Without pausing at the museum, Allan boarded a car back to the city. After all, he reflected, Betty Heywood was right—train-dispatching had little to do with art and artists. He realized that he had looked at the paintings and the statuary from the outside, as it were; he had been interested in them, it is true, as he would have been interested in a play or a novel. They had entertained him, they had helped him to pass a pleasant hour, and that was all. He did not feel that they were vital to him—vital in the sense that a thorough knowledge of railroading was.

In a word, he was narrowing into a specialist, as every man who really accomplishes anything in the world must do. His work had become the only really necessary and vital thing to him. He had found his groove, and while he still possessed the power to climb out of his groove occasionally and to look about the world and find amusement in it, it was in his groove that he felt most at home, that he was strongest and most efficient and most contented.

For his efficiency—the knowledge that he was really doing something in the world—rejoiced him and moved him to stronger effort.

So his feet naturally led him back to the great depot which formed the Union terminal for all the lines of railroad entering Cincinnati. It was a place which might well be interesting to any one, so crowded was it with life and well-directed skill. To any one looking at it understandingly it was more than interesting. It was engrossing. Nowhere else did the life-blood of traffic pulse quite so strongly; nowhere else was there quite such an opportunity to study human nature; and nowhere else was perfection of organization in railroading so necessary and so evident.

It was this latter point which interested Allan most of all, and so, with merely a fleeting glance at the crowds hurrying past him, he bent his steps along one of the narrow cement platforms which ran out under the train-shed like long, gray fingers. In the midst of the tangle of tracks just beyond the train-shed, stood a tall, box-like structure, its upper story entirely enclosed in glass. Dodging an outgoing train, Allan hastened toward this queer tower, climbed the narrow stair which led to its upper story, opened the door and looked in.

“Hello, Jim,” he said, to a man in shirt-sleeves who stood looking down upon the busy yards. “May I come in?”

The man turned quickly and held out his hand.

“Sure, Mr. West,” he said. “Come in and sit down,” and he motioned toward a chair.

Just then a bell overhead rang sharply.

“That’s the Pennsylvania limited,” he said. “Give her track number twelve, Sam.”

There were two other shirt-sleeved men in the little room, standing before a long board from which projected what appeared to be a series of little handles like those one sees on water-cocks. At the words, one of the men turned one of these little handles.

Again the bell rang.

“Number seventeen for the accommodation,” said the man Allan had addressed as Jim, and another little handle was turned, while still a third, which had been turned, sprang back to its original position.

“There goes that school-teachers’ special from eleven,” added Jim. “Fix her, Nick,” and the third man turned a handle at his end of the board.

Allan, meanwhile, had taken a seat, and gazed down over the network of tracks. Trains were arriving and departing almost every minute. Busy little yard-engines were hustling strings of coaches about, pulling them out from under the great train-shed or backing them up into it. Down the long cement walks beneath the shed, arriving and departing passengers were hurrying to and fro; trucks piled high with luggage or groaning under a load of mail-sacks or express matter were being propelled back and forth with almost superhuman skill; engineers were “oiling round,” blue-coated conductors were reading their orders, hostlers with flaring torches were taking a last look at wheels and connections—in a word, the busy life of a great terminal was at full blast.

And above it all, controlling it, as it were, by a movement of a finger, stood Jim—James Anderson Davis, if you care for his full name—gazing down upon it nonchalantly, and giving a terse order now and then. For Jim is the chief towerman, than whom, in his sphere, no autocrat is more autocratic and no czar more absolute.

It is a fearful and wonderful thing, this controlling the trains that arrive at and depart from a great terminal—almost too fearful and wonderful to be put upon paper. But at least we will make the effort.

Most modern terminals resemble each other in general plan. Railroads have found it not only convenient for the public but economical for themselves to build “union stations” in the larger cities, wherever possible. That is, a suitable site is selected, as near the business centre of the city as it is possible to get, and the roads join together in providing the money necessary to purchase it and erect the station building, the cost being pro-rated in proportion to the amount of traffic which each road gets from the station.

The side fronting upon the street is usually handsomely embellished, for it is this side which the public sees as it approaches, and all railroads know that to make a good impression is to do good advertising. So with the main waiting-room, which always lies directly behind the street doors. Here marble, mosaic and gilding are always in evidence and no opportunity is lost to impress the travelling public with the wealth and magnificence of the road which it is using. On either side of the main waiting-room are smaller waiting- and retiring-rooms, there is a row of ticket-booths, a news-stand, telephone booths, baggage-rooms, a dining- and lunch-room and, of course, inevitably, the long rows of seats, back to back, where the waiting public spends so many weary minutes.

