KEEPING THE LINE OPEN
THE WRECKING TRAIN AND ITS SUPPLIES--FLOODS DAMMED BY AN EMBANKMENT--
RIGHT OF WAY ALWAYS GIVEN TO THE WRECKING-TRAIN--EXPEDITIOUS WORK IN
REPAIRING THE TRACK--COLLAPSE OF THE ROOF OF A TUNNEL--TELEGRAPH
CRIPPLED BY STORMS--WINTER STORMS THE SEVEREST TEST--TRAINS IN QUICK
SUCCESSION HELP TO KEEP THE LINE OPEN IN SNOWSTORMS--THE ROTARY PLOUGH.
A cub reporter shouldered his way into a railroad superintendent's office.
Outside, a late winter's storm howled around the terminal; the morning was
nipping cold, the air curtained with myriad snow-flakes, a great railroad
was making a desperate fight against the mighty forces of nature.
"My city editor wants to know what you folks are doing to get the line
open," demanded the reporter.
The big superintendent swung in his swivel chair and faced him. It was a
place where angels might well have feared to tread--a place surcharged
with the electricity of fight. The superintendent's mind was filled with
the almost infinite detail of the fight, but he liked the cub reporter and
greeted him with a smile.
"You can tell your city editor," he replied slowly, "that it is as much as
a man's job here is worth for him to think that the line is going to be
opened. I'd fire him if he as much as thought that it was ever closed. We
don't die. We fight. It's a hard storm, sonny, but we make muscle in
storms like this. We don't _get_ the line open, we are _keeping_ the line
open. D'ye see?"
In that the big superintendent had sounded one of the biggest principles
of railroad operation.
The line must be kept open. That slender trail of two rails, stretching
straight across the open land and writhing and twisting through the high
hills, is a living organism. The railroad is no mere inanimate
organization, like a store, for instance. It is a right-hand of the
nation's life; it is life. The railroad is like a great living thing, its
many arms reaching long distances back into the land. You cannot cut off
the living arm and then bring it back to pulsing life.
Just so the railroad arm cannot be severed--the line must be kept open.
Strange things may come to pass: the right-of-way may be littered with the
wreckage of trains, brought together through a defect in the physical
machine of the human; unexpected floods of traffic may seek to overwhelm
the outlet; in spring the power and might of flood may descend upon it;
winter's storms may seek to paralyze it; still, always the railroad must
be kept open.
"We can't lie down," the superintendent explained to the cub reporter.
"We've got to get the traffic through. Do you know what it would mean if
we were to follow the path of least resistance to-day--to let this storm
get the best of us? Let me give you an idea of just one thing. There's
food coming in here in trainload lots every night--fresh meat, fresh
vegetables, fresh milk. Folks would go hungry if we were to say 'We can't,
this storm is a gee-whilicker. We give up.'"
To keep the line open, the railroad affords every sort of protective
device; it trains men for especial duties.
Take the matter of wrecks, for instance. The railroader does not like to
think of wrecks, but his methods for removing them must be prompt and
thorough: the line must be kept open. Each year sees equipment increasing
in size and weight, and each increase brings additional problems in
handling wrecked cars and engines.
Twenty years ago, the wrecking-equipment of most of the big roads was
comparatively simple. It was generally built in the railroad's own shops.
To-day 60-ton cars and 100-ton locomotives require something of a
wrecking crane or derrick to lift them from the right-of-way; and the
wrecking-train is a device thought out and built by specialists.
