day be heard 
 of as general manager or an official of one of the 
 really big railroad systems of the country. 
 
 It is worth a great deal to the fellow who is 
 interested in railroads, and possibly hopes some 
 day to make it his vocation, to have a word with 
 a man who has gone from the bottom to a place 
 near the top in railroading, and since he is the 
 bulliest sort of a chap he quite willingly gave 
 the writer some bits of advice to pass on to fel- 
 lows who are as eager as he was to some day find 
 employment at the fascinating occupation of a 
 railroad man. 
 
 " The young man who does not feel that he is 
 in every way qualified to go into railroading 
 should never think of entering the service, for if 
 he balks at hard work, uncertain hours and all 
 sorts of hardships, he will never make good. If, 
 however, he is the sort of chap who just knows 
 he can't be happy unless he is railroading he'll 
 make good in spite of the hard work and he'll 
 find fun, romance and adventure in it. 
 
 " But it is hard enough for even that type of 
 fellow to keep from feeling discouraged and 
 downhearted sometimes. Why, I remember the 
 
THE DIVISION'S KING 253 
 
 first night I was made yardmaster. It seemed to 
 me as if they ran every train on the line into my 
 yard that night. And then didn't I have a 
 wreck at one end of the yard that tied up the 
 whole outfit. 
 
 "I put in fourteen hours steady work, and 
 I was a mighty blue and discouraged chap 
 when I saw my boss coming up the tracks 
 next morning. I figured right there I had made 
 a bull of the whole thing and I guessed I wasn't 
 cut out for railroading after all. But when I 
 told my boss of the troubles and expected that 
 he was going to fire me on the spot, he slapped 
 me on the shoulder and said, i Good work, young 
 fellow. Fine night's work. You're tired. Go 
 home and have a good sleep. You'll feel better 
 then.' I went out of the yard happy after that 
 and I decided that perhaps after all I might be 
 a railroad man some day. 
 
 "It is a wonderful life. No two days are 
 alike. No two days bring the same problems, 
 and there is a chance for a chap to go home every 
 night with that fine feeling of a job well done." 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 RAILROAD HISTORY 
 
 Ai/thotjgh America is to-day the foremost na- 
 tion in the world in relation to railroads, and all 
 that goes with this wonderfully romantic indus- 
 try, the railroad, nor yet the steam locomotive, 
 can be properly credited as American inventions, 
 as you already know. It is quite true that 
 America leads in railroading to-day. Hers are 
 the biggest railroad systems in the world. There 
 are more tracks in America than anywhere else 
 on the globe. There are bigger, faster and bet- 
 ter trains here, and American railway equip- 
 ment is considered the world over as the last 
 word in design and workmanship. American 
 locomotives stand to-day as the best that en- 
 gineering skill has developed, and they are 
 sought after by every nation on the globe. 
 
 Yet in spite of all this, America cannot claim 
 254 
 
EAILEOAD HISTORY 255 
 
 the credit of the invention of the steam locomo- 
 tive which made the fine systems of to-day pos- 
 sible. Records indicate that a Britisher, a 
 young man by the name of Stephenson, was the 
 first to experiment successfully with a "steam 
 wagon" or locomotive, as he called his inven- 
 tion. Indeed, according to Edward S. Hunger- 
 ford, in whose excellent book, "The Modern 
 Railroad," a wonderfully accurate history of 
 railroads in America is published and from 
 which many of these facts were gleaned, the first 
 steam engine, or locomotive, to turn a wheel on 
 American soil was built by the same Stephenson, 
 and brought to America by one, Horatio Allen, 
 for the Delaware and Hudson Company, a pros- 
 perous canal company of New York State. 
 
 Canals were the national traffic highways of 
 this country in the days before the railroads. 
 These, too, were copied from a European idea, 
 for in England and on the continent of Europe, 
 extensive canals were maintained to carry food- 
 stuff and heavy freight from inland towns to the 
 seacoast for shipment over seas. 
 
