“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.