These wrecking-trains are the emergency arms of railroad operation. They
stand, like the apparatus of a city fire department, at every important
terminal or division operating plant, awaiting summons to action. You may
see the wrecking-train at every big yard, waiting on a siding which has
quick access to the main-line tracks. It consists of from four to six
cars--a tool-car with all sorts of wrecking-devices--replacers, blocks and
tackle, extra small parts of car-trucks for emergency repairs, and the
like. There are more of these extra parts--axles and wheels and four-wheel
trucks on a "flat" that is fastened to the tool-car; and if this
wrecking-train has a couple of miles of heavy traffic line to serve, there
may be three or four of the "flats" with tools and spare equipment. You
cannot have too many of those in a big wreck. The wrecking-train is sure
to have a crane--a big arm of steel, compressed to come within the slim
clearances of bridges and of tunnels, but capable of reaching down and
tugging at a 100-ton locomotive with almost no effort whatsoever. And
quite as important as the crane is the cook-car--generally some old-time
coach or sleeper descended to humble service on the road. The cook-car has
a rough berth and a kitchen; and you may be mighty sure that there is a
good griddle artist upon it. You cannot expect a wrecking-gang to get into
a twenty-four hour job without being pretty constantly provisioned while
it is at work.
Only a little while ago, one of the officers of an Eastern trunk-line
railroad and a member of one of the State railroad commissions were coming
toward New York. The trip was in the nature of an inspection on the part
of the State official, but as a matter of comfort and convenience to the
two men, it was made upon the former's private car. The comfort and
convenience suddenly ceased while the two were still nearly 300 miles away
from the seaboard. The road rested there for many miles in heavy country;
its rails found their curving way in the crevices between high hills. It
had rained steadily for a fortnight; the little mountain brooks were
raging mill-races. In the low flatlands of one deep valley lakes were
being formed. There were long stretches where the four rails of the
double-tracked trunk-line railroad lost themselves under the glassy
surface of the waters. Up and down the valley trains were standing
helpless between those lakes, their passengers fuming at the delay. Fast
freights stood axle-deep in water; their title, for that moment, was an
occasion for joyous humor. The comfortable, convenient trip of the
railroad operating man and the railroad commissioner was at an end.
An embankment that the railroad had built for a branch down the valley was
blocking the waters, and orders had come from New York to dynamite out
that embankment. It would cost the railroad nearly $50,000 to destroy that
half-mile of track but it might save the valley millions. There had been
no hesitation on the part of the "old man"--the road's tried executive.
That is a phase of American railroading not often brought to light.
Orders came that the engine hauling the "special" of the operating man and
the railroad commissioner was to be taken for a work-train down at that
damming embankment. That's the way with railroading. When the clattering
telegraph keys sound the note of trouble, even that mighty soul, the
chairman of the board, may find himself "laid out" at some jerkwater
junction, while his pet engine goes into service with a wrecking-train.
But the chairman of the board, whose time is real money, offers no
protest. He knows that to block the main line costs his road $250 a minute
for the first 60 minutes; that that figure doubles and trebles in the
second hour; in the third, his auditors may check off $1,000 a minute, at
the least, as the cost of a blocked railroad. No wonder that they insist
that it is "keeping the line open."
Before the engine of that special was cut off to go scurrying down to the
embankment where the skilled workmen were making preparations to dynamite
away a half-mile of track, the operating man lifted his hand. He had, like
any trained railroader, been listening to the clattering telegraph key.
"They've come away without their cook--those wreckers," he told the
gentleman who regulated public utilities. "I think I'll go down with the
'eats.' There's an old hotel across from the railroad track down at the
next station, and the landlord, Uncle Dan Hortley, will fix me up."
"I'll go with you," said the State official. "I want to get my finger in
the pie."
So it came to pass that they both went, the private car stopping at the
little hotel long enough to get in an overwhelming supply of bread and
ham. As they whizzed through the scene of trouble all hands joined at
making sandwiches.
"Butter them on both sides," said the railroad commissioner.
"They're better with the butter on one side," insisted the operating man.
The commissioner was not used to back-talk from railroaders, no matter how
high their office, and he stuck to his point.
"Both sides," he insisted.
"One side only," reported the big operating man.
"The commission has closed its hearing and issues an order for both
sides."
"The railroad appeals."