 In America the development of canals, like the 
 development of the railroad of to-day, had out- 
 
256 THE BOYS' BOOK OF BAILEOADS 
 
 stripped the inventors in Europe with, long 
 waterways that cut across the country for hun- 
 dreds of miles. 
 
 But at best these were unsatisfactory, and 
 various forms of freight highways were experi- 
 mented with, which after all were really the 
 forerunners of the railroads. In England in 
 the coal mining districts a type of railroad 
 was developed, the rails being made of wood, 
 and horse-drawn vehicles being used to 
 drag the heavy bulky freight overland. These 
 horse-operated, wooden-railed railroads were 
 tried in this country, too, short lines being con- 
 structed in sections of the mining district of 
 Pennsylvania, Virginia, and in the granite 
 quarry district of New England. One notable 
 railroad of this type being constructed and 
 maintained by one Gridley Bryant in 1826, 
 which was used to carry the heavy granite block 
 used in the construction of the Bunker Hill 
 monument, from the quarries in Quincy, Mass., 
 to the docks four miles away. This railroad, 
 though using horse-drawn vehicles, was a na- 
 tional curiosity, and people became so curious 
 about it that it was considered an excellent busi- 
 
EAILEOAD HISTOEY 257 
 
 ness opportunity to open a hotel near the rail- 
 road to accommodate sightseeing visitors. It is 
 said to have done a remarkable business. 
 
 But the canal continued to be the safest, fast- 
 est, and generally the most satisfactory way of 
 transporting freight and passengers despite cer- 
 tain drawbacks. The most serious handicap 
 that canal operators were confronted with was 
 the fact that canals could not be successfully 
 carried across mountain ranges. Hills could 
 be surmounted by locks and inclined planes, 
 but mountain ranges were out of the ques- 
 tion. 
 
 It was this fact that led the officials of the 
 Delaware and Hudson Company to send Horatio 
 Allen to England to interview Stephenson when 
 word reached this country that he had perfected 
 a steam wagon. The outcome of his visit abroad 
 was that eventually four strange looking loco- 
 motives arrived here, the first and most con- 
 spicuous of which was the Stourbridge Lion. 
 
 This " steam bug," you may be sure, created a 
 sensation in this country when it arrived. It 
 was landed in 'New York, from one of the big 
 freight boats that plied between America and 
 
258 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 England, and so intense was the public's inter- 
 est in the thing that Allen and the directors of 
 the Delaware and Hudson Company were not 
 loath to have the thing assembled, set upon 
 blocks and exhibited to public view. We can 
 well picture what a strange sight it must have 
 been and what a sensation it caused among the 
 hundreds of men in their quaint, tight-fitting 
 breeches and high beaver hats, and the women in 
 their strange flounced skirts, when the boiler 
 was filled and a fire was built in its fire box. 
 Fancy the tenseness of the crowd as they waited 
 for the steam to gather, the mixture of awe, ad- 
 miration and perhaps downright fear with 
 which they watched the fearless Allen let steam 
 into its ungainly cylinders. How the old horse 
 must have smoked and coughed, and choked and 
 sputtered and rattled as she got her big drive 
 wheel slowly revolving, and how the crowd must 
 have gaped, and wondered and finally skeptic- 
 ally shook their heads and muttered, "You 
 won't catch me riding behind one of those fear- 
 some things. Canal boats may be slower but 
 they are a lot safer." 
 
 Thus did the steam engine make its d€but in 
 
(c) Ewing Galloway 
 
 A modern passenger locomotive. Contrast this with the 
 proud "dinky" below 
 
 " 
 
 A veteran of Civil War days, a real "flyer" of its time 
 
RAILROAD HISTORY 259 
 
 this country. After its appearance in New York 
 it was packed aboard a river steamboat and 
 shipped up to Rondoubt, and thence by canal to 
 Honesdale, Pa. Here let us quote from Mr. 
 Hungerford's book, " The Modern Railroad/' the 
 first actual operation of the steam locomotive in 
 America. 
 
