"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.