But the commission won--it almost always does--and the men down at the
embankment ate their sandwiches with a double thickness of butter.
Sometimes a refrigerator train comes under the skilled hands of the
wreckers, and the cook-car may have more than an abundance of good
material right at hand. Beef, chickens, milk--all manner of edibles have
been spilled like waste along the right-of-way, and there have been no
regrets among the men of the wrecking-boss's crew. Once, a speeding
cook-car hurrying to the relief of the laborers upon a wrecked meat-train
that had tried to go tangent to a mountain curve, brought reinforcements
in the form of ham sandwiches. The wreckers were pretty hungry, but it
needed all their hunger to tackle those sandwiches. The meat-train had
been filled with ham; it had caught fire. Somehow, three or four hours of
work hauling out smoked hams gave no appetite for sandwiches of the same
sort.
* * * * *
On main-line divisions, where traffic runs exceeding heavy, a locomotive
stands, steam-up, with the four cars of the wrecking-train. Even on
side-line divisions the call for the wreckers will bring the fastest and
best engine out of the roundhouse, no matter what her train assignment may
be. Things on the railroad stand aside for the wrecker. Limiteds may paw
their nervous heels upon sidings while she goes skimming up the line--all
time-table rights are hers from the moment that she goes into service.
A wire from the seat of trouble brings her into service.
"Second Four-twelve in ditch at Grey's Bridge. Broken rail. Engine and two
cars derailed. Both tracks blocked. About four killed and injured."
That wire has itself had the right-of-way. When "W-K, W-K, W-K" comes
persistently calling over a railroad wire, every key closes. "W-K" is the
"C-Q-D" of railroading. It is as much as any operator's job is worth, to
ignore it.
When a despatch of the sort just cited comes into headquarters, things
start to move. The despatcher, if he is after the manner of most
despatchers, turns to his telephone and calls the yardmaster to order out
the wrecking-crew. There is no more excitement in his voice than if he
were ordering out any ordinary sort of special. He rings off quickly,
calls up in turn the superintendent, trainmaster, perhaps the division
engineer, the claim department. If there is a fatality list--the wreck one
of those fearful things that sometimes show themselves upon the front
pages of the newspapers--he will get the hospitals and the doctors. The
list of surgeons who are allied to the railroad in every town on the
division hangs above the despatcher's desk.
He may run a special hospital train with doctors and nurses and emergency
equipment. On one memorable occasion the hospital train was on its way out
upon the main line before the wreck had been reported over the wire. The
despatcher saw that the hospital special had a clear track; he gave a
multitude of directions as to its running, with the quick clear word of a
self-possessed man--then turned and shot himself dead. He had
miscalculated: the human machine sometimes does. He knew that he had sent
the two crack-a-jack trains on that single-track division, curling its way
among the mountains, into each other at full speed. No need for him to
know exactly where they met.
But even if the wreck is no holocaust; if it is one of those minor smashes
that are bound to come now and then on the best of lines, he must keep his
head. As he caught up his telephone to get orders to that wrecking-boss
out at the roundhouse, his assistant took instant notice of the wreck,
first notifying the stations on either side of the accident to set
danger-signals against all trains. After that, while the despatcher
himself was busied with details, the assistant arranged to handle all
traffic. If both tracks were blocked, there were plans to be instantly
made to forward the fast through trains by detouring them over other lines
of railroad. The assistant despatcher, wishing to know how long he
could afford to hold his heavy traffic (remember that the line must always
be kept open), wired the nearest station for additional details. Most of
all he wanted to know how long the tracks would be blocked. Perhaps before
he got his wire through there came a second message from the wreck, giving
more facts about it. By means of code, great detail can be given in a
short wire; headquarters gets a clear understanding of the trouble. After
that the wire chatters constantly; there are a thousand orders to be
given, a thousand details to be arranged.