In the stories overhead are the executive offices of the various roads—as many of them as there is room for—but to these the general public seldom penetrates.

Beyond the swinging doors along the side of the waiting-room opposite the entrance is the main platform or concourse, and from it, stretching down between the tracks like long fingers, are the narrow cement platforms upon which the passengers alight or from which they mount to their trains. The tracks are laid in pairs, and a platform extends between every pair, each platform thus serving two tracks, one on either side. Overhead is the great echoing vault of the train-shed with its mighty ribs of steel, stretching in one enormous arc across the tracks beneath—a marvel of engineering skill, if not of architectural beauty.

This is what is known as the head-house plan, and is the ideal one for the passenger, since it permits him to go to and from his train without crossing any tracks or climbing to any overhead bridges. It is, however, expensive for the railroads since, of course, all through trains must be backed out and switched around until they are headed on their way again—a process which requires no little expenditure of time and energy, as well as money. However, in a great city, a right of way which would enable the through trains to continue straight onward toward their destination is frequently so expensive that it is cheaper to back them out the way they came in, and send them by a detour around the city.

And upon no one is this backing-out process more wearing than on the towerman, for the trains must be handled twice over the same track, and of course the track must be kept clear until the train is out again and safely on its way. Now there is never any surplusage of tracks in a terminal. Indeed, as one sees the tracks narrow and narrow as the terminal is approached, until they are merged into those which plunge beneath the train-shed, one is apt to think they are all too few. Yet their number has been calculated with the greatest care; there is not one more than is needed by the nicest economy of operation—nor one less. The number is just right for the station’s needs—so long as the towerman knows his business and keeps his head.

And now to return to the glass-enclosed perch where, for eight hours of every day, Jim Davis and his two assistants send the trains in and out over the network of tracks. That long row of little handles is the last word in switch-control. Time was—and is, in all but the most important stations—when the towerman opened or closed the yard-switches by means of great levers. To throw one of these levers was no small athletic feat, especially if the switch it controlled was at some distance, and to keep at it eight hours at a time reduced the strongest man to mental and physical exhaustion. When the towerman left his work at the end of his trick, he was, in the expressive parlance of the day, “all in.” Now when men are “all in,” they are very apt to make mistakes, hence in a busy terminal under the old system, accidents more or less serious were of almost every-day occurrence. Besides which, the number of levers which one man was physically able to operate was comparatively small, so that there must be many men and a consequent divided responsibility and opportunity for confusion.

The tower itself had been an evolution, for, at first, these yard-switches had been controlled by a brigade of switchmen, each of whom had two or three under his supervision, which he turned by hand whenever he saw a train coming his way. Then the hand switchmen were supplanted by a cluster of levers in a tower, operated by a single man. The tower was so located that its occupant had a general view of the yards, and the levers were connected by steel rods with the switches and signals which protected them. For every switch must have its signal—that is, a device by which the engineer of the approaching train may see whether the switch is properly set—the old standards showing yellow when the switch was open and red when it was closed—and since replaced by arms, or semaphores, which hang down when the train may pass and bar the way when it must stop.

This grouping of the levers in the tower simplified the control of the yard and placed the responsibility upon a more intelligent and more highly paid man than the average switchman, and consequently broadened the margin of safety. But terminals grew and yards grew and switches increased in number, until even this system was unable to meet the demands made upon it.

It was at a time when this state of affairs seemed seriously to threaten the safety of operation of great terminals that some genius invented the pneumatic control. Instead of a row of great levers requiring the strongest muscles, the towerman found himself confronting a battery of tiny ones, operated by the touch of a finger. And that finger-touch against the slender lever is instantly magnified to the pull of a giant arm against a switch half a mile or more away.

How? By a bewildering intricacy of cogs and valves, by the aid of the electric current and of compressed air, for, in order to perfect this mechanism, man has harnessed the whirlwind and the lightning. That finger-touch brings instantly an electric touch; the electric touch raises a valve which releases the compressed air from a cylinder into which it has been pumped; and the air thus withdrawn from the cylinder in the tower basement is also in the same instant withdrawn from a cylinder opposite the switch-point, by means of a slender pipe which connects the two; and a plunger in the cylinder at the switch moves the switch-point and the signals which protect it.

