The Sedalia weekly bazoo. [volume] (Sedalia, Mo.) 187?-1904, 1883-02-27
WITH THE WIND
What an Old Engineer Says About
Fast Travelling,

dSt 4Idt0Aiu8,
From an interview in the Cleveland Herald
IF the train is fifteen or twenty
minutes late on your account it's q
terrible temptation to 'let her out 60.
ing Down a mid grade. Fifty miles
az hour is fast time to make with eight
or ten cars behind you. Fifty-five is
very fast, even for short distances,
and sixty is seldom attained. When
YOU come 10 consider that eighty-eigh
feet of ground 10 passed over every
second. you will begin to understand
something OF the terrible speed
Even at City miles an hour you will
see by q little figuring that seventy
three feet are passed over in a single
second"
How soon can train he stopped
wneu running At such q rate of
speed:"
That depends upon the emergency.
If we are sliding into a station and
know just how to plan. the case is
very different than it would be should
We discover a load of dynamite
stuck on the track" continued the
engineer, laughingly. "What | mean
is that the discovery that a bridge
was gone, and We were within 1000
feet of the bank, we might stop. but
again We might not. IF We were l.,
200 feet away and did not have too
heavy q train, think we could bring
the engine to q standstill before the
hank wss reached. If we were ap-
preaching a station and no special
emergency occurred, such Is l have
related. We would begin to stop 1000
feet away, that is, if We were running
fifty miles per hour"
You must have had many oppor-
tunities for making fast time in your
long experience, suggested the re-
porter.
oh, yes and yet it is hard to
call just those special occasions to
mind. One of the fastest trips I ever
made over the Lake Shore road. or
over any other part Of it, was when
l yanked old Cornelius Vanderbilt
from Erie to Cleveland in an hour
and thirty-nine minutes. That was
On the LIST or I'd of May. 1915, the
day before the stockholders meeting
in.,his city. The special had been
delayed all the way from New York
to Buffalo by the immense travel over
the road, incident to the Centennial
exhibition. When L backed up the
car at Erie my orders were to let her
out and / did. From Erie to Girard,
Pa, the track was heavy, and it took
us eighteen minutes to make the fif-
teen miles. That would never do.
The fireman braced up the fire, and
/ pulled her open. Well, now, we
fairly flew You see we had to make
four stops, once for water
and three times at tar
gets. When you come to take out of
ninety-nine minutes the actual time
consumed in the whole trip the time
occupied in four stops and the time
lost in going from Erie to Girard.
YOU can see tina: some lively time had
TO he made somewhere. The distance
is ninety-fve and q half miles and we
must have M de the last eighty of
them in just eighty minutes and stop
ped four times. l guess that's lit.
tie the liveliest travelling the old man
ever got"
Is there q perceptible difference
in the melton or in the swaying of
the engine when running at such a |
speed ?"
oh, yes. The engine seems to
go almost by bounds. First it will
sway to the right and seem to run
nearly quarter of a mile on that
side, then it will rock over to the left |
and give another prodigious leap for
ward. The current created by such
1 speed is frightfal even when travel
ing away from the wind. The respon.
'ihility Of the engineers position comes
very wildly to his mind when dash
ng through q thickly populated dis
trict at that rate of speed. You catch
sight ofan object ahead, grasp the
ever nervously, and almost before
you would have bad time to close the
,alve you have passed the point in
,iew. If such q schedule ia to he
for such distance the
engineer must take advantage of every
hing. On al upgrade We must crowd
me engine ahead to her utmost cap
lbility, and an down-grado we must
70 as fast as we dare. It's very easy
o talk about having ridden sixty
l L. 1 (