[Illustration: THE WRECKING TRAIN READY TO START OUT FROM THE YARD]
[Illustration: "TWO OF THESE GREAT CRANES CAN GRAB A WOUNDED MOGUL
LOCOMOTIVE AND PUT HER OUT OF THE WAY"]
[Illustration: "THE SHOP-MEN FORM NO MEAN BRIGADE IN THIS INDUSTRIAL ARMY
OF AMERICA"]
While the first of these wires are beginning to swing back and forth the
despatcher will hear the wrecking-train, pulled by the neatest and
swiftest bit of motive power from their big roundhouse, go scurrying by
down the line. The road is cleared. Everything stands aside, and for weeks
after, the stove committee in every roundhouse on the division will be
telling how she made the run.
They don't talk about the run when they get to the accident. They pile off
the train and get to work quickly. Every man is a trained wreck-worker, as
a fireman is trained to his peculiar business. In such hours as they are
not out on the road, the wreckers are repairers of cars. It keeps them
busy during the long seasons when the line is lucky and has no wrecks, and
it gives them the skill with which to tackle the difficult problems that
confront them after a smash. By day these men--eight or ten or twelve of
them to a crew--work in the yard close to the waiting wrecking-train; by
night the telephone at the head of the bed of each man will bring him
quickly to the near-by yard.
"How do you handle a wreck?" we once asked an old-time wrecking-boss, a
man grown gray in keeping his line open.
"I don't know," was his frank response. "I've probably handled a thousand
wrecks--perhaps more--but I have yet to see two that were the same.
Different cases demand different treatments. Any surgeon will tell you
that; and you know," this with a bit of a laugh, "we are the surgeons of
the steel highway.
"We've only one rule that is absolute, and that rule is to take care of
the folks who are hurt in the first place, and in the second place to get
the line open. If it is multiple-track line--two or three or four tracks
in operation--and the muss is sprawled over the entire right-of-way we get
a through track working in shortest interval. When we can wire "number two
open" or whatever it is, the despatcher down at headquarters will catch
the stations where there are crossovers and he'll be handling his
first-class traffic of all sorts past us while we'll still be stocking the
arm of the old bill crane down into the smash."
The arm of that crane can lift a freight-car--if there is enough
freight-car left to lift--off the rails and into the ditch in almost a
twinkling. Two of these great cranes can grab a wounded mogul locomotive
and put her out of the way. The wrecking-trains on a first-class road are
kept along the line in profusion. Each is supposed to cover a territory of
100 miles or so in every direction from headquarters, and a sizable smash
will bring two or more to work in unison. Two wrecking-cranes working into
the remnants of a head-on collision from each direction can accomplish
marvels. They will come together finally at the chief test of their
strength--the point where two locomotives have firmly locked horns in
dying embrace. That is a point that finds the nerve and ability of every
wrecking-boss.
But all these wrecking-bosses have nerve and ability. They could not hold
their jobs without both. They know when equipment--cars that might be made
as good as new in the shops--must be burned like driftwood, and when the
burning of a wreck would be criminal waste. That requires
judgment--judgment to determine whether it is cheaper to burn than to
lose valuable time; to delay traffic on a main-line division or to let the
traffic on a less important side-line division wait for a little longer
time. Judgment is part of a wrecking-boss's equipment. His superintendent
knows that; and when the super grows nervous and gets down to the wreck
himself, although he knows that he is ranking officer in charge of the
work he shows good judgment, on his own part, in letting the wrecking-boss
give all orders. That makes for skill, it makes for speed. If the
wrecking-boss is not doing good work the superintendent can fire him
to-morrow, or (what is far more usual) find him an easier berth somewhere
on the division.
There are times when the work-train must be summoned, when laborers by the
dozen must get to work to build new track. A wash-out may require a
half-mile of track to be laid in a night, and the railroad can do it. A
young man wrote a very able story for _The Saturday Evening Post_ a few
months ago, in which he told how an emergency track was laid across a
highway bridge and a test fast-freight put through on schedule. That feat
was but one of the many ordinary tasks that come in the lifetime of every
operating man.
