"_See the huge creature with muscles of steel, his heart a furnace
of glowing coal, and the strength of a thousand horses nerving his
sinews. See him strut forth from his stable, and, saluting the
train of cars with a dozen sonorous puffs from his iron nostrils,
stand panting to be gone. He would drag the pyramids across the
Desert of Sahara if they could be hitched on._"
The average New Yorker who rides to Chicago in twenty hours on the
World's Fair flyer does an easy day's work, in fact, does no work at
all. He rests comfortably at night, enjoys well-served meals, and
reaches his destination almost before he knows it. Having paid the
price, such is the arrogance of money, he takes all that is done for
him quite as a matter of course, and knows no more of the workings of
this wonderful train than a school-boy, while he cares rather less. An
engine pulls the cars, steam works the engine, and as for the
engineer, the New Yorker never thinks of him except to growl at him
when the train is late, and to advocate hanging him if there is an
accident.
Meantime, what is the engineer of this fastest train in the world
doing for the passenger? In the first place, the Chicago flyer is not
driven by one but by many engineers. In order to cover the nine
hundred and sixty-four miles between the two cities in twenty hours,
including nine stops, there are required seven huge engines in relays,
driven by seven grimy heroes. A run of less than one hundred and fifty
miles is the limit per day for each engine, while three hours of the
plunging rush wears out the strongest engineer. Sixty, seventy, eighty
miles an hour--what does that mean to the man at the throttle? It
means that the six and a half feet drivers turn five times every
second and advance one hundred feet. Tic-tic-tic, and the train has
run the length of New York's highest steeple. The engineer turns his
head for five seconds to look at the gauges, and in that time the
terrible iron creature, putting forth the strength of a thousand
horses, may have shot past a red signal with its danger warning five
hundred feet away. Ten seconds, and one thousand feet are left
behind--one-fifth of a mile. Who knows what horrors may lie within
that thousand feet! There may be death lurking round a curve, death
spreading its arms in a tunnel, and the engineer must see and be
responsible for everything. Not only must he note instantly all that
is before him, the signals, switches, bridges, the passing trains, and
the condition of the rails, but he must act at the same moment,
working throttle, air-brakes, or reversing-lever, not as quick as
thought, but quicker, for there is no time to think. His muscles must
do the right thing automatically under circumstances where a second is
an age. In the three hours of his vigil there are ten thousand eight
hundred seconds, during each one of which he must watch with the
mental alertness of an athlete springing for a flying trapeze from
the roof of an amphitheatre, with the courageous self-possession of a
matador awaiting the deadly rush of a maddened bull; and far more
depends upon the engineer's watching well, because, if he fails by a
hair's breadth in coolness or precision of judgment, there may come
destruction, not only to himself, but to hundreds of passengers, who,
while he stands guard, are perhaps grumbling at the waiters in the
dining-car or telling funny stories in the smoker.
In addition to this constant mental tension the engineer on this
hurling train has to endure material discomfort, often bodily
suffering. The air sweeps back in his face with the breath of a
hurricane, blowing smoke and cinders into his eyes. Most people know
the intense pain a cinder causes in a man's eye, particularly a hot
cinder. The suffering is almost unbearable, and yet, suffering or no
suffering, the engineer who gets a cinder in his eye can have no
relief until the end of his relay. They shut their lips, these
unflinching men, keep looking ahead, and bear it. Long after they
leave the cab, the burning sensation in their eyes and eyelids
continues, and even persists after hours of sleep. "It seems as if
nothing would rest my eyes, sir," said one of the new men after his
first week on the flyer. No wonder the eyesight of engineers fails
rapidly, no wonder many of them are removed from their positions every
year because the examining doctors find them unable to distinguish the
signals. The engineer suffers also from the plunging and tossing of
the monster locomotive, which bruises his whole body with its violent
rocking, and causes sharp pains in the back, particularly where there
is any tendency to kidney trouble. One has only to watch these strong
men as they stumble down from their engines at the end of a relay, has
only to observe their white faces and unsteady gait, and see the
condition of physical collapse which follows, to understand what it
costs in vitality and grit to give the ease-loving public this
incomparable train service.
[Illustration: "THE FLYER" LEAVING THE GRAND CENTRAL STATION, NEW YORK
CITY.]
Thus it is that while the New Yorker gets to Chicago with scarcely
more discomfort than if he had remained at home, the same journey
wears out seven engineers, all picked men; for many of them who have
seen years of service on trains running forty miles an hour, break
down entirely when put upon the flyer. So exhausted are these seven
engineers by their comparatively short relays that they are obliged
to lay off entirely during the following day to recover from the
shock. They do not even take the opposite-bound flyer back over
their stretch, but return with their engines to their respective
starting-points, drawing slower trains. Thus, seven strong men do
two days' work every time the flyer runs from New York to Chicago,
and seven other men do two days' work every time it runs back. Each
engineer works three hours on the flyer, returns home on an easy
train, and then rests forty hours before his muscles and nerves and
brain are in condition to repeat the operation.