 "Allen placed the Stourbridge Lion — which 
 resembled a giant grasshopper with its mass of 
 exterior valves and joints — on the crude wooden 
 track of the railroad, which extended over the 
 mountain to Carbondale, seventeen miles dis- 
 tant. A few days later — the ninth of August, 
 1829, to be exact — he ran the Lion, the first turn- 
 ing of an engine wheel upon American soil. De- 
 tails of that scene have come easily down to to- 
 day. The track was built of heavy hemlock 
 stringers on which bars of iron, two and a quar- 
 ter inches wide and one-half an inch thick, were 
 spiked. The engine weighed seven tons, instead 
 of three tons, as had been expected. It so hap- 
 pened that the rails had become slightly warped 
 just above the terminal of the railroad, where the 
 track crossed the Lackawaxen Creek on a bend- 
 ing trestle. Allen had been warned against this 
 trestle, and his only response was to call for pas- 
 sengers upon the initial ride. No one accepted. 
 There was a precious Pennsylvania regard 
 shown for the safety of one's neck. So, after 
 running the engine up and down the coal dock 
 for a few minutes, Allen waved good-bye to the 
 
260 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 crowd, opened his throttle wide open and dashed 
 away from the village around the abrupt curve 
 and over the trembling trestle at a rate of ten 
 miles an hour. The crowd, which had expected 
 to see the engine derailed, broke into resounding 
 cheers. The initial trial of a locomotive in the 
 United States had served to prove its worth." 
 
 From then on the desire for railroads in 
 America grew with the swiftness of a prairie 
 fire, it seems, and this despite really stubborn 
 opposition from the owners of canals. Through- 
 out the Atlantic Seaboard, from the southern 
 states to New England, companies were formed 
 to promote railroads. These were all small 
 lines, almost insignificant when compared with 
 some of the giant systems of to-day. Yet they 
 were bold ventures indeed. 
 
 For the most part these pioneers in railroad- 
 ing sought to connect the cities on some inland 
 waterway with the seaboard. Indeed it was only 
 the seaboard cities of the country that were 
 really developing then, with the cities on the in- 
 land waterways pushing along slowly. There 
 was little development of the country, otherwise, 
 except where mineral deposits attracted the ven- 
 turesome to build up mining communities. But it 
 
RAILROAD HISTORY 261 
 
 was the railroads that this country was waiting 
 for, for these meant that towns could be built 
 anywhere, and that food could be brought to 
 them from the outside world and their products 
 brought to market without depending upon the 
 slow canals. 
 
 Some of the earliest of these railroads were 
 weird in their conception. Some were regarded 
 for years as common highways over which horse- 
 drawn vehicles were hauled along with the op- 
 eration of steam trains. Indeed it is said that it 
 was not unusual for a steam train to spend an 
 entire morning creeping along with snorting lo- 
 comotive in the rear of a slow-moving truck 
 hitched to a four-horse team and loaded with 
 farm products or something of the sort. 
 
 The operators of the canals, however, saw the 
 handwriting on the wall with the appearance of 
 the first of these steam horses. They could see 
 that railroads were eventually going to be able 
 to touch sections of the country into which they 
 could not get their canals. They saw, too, the 
 possibilities of swifter travel and they knew that 
 if it became a matter of competition, as it 
 quickly did in some sections of the country, ship- 
 
262 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 pers would be far more eager to have their mer- 
 chandise hauled to market by the trains than by 
 the canals. 
 
 The first railroad to parallel a canal was 
 built up in New England between the cities 
 of Boston and Lowell, but while the project was 
 being planned and even while the road was being 
 built and operated, the owners of the Middlesex 
 Canal started a fight to prevent the road from 
 carrying freight. This was the cue for other 
 canals to begin similar fights, and for a decade 
 or longer there was constant friction. The canal 
 owners were strong politically and financially, 
 and for a long time held railroad development in 
 check and prevented many of the roads from 
 carrying freight at all. The fights waged hard 
 and furiously and for the railroads, some of 
 them mere weaklings in finances, things looked 
 very unfavorable. But of course the canals 
 could hardly hope to survive, and after a war- 
 fare that extended in some cases for many years, 
 the railroads were victorious. Indeed most of 
 the canals were eventually purchased by the 
 railroads they sought to defeat, and then put out 
 of business. 
 