Clearing a wreck may be a tedious business.
There is a deep sink on the parade-ground of the Military Academy at West
Point that is a monument to the nastiest railroad wreck from the point of
view of time, that the Eastern railroaders have ever known. Just under
that parade-ground the West Shore Railroad passes through a long tunnel.
On an October night more than twenty years ago, the Chicago & St. Louis
Express of that railroad was slowly poking through that bore, when a
portion of the roof of the tunnel collapsed. It buried itself between the
rear part of the baggage-car and the forward part of the express-car and
the train came to an abrupt stop.
Engineer William Morse saw in an instant the damage that had been done.
He cut loose from that penned baggage-car and made record speed up the
line to Cornwall, the nearest station. From there he a sent a wire
post-haste to the despatcher up at Kingston, then the headquarters of the
line.
"Train caught by collapse of West Point tunnel," that despatch read in
part. "Only engineer and fireman escaped."
They began to get their hospital train ready at Kingston, notified Newburg
to get all the doctors in sight and hurry them on a special to West Point.
The chief despatcher went through the worst quarter of an hour of his
life. He began to call Weehawken, the southern terminal of the line.
Weehawken wires were all busy, and he could not cut in there.
Weehawken wires were getting reports from Conductor Sam Brown of the
Chicago & St. Louis Express, who had come running out of the tunnel to the
West Point depot.
"Wire headquarters," he shouted to the agent, "that we've run into an
avalanche. Morse and his fireman are crushed under the tunnel roof."
And they began to get the wreckers busy down at Weehawken.
When the chief despatcher up at Kingston finally got Weehawken, they told
him about Sam Morse's fate. The truth of the thing came to him in an
instant. He laughed hysterically, and his assistant jumped up. The
despatcher's bad quarter of an hour was over. He jumped to his telephone,
caught the yardmaster with it.
"We won't need that hospital train," he said. "There isn't a soul hurt."
And there was not. But there remained the worst railroad block on record.
It was three months before they pulled the baggage-car out of that tunnel,
and then they had to use dynamite. After that it was found necessary to
line the entire bore with solid masonry. That was an accident that might
not have been so lucky on repetition.
* * * * *
Enough of wrecks. They are not the only test when it comes to keeping the
line open. Sometimes a crippled telegraph service may be quite as
effective. Out on the Pennsylvania lines west of Pittsburgh a couple of
years ago a severe wind and sleet storm levelled more than 40 miles of
telegraph poles, in most cases dropping them across main-line tracks in
the dark. A few months later--the never-to-be-forgotten inauguration day
of President Taft--a similar storm did similar work on the lines leading
to Washington. Thousands of militiamen and excursionists never reached the
inauguration at all. In both storms the resources of a great railroad were
well tested.
An old-time Erie man remembers wire troubles of a different sort. It was
in his salad days, when he was serving as assistant superintendent over
the Meadville, in the western part of Pennsylvania. They had but one
telegraph wire for railroad purposes on the division then, and one night
it "grounded." Keys were silent, the road might as well have had no wire
at all.
The assistant superintendent started that evening with two linemen on a
hand-car to find that "ground." They went miles from Meadville, and every
test showed the wire working. Finally they came to a deserted little depot
at a cross-roads and the railroader lifting his lantern high against the
window verified his suspicions: the careless agent had gone home and left
his key open. The superintendent broke open the window, climbed in,
removed the telegraph set, placed it in his overcoat pocket and closed the
circuit. He knew that he would hear from the agent on the morrow. He did.
Word came by tedious train mail, a formal report on the road's yellow
stationery.
"Station at A---- burglarized last evening," that formal report read, "and
agent's telegraph set, best pants, and ten dollars taken."