That seems enough for any mere machine to do—but it does much more. For, by a series of interlocking devices, the switches are so controlled by each other that no signal for a train to proceed can be given until all the other switches over which the train will pass have been properly set and locked, nor can any switch be moved as long as any signal is displayed which gives right of way over it. Thus was the margin of safety further broadened, and the control of a great terminal brought down to three men on each eight hour trick, representing the very cream of their profession.

Approaching trains announce their coming by ringing an electric gong, the chief towerman, of course, knowing just which train is due at that particular instant—knowing, too, if any train is late, and how late and with what other trains it conflicts. He must know the precise second of departure of each train from the shed, and every train must glide smoothly in and out without let or hindrance. He must know; he mustn’t merely think he knows, for this is one of the positions in which a man never has a chance to make two mistakes. For, while the tower machinery is wonderfully adapted to its purpose, it is, after all, the mind of the chief towerman which controls and directs it.

It was not by any means the first time that Allan West had sat watching this fascinating scene, but it had never grown uninteresting and he had never ceased to wonder at it.

“I used to think train-dispatching was a pretty nerve-racking business,” he remarked, after a while, “but it’s child’s play compared with this.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Jim, his eyes on a through train threading its way cautiously out of the terminal and over the network of switches. “We don’t have to worry about big accidents up here—the interlocking takes care of that. We can’t have a head-end collision, for instance—at least, not while the signals are working properly. What we’ve got to look out for is tangles. If we have to hold one train two or three minutes, that means that two or three other trains will be held up, and before you know it, you’ve got a block ten miles long. Then’s when somebody up here has to do some tall thinking and do it quick. The only way to keep things straight is to keep ’em moving. Sixteen,” he added to his assistants, as the overhead bell rang.

They watched the train as it rolled in, saw it disgorge its load of passengers, saw the baggage and express and mail matter hustled off, saw the yard-engine back up and couple on to the rear coach, and slowly drag the train out from under the train-shed.

“I never watch that done,” added Jim, as the train disappeared down the yards, “but what my heart gets right up in my throat. You don’t know what a way those pesky little yard-engines have of jumping switches. Open sixteen, Sam,” he added, as the big engine which had brought the train in rolled sedately down the yards on the way to the round-house, to be washed out and raked down and coaled up. “Ring off thirteen, Nick,” he said, and Nick touches one of the little handles, a blade on a signal bridge opposite the end of the train-shed drops, there is a sharp puff, puff, of a locomotive, and another train starts slowly from the train-shed on its journey east or west, north or south, as the case may be.

Meanwhile, the little switch-engine has set its train of coaches in upon one of the innumerable sidings away down the yards where passenger cars are stored—and one would scarcely believe how many miles of such storage track every great terminal requires—has uncoupled and started back toward the train-shed for another load—her movements, by the way, as well-known to and thoroughly understood by the chief towerman as are those of the most glittering through train. Already the train of coaches is in the hands of the cleaners and stockers, for it will start out again presently upon another trip. Modern passenger cars represent too much money to be allowed to repose on a siding a minute longer than necessary.

The cleaners swarm into the coaches, dusty and dirty and foul after the long journey, dragging behind them long lines of hose. The hose carries compressed air, and in half an hour those cars are sucked clean of dirt and are as fresh and sweet as when they first came from the shops. Other cleaners are washing the windows and polishing the metal fittings. Trucks pull up loaded with ice, with clean linen, and the stockers see that every car is supplied. Farther along is the diner, and to it come the butcher’s cart, the baker’s cart, the grocer’s cart; dozens and dozens of napkins and table-cloths are taken aboard, and already the chef is making out the menu for the dinner which will be served in an hour or two somewhere out on the road. It is all wonderful—fearful and wonderful, when one stops to think of it—impossible to set on paper except in broad suggestive splashes, as an impressionist paints a sunset.

“Are you going back on Two?” asked Jim.

“Yes,” said Allan, glancing at the tower clock.

“Well, there she comes,” said Jim, and motioned toward a cut of coaches being backed into the train-shed by one of the ever-present switch-engines.

“All right,” said Allan. “I’ll go down and hunt up Mr. Schofield. He’s going back with me. This is a great place, Jim.”

“Come again,” said Jim heartily. “You’re always welcome. He’s a fine young fellow,” he continued, as Allan went down the stairs. “He’ll have his office up yonder one of these days,” and he motioned toward the towering stories of the terminal building. “Number eight, Sam,” he added, as the bell rang. “There comes the St. Louis express.”