RAILROAD HISTORY 263 
 
 Another situation that in a measure retarded 
 the growth of the railroads was the big moun- 
 tain ranges that reached from north to south and 
 cut off the inland towns from the coast. It re- 
 quired real exertion on the part of the railroad 
 engineering genii to conquer these mountain 
 ranges. Of course these were the same difficul- 
 ties that the canals had faced in their day, but 
 it had long been proved that canals could not 
 climb mountains, whereas the railroad engineers 
 knew full well that they could send steam trains 
 over the ranges by the proper methods. 
 
 The first railroad to conquer the Alleghany 
 Mountains was the Portage Road, a peculiar 
 sort of a railroad built in planes. This was a 
 horse-operated road for a time, but later became 
 steam. The first road to conquer the Appalach- 
 ian chain was the road that afterward became 
 the present Pennsylvania Railroad of to-day. 
 
 The first really big railroad system wag the 
 present New York Central Railroad. New 
 York financiers and promoters of industry early 
 became enthusiastic over railroads as compared 
 with canals, and all over the state little lines 
 were built, some connecting one large city with 
 
264 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 another, some extending to touch a half dozen 
 large towns. 
 
 A railroad directory of New York then, had 
 there been such a volume, would have showed 
 an array of names, sometimes almost as 
 long as some of the railroads themselves, and 
 most of them were fighting among themselves 
 over territory, freight and everything else. But 
 the captains of industry of the time, who, as 
 they are now, were located in New York City, 
 realized the business possibilities of these roads, 
 and soon a group of them, headed by Commodore 
 Vanderbilt, himself a steamboat and canal en- 
 thusiast in his day, began to buy up these small 
 roads that were bickering and quarreling among 
 themselves, and almost before the country real- 
 ized it, a real railroad system had been estab- 
 lished. 
 
 During this time bigger projects in railroad- 
 ing were being developed throughout the coun- 
 try. The Baltimore and Ohio, a tremendous proj- 
 ect then, the Erie, four hundred odd miles long, 
 the Pennsylvania and some now middle western 
 roads were growing swiftly. Tremendous 
 strides were being made in the rolling stock and 
 
RAILROAD HISTORY 265 
 
 equipment of railroads, too. Tlie locomotive in 
 a short span of years developed and grew into 
 such a remarkable piece of mechanism that the 
 young Englishman who conceived it could 
 scarcely recognize his child. Coaches, too, grew 
 swiftly from old stages equipped with flanged 
 wheels to something that began to resemble the 
 coaches we recognize now. 
 
 Steel tracks were pushing out toward the Mis- 
 sissippi. The Rock Island Railroad from Chi- 
 cago was the first line to span that stream and 
 push tracks westward into the fine country that 
 for years had been slowly developed by the 
 pioneers who fared westward in their prairie 
 schooners. The Rock Island's tracks crossed the 
 Mississippi in 1859 and the march westward was 
 on. 
 
 Then came the Civil War, and the railroads 
 were pressed into service in every way. In truth 
 the railroads were responsible in a great meas- 
 ure for the final victory of the Northern forces, 
 and the maintenance of the Union. In the 
 north the railroads had reached out and were 
 spread across the country in a great network of 
 lines* 
 
266 THE BOYS' BOOK OF EAILBOADS 
 
 These extended well below the Mason and 
 Dixon line and afforded excellent means of mov- 
 ing troops and supplies across the country 
 swiftly. Some of the Civil War generals utilized 
 the railroads for the shifting of troops from one 
 front to another with tremendous success. 
 Some famous battles were fought for the pos- 
 session of railroad lines as the Union forces ad- 
 vanced into Confederate territory, and there 
 were many G. A. B. veterans who could tell 
 thrilling stories of how they walked the track in 
 front of a snorting locomotive, fighting every 
 step of the way so as to get provisions through 
 to a detachment cut off by the enemy. 
 