* * * * *
The real test of keeping the line open comes when winter descends upon the
land, when the heaviest freight traffic of the year comes, together with
those forces of nature that sweep off the summer joys of railroading. The
mighty battles of the western transcontinentals with the snows of the
Rockies have long been known, their miles of snow-sheds making safe
crawling bores for through trains under the snow-banks, and the avalanches
of the mountain-sides are as familiar to the tourist as the Great Salt
Lake or the wonders of the Yellowstone. Only a few months ago the
newspapers told the story of how a passenger train, stalled at the
entrance of a Washington tunnel, had been carried by an avalanche down a
great cliff. Every railroader, east and west, knows full well the hazard
of mountain line in the depths of a treacherous winter.
There is a snow-belt extending around the south edge of the Great Lakes
that annually gives the Eastern railroad men a good opportunity to
sympathize with the Westerners. Long years ago a little railroad reaching
north in this belt from the main line of the New York Central became
discouraged in the all but hopeless task of keeping its line open. It had
been a hard enough battle to find the rails of its main line from Rome to
Watertown through one blizzard crowding upon the heels of another. There
had been ten days when Watertown was entirely cut off from the world to
the south of it. But that little railroad owed some obligations to its
chief town, and it kept at its brave efforts although every night the
fresh wind blowing down from the Canadas across Lake Ontario filled the
long miles of railroad cuts, and nightly erased all trace of rails. But
there was a branch from Watertown to Cape Vincent run at a dead loss
throughout the entire winter, and in that hard winter the railroad gave up
the branch, and hired a liveryman to take the mails in his cutter over the
country drifts. It was one of the few instances on record of a railroad
giving up the fight.
After the railroad had been abandoned a fortnight a delegation of citizens
from Cape Vincent drove to Watertown and there confronted H. M. Britton,
the general manager of the line. They made their little speeches, and
those were pretty hot little speeches--hot enough to have melted away one
good-sized drift.
"When are you going to cart that snow off our line?" finally demanded the
spokesman of the Cape Vincent folk.
Britton looked at the delegation coolly, and lighted a fresh cigar.
"I'm going to let the man that put it there," he said slowly, "take it
away."
And he did. It was thirty-two days before a railroad engine entered Cape
Vincent from the time that the last one left it.
In recent years, that nasty stretch of railroad line has kept the
railroaders still busy. Within the decade it was blocked for six long
days, while a force of snow-fighters and a battery of ploughs forced their
way into the drifts. And while the superintendent up at Watertown grew
nervous, then desperate, there came the worst blow of all: the telegraph
wire no longer brought news from the front.
Afterwards that super knew the reason why. His train-master was at the
front with ploughs and the hungry, tired, straggling men. The train-master
was nervous, too, wearied explaining to his boss. He remembered Dewey at
Manila, and he cut the cable! He lost sight of the outer world for long
hours, for days, for nights, until that January evening when he brought
his battered snow-fighting force triumphant into Richland Junction.
When a big road whose rails rest through a snow belt finds the winter
clouds blackening, it puts on its fighting armor. Every man at
headquarters sticks by his desk. The superintendent will get bulletins
from each terminal and important yard every hour, perhaps oftener. Those
bulletins will give him exact information--the amount of motive-power
ready at each roundhouse, freight congestion, if any, amount and direction
of wind, cloud and snow conditions.
In other days the signal for an oncoming storm was followed by quick
orders from headquarters to pull off the snow-freights. Traffic was
quickly cut down to passenger and perishable-freight trains, and, if the
blizzard grew bad enough, the perishable-freights were run in upon the
sidings. The railroad concentrated its motive-power upon the passenger
trains and the ploughs. Nowadays they do it better. Not that the old
fellows of the last generation were anything less than prize railroaders,
for remember they did not have the locomotives in those days that even
side-line divisions possess in these.
So to-day the superintendent can growl at the first of his men who even
hints that a scheduled train of any class be sent upon a siding.
"We keep the traffic moving," said one of the biggest the other day. "We
keep the line open. A train every thirty minutes over our rails will do
more toward keeping them usable than a rotary going over them after a
night's inaction.