So it results that twenty-eight engineers, one at a time, are required
to run this wonderful train from New York to Chicago and back again.
Fourteen veterans drive the great engines one way, and fourteen
brother veterans drive them the other. Twenty-eight men for a single
complete trip of a single train, and they the flower of American
engineers, splendid fellows every one of them, with cool heads, stanch
hearts, and the experience of years at the throttle. The fact is,
these men of iron, who, after all, are made of flesh and blood, have
been called upon of late years to bear a mental and physical strain
which has increased steadily as the speed rates have advanced. Forty,
fifty, sixty, seventy, and now eighty miles an hour, each greater
velocity has meant greater pressure, not only on the boilers and
cylinders, but on men's brains; has meant greater expenditure, not
only of coal and dollars, but of nerve force, until now experts
recognize with concern that the limit of human endurance has been
almost reached. Science may remove the mechanical difficulties in the
way of running a hundred miles an hour, or more, for such a rate has
already been predicted; money may buy better axles, wheels,
lubricators, and machinery, but where are the men who will run these
trains of the future when they are built? Can science breed us a race
of giants? Can money purchase an immunity against suffering or eyes
that are indestructible? If twenty-eight engineers are required to-day
on the Chicago flyer, how many, pray, will be necessary on a train
running fifty or one hundred per cent. faster?
I gained a vivid impression of what it means to drive one of these
monster engines, by actually travelling from New York to Albany, a few
days ago, in the cab of Engine 870, which takes the Empire State
express over the first stretch of its journey--one hundred and
forty-two miles--at a rate rather faster than that of the Chicago
flyer. At the throttle was Archie Buchanan, a silent man with gray
eyes and earnest face, who comes of a family of engineers, and is one
of the most trusted of the New York Central employees. Buchanan's
brother John, a skilled engineer in his time, was cut in two some
years ago in an accident near East Albany. His brother James is a
master mechanic at the shops at West Albany, and his brother William,
after serving for years as a New York Central engineer, was made
Superintendent of Rolling Stock, a position he still holds.
Buchanan smiled quietly as I climbed upon the fireman's seat at the
left. It was a perfect July morning, and at 8.39 the shrill whistle
sounded, worked by the conductor's bell-rope, and we were off, nine
minutes behind time on account of some trouble with the air-brakes.
"We must make up the delay, Al," said the engineer to his fireman, as
the wheels began to turn. Those were the only words he spoke until we
reached Albany, and, had he spoken, neither Al nor I could have heard
him for the roar.
Now the slow, heavy pant of the engine quickens, and we shoot under
bridges and streets, passing out of New York. For a few minutes
Buchanan, working the reversing-lever, lets the pistons go the full
length of the cylinders, but he gradually cuts down their stroke to
eight inches, making the steam expansion do the rest. This lessens the
noise from the exhaust, but the noise from the pounding of the
mountain of iron on the rails increases in geometrical ratio. A shower
of cinders blows in with black smoke, and a hot one settles in my
neck. The smoke tastes of oil, the cinder burns--this is but a
foretaste of things to come. I turn my head to avoid suffocation and
get a scorching blast from the fire-box, whose door is swung wide
open. The fireman's orders are to make up the lost time, and he
proposes to do it. In goes coal at the rate of two shovelfuls a minute
for the first half-hour. Before we reach Albany he has shovelled in
more than three tons, and had the day been windy it would have taken
more. In the intervals he rakes and prods the white-hot crater and
rings the bell as we shoot past towns and cities. Buchanan tends to
the whistle and air-brakes. The noise is dreadful, as if a thousand
devils were dancing in one's head. The motion is so violent from side
to side that we all have to hold on tightly. A little more and one
would be seasick.
As the hundred-ton engine pounds along with horrible din, a strange
sense of exhilaration succeeds that of physical discomfort. One
becomes indifferent to everything, and, courting now the smoke-laden
hurricane, thrusts one's head from the window into the sweeping
air-billows, which dash against the face like breakers and with the
same strangling force. I was seized with a wild desire to go faster;
seventy miles an hour was not enough, and I would fain have opened
everything to its full capacity, stop-cocks, levers, throttle, and
all, and taken part in a furious, splendid runaway. Strange thoughts
chased through my mind; the houses of flying towns seemed to be
rushing at each other in battle from either side, a long line of loose
ties between the tracks suggested an endless procession of turtles,
the trees seemed to be dancing down the hills, and the people who
stared up at us while stepping away from the dangerous suction seemed
to be creatures of another race. I have learned since that engineers
often have that feeling of belonging to some other world, and it comes
upon them particularly at night. A man of highly strung organization
could easily go mad riding on an engine running seventy miles an
hour.