 The North had a decided advantage in the 
 number and miles of railroad at its command, 
 for although there were several prominent rail- 
 roads in the South, there was nowheres near the 
 mileage or equipment available to the forces of 
 the Confederacy. 
 
 At the close of the war the railroad fever re- 
 occurred, so to speak, with renewed vigor. Sud- 
 denly several groups of railroad promoters saw 
 the necessity for pushing westward while out on 
 the Pacific Coast other groups were struggling 
 
BAILROAD HISTORY 267 
 
 to conquer the Sierras and cross them eastward. 
 Transcontinental lines had been undertaken be- 
 fore the war. 
 
 Work was renewed where it had been aban- 
 doned. Kansas and the border states were grow- 
 ing in leaps and bounds, and as fast, and even 
 faster, than the railroads were pushing forward, 
 towns were springing up. 
 
 Terrific railroad building campaigns started 
 and miles of new tracks were laid every week 
 despite all drawbacks. Those were romantic 
 days in railroading. Tremendous herds of buf- 
 faloes roamed the west. Thousands of Indians 
 swarmed the plains and sought in every way to 
 check the advance of the railroads. The rail- 
 road builders were fighters, too. They had to be. 
 Every work crew was armed and armed guards 
 accompanied them, for it was never possible to 
 know when some war party would sweep down 
 on the builders, kill and scalp them all and 
 leave the railroad temporarily stranded out in 
 the bad lands. Those were the days of Custer 
 and Cody, General Miles and a host of other In- 
 dian fighters. Cody won his name of " Buffalo 
 Bill" then while working for a railroad. His 
 
268 THE BOYS' BOOK OF RAILROADS 
 
 job was that of hunter for a railroad building 
 crew. He kept the construction camp supplied 
 with fresh beef by slaughtering buffalo from the 
 great herds that roamed the plains. 
 
 Associated with the railroad history of the 
 west are hundreds of stirring tales of Indian 
 fights, great hunting parties, of boom towns, 
 mining adventures, bad men, two gun men, rob- 
 bers, gamblers and all other types that went to 
 make up this great new and expanding country. 
 
 The railroad was fast forcing the famous pony 
 express, and the western stage-coach out of ex- 
 istence, and the highwaymen, too, who preyed on 
 these carryalls found that pickings were grow- 
 ing meagre with the coming of the new form of 
 transportation. But the always versatile law- 
 less ones of the border lands decided that if they 
 were to be deprived of the stage-coach, as a 
 means of earning a living it might be well to try 
 and hold up the stage-coach's successor, and so 
 a new breed of lawbreakers developed in the 
 form of train robbers. They were daredevils 
 and no doubting it, and many were the brilliant 
 hold-ups that took place. They were lawless, 
 godless, fearless men who shot equally as accu- 
 
EAILKOAD HISTORY 269 
 
 rate with their left hand as they did with their 
 right. They recognized not the slightest moral 
 obligation to society, and a human life was little 
 to them. Their exploits were so daring that they 
 almost became heroes to the reading public. 
 
 But of course they could not long survive. 
 Two decades of this and the old west, with its 
 Indians, two gun men, train robbers and the 
 rest, began to fade into the background, into the 
 historic past, for thanks to the railroad a new 
 west was coming on, a west rich and prosperous 
 with farms, mines, cattle ranches and billions of 
 dollars in resources, and a railroad system to 
 reach its long arms into the mountain ranges, 
 across the prairies, and gathered all corners of 
 the vast open country into close communion 
 with each other. And thus America is to-day a 
 great country, made great by the greatest group 
 of railroad systems in the world. 
 
 THE END