"So when she begins to blizz, we just fall back on our roundhouses, that's
all. We cut our local freights down to 1500 tons, then to 1200, 900, 600,
rather than send them into shelter. We tackle our through freights in a
like proportion and while we are cutting off cars, we are adding power.
Everything that goes out of this yard will be double-headed as long as
there is danger in the air. There will be two engines to a passenger-train
and ahead of each a rotary, with two or three locomotives to push her.
You see the value of reserve motive-power, don't you? Why we have
half-a-dozen extra engines trying to gather rust over there in the
roundhouse. They're worth their weight in gold in a pinch of this sort,
though when they're done with a week of snow fighting, they're fit
candidates for the shops."
A rotary plough has no powers of self-propulsion, but the mighty engine
within her heart, driving the shaft of her great cutting-wheel has the
power of three locomotives. That cutting-wheel approximates the width of a
single-track in diameter. It will bore into a solidly packed drift, twelve
or sixteen feet in height, suck in a great volume of snow, and then throw
it--as a fire engine throws water--through a nozzle 60 to 100 feet to the
right or left of the line. The nozzle is close to three feet in diameter,
and the stream that it throws will bury a small barn. The man who sits in
the lookout of the rotary controls the nozzle, changes it from side to
side so as to avoid buildings.
These rotaries are giants. Where the great flange or wing ploughs--the
ordinary snow-fighting artillery of a railroad--fail, they come into
service. Theirs is ever a mighty task to perform. We have seen a rotary
spend sixty minutes in going sixty feet through a heavy drift, a drift
three miles long and twenty deep. Snow can drift, and wet snow can pack,
pack until you almost begin to think of dynamite as a resource.
Three days of such snow-fighting would completely weary the ordinary man.
Up in the snow-belts, they are likely to get a hard storm every week from
December to March, and that atop of the heaviest traffic of the year. It
is the sort of fighting that marks the fine-grained timber of a man; that
sends him down to headquarters in some metropolitan city along the
seaboard, to fight the weightier battles of traffic and of operation,
which are unending within and between the mighty railroads of America.
Sometimes the battle to keep the line open is fought close to a busy
terminal. Here, before you, once again, is the division superintendent of
one of the great lines entering Jersey City. Let him tell you of the nasty
storm on Christmas night last, a storm that laid low all street
transportation in every city along the North Atlantic seaboard. He will
tell you how it was the first Christmas that he had spent with his family
in seven years; the first holiday in three. He lives in a little suburban
city within the 20-mile radius of New York City Hall, and in his bedroom a
telegraph sounder, connected with the division's main wire, clicks in the
early morning and late at night.
Over that wire on Christmas night last, the superintendent gave orders.
There was snow in the air at dusk when they finished their late afternoon
dinner; by eight o'clock he had ordered the flanges (ploughs) on all his
regular road engines. Along the entire line orders had gone to keep a
sharp lookout for trouble. The superintendent turned into bed at ten
o'clock, hoping for a clear winter's sky in the morning.
He turned into bed but not into sleep. He had cut out his telegraph wire
for the night but a telephone message from the agent down at the depot in
the suburban city made him sit up wide awake. The storm was gaining. They
were beginning to get trouble reports down at headquarters. The
superintendent turned out of bed and began dressing. He cut in on the
telegraph wire and began giving orders.
He caught his train-master at the neighboring town and told him to meet
him at 495, the last train into Jersey City that evening. He turned from
the telegraph to the telephone and ordered the local livery man to get up
to his house and take him down to the 11:42. He called the depot agent to
hold that 11:42 until he arrived.