These curious illusions of the senses were presently succeeded by a
period of intense and perfectly normal curiosity. I counted the number
of strokes made by the piston in a minute, and found there were about
three hundred. I counted the number of puffs from the smoke-stack, and
decided correctly that there were four times as many of these as there
were piston-strokes, that is, about twenty to the second. Then I
counted the oil-cans, the gauges, and made mental photographs of the
inside of the cab.
From start to finish we made no stop and only slackened our speed
twice to "pick up water," this important operation being accomplished
with a great splashing by a scoop under the tender, which drops into a
trough running lengthwise of the track for about twelve hundred feet,
and always kept full to the brim. The scoop is controlled by a lever
in the tender, which the fireman directs. In the winter, steam-pipes
through the troughs keep the water from freezing. During the whole
distance Buchanan scarcely changed his position, and never turned his
head. For two hours and thirty-six minutes he stood at the right of
the boiler, an immovable figure in gray overalls and black skullcap,
his left hand on the throttle, while his right clutched the window to
steady him. I never once saw his eyes, which were fixed on the track
ahead as if held there by a magnet. No matter how the smoke and
cinders poured in through the open windows in front, no matter the
bridges and tunnels nor the mad rush of air, his eyes stayed forward
always, sweeping the line before us anxiously, constantly on the alert
for signals, for switches, for obstructions, for the long tunnel, for
the train side-tracked near Poughkeepsie, for the water troughs, for a
score of things, the missing any one of which might mean disaster.
And, as he watched, silent and motionless, there was one thought in
his mind and only one, whether we would make up the lost nine minutes
and get into Albany on time. Al's thoughts were the same, and, like
one of Dante's demons, he worked at the coal and the fire and the
water, now oiling the drivers, now looking at the gauges, ever busy
and ever growing blacker and oilier in hands and face.
Very proud we were as we ran into Albany at 11.15 A.M. on time to the
minute, having made the run of one hundred and forty-two miles in one
hundred and fifty-six minutes, an average of 53.8 miles an hour. This
exceeds the average of the Chicago flyer, which is 48.2 miles an hour,
although for a much greater distance. Several times our speed had
reached seventy miles an hour, and with better coal and other
conditions equally favorable, Buchanan has driven 870 up to the
eighty-mile point. With the sound devils still dancing in my head, I
watched the engineer as he rubbed down his iron horse after the hard
run. He was tired himself, and his face was white, but he went over
the rods and cylinders as tenderly and carefully as if he was
refreshing the muscles and sinews of a living creature.
"She's a beauty, isn't she?" he said, in a tone which bore witness to
the love felt by the man for the machine. "You see, she has always
been true to me, 870 has, and I've run her ever since she was built.
She's never cranky or sick, and she makes her three hundred miles a
day three hundred and sixty-five times a year, and does her duty every
time. That's more than you can say of many men, or women either, isn't
it?"
It seems that there are about fifty engines in constant use on the New
York Central with the power and dimensions of 870, and only the
peerless 999, with her heavier build and smoke-consuming device, can
boast any points of superiority. The life of an engine like 870 is
about twenty years, during which time she makes several visits to the
hospital for new cylinders, new flues, and a new fire-box. Aside from
that, the engine needs about an hour's care morning and night, and a
washout and blowout of her boilers at the end of alternate weeks.
Only at these periods is the engine's fire allowed to go out.
I asked Buchanan what were the principal qualifications for a
first-class engineer, and what was the training necessary to become
one. "To begin with," he said, "a man must be a first-class fireman,
which is no easy matter. He must know just how much coal to put on the
fire and when to put it on, so as to keep the steam at full pressure
without burning too much fuel. The great secret of good firing is to
put coal on often and a little at a time. You noticed Al did that on
our run up. When a fireman has shown himself worthy of it, he is given
a chance to drive an engine for switching work or on a freight train.
The first years of his life as an engineer are very hard, for he has
to run at all sorts of hours, day and night, winter and summer, and on
the meanest kinds of trains. If this does not kill him he finally
becomes engineer on an express and has a better time of it, but a good
many of the boys prefer to remain firemen all their lives rather than
stand such hardships. My man Al has tried driving an engine twice, and
come back to me both times. You can be pretty sure that a man who gets
to be an engineer on one of the fine trains to-day has earned his
position. He must know his engine like a book, backwards and forwards,
must know how to manage her when she is sick and well, and what to do
if an eccentric breaks or a piston gets leaking or a valve-spindle is
bent. He must know how to work the injector so as to keep water enough
in the boiler without wasting any by the steam blowing off. He must be
able to save power by working the steam expansively and yet keeping up
his speed; he must know every inch of the road, the grades, bridges,
switches, curves, and tunnels, and all the trains he has to pass or
which may pass him. He must be able to control his train and engine at
full speed, must understand the effect of the weather on the rails,
must know how to use the air-brakes and the reversing-lever, and when
not to use them."