[Illustration: "WINTER DAYS WHEN THE WIND-BLOWN SNOW FORMS MOUNTAINS UPON
THE TRACKS"]
[Illustration: "THE DESPATCHER MAY HAVE COME FROM SOME LONELY COUNTRY
STATION"]
[Illustration: "THE SUPERINTENDENT IS NOT ABOVE GETTING OUT AND BOSSING
THE WRECKING-GANG ONCE IN A GREAT WHILE"]
When that superintendent came puffing into his office in the Jersey City
terminal it was one o'clock of a blizzardy Sabbath morn. He dropped into a
chair beside his chief despatcher and took the entire situation in
hand. Things looked pretty bad from every point of view. From up in the
foothills came reports of discouraging nature, trains were losing time,
they were having added trouble every hour in handling switches and
cross-overs. At the terminal the switches were a most prolific source of
annoyance. The intricacy of the interlocking system was being bothered by
ice freezing about its exposed working parts.
The superintendent was perplexed, but he did not show it. He kept lighting
cigars and throwing them away half-smoked. And all the while he was
sending orders over his wire. If a narrow strand of steel, stretching for
miles through darkness and through storm could carry infectious courage,
that wire carried the superintendent's courage out to every far corner of
his division through those early hours.
"Keep at it," was the tenor of his message. "Keep everlastingly at it."
And between times he was planning how to help them to keep everlastingly
at it. Men were summoned to report Sunday morning at the shops--they might
need to make some quick repairs, and it is a matter of record on that
division that a locomotive has been torn apart, entirely overhauled and
placed in service again in twenty-four hours--others were ordered to stand
by important switches against breakdowns in the interlocking.
There were special problems in plenty to be considered, a new one arising
every hour. One of them will suffice to show the measure of that
superintendent's problem that night.
Up in a narrow pass between overhanging hills a much-delayed local, with a
light road-engine, was still struggling to get the Christmas celebrators
home. It was a hard proposition; and just a block back of the suburban
train was chafing the midnight express through to Chicago--one of the
road's best trains. The superintendent saw in an instant that his main
line stood in imminent danger of being blocked. He caught Middleport, the
station ahead of the struggling local, and ordered it side-tracked there
for a moment.
"I want to get that midnight with her big engine ahead from there," he
explained to his despatcher.
But the towerman at Middleport said that he could not move the
siding-switch there; it was packed in with ice and snow.
"Tell him to get a pick-axe and shovel and get in at it," said the
superintendent.
"He says that it's 20° below up there; they've swiped his shovel, and he
hasn't anything but a broom," the despatcher returned.
"A broom! Tell him a broom's a God-send. He can sweep with the one end and
pick with the other."
Eight times that towerman tried there in the midst of the storm to open
that switch and eight times he reported failure. Eight times the
superintendent kept at him with his kind persistence, and the ninth time
they reported that the midnight express with the best type of motor power
on the division was ahead of the weak engine on the local.
And while the superintendent struggled at the far end of a telegraph wire
with that towerman, there were a dozen other Middleports, each with its
own different and equally difficult problem. Each required quick,
intelligent solution. He solved each. The line stayed open. The
superintendent stayed at his desk.
All that Sunday it snowed, and all that Sunday the superintendent was at
his desk. He did not know the passage of the hours; the clicking sounder
held his attention riveted. He worked all Sunday night and into Monday
morning. There were 200 suburban trains to be brought into the terminal on
Monday morning, and the commuter is a fussy soul about his train being on
time. The superintendent knew that, and he was ready. He had extra men at
the switches in the terminal yards, took particular pains to have snow
swept from the platforms of even the lowliest suburban station.
The trains came in on time that Monday morning, all save one. On that one
train the regular fireman had been snowbound at his home upon the
mountainside. They had to put on a green man to fire the engine--a
raw-boned lad just off a freight. He made slow work of it, and the train
was fourteen minutes late. That was the only exception to a clean record,
a record made possible by long hours of work.
"They ought to have been proud of that fight," you say to the big boss. He
grins at your ignorance.
"Proud?" he laughs. "They raised hell with me because we had 387 laid out
fourteen minutes."