The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-08-24
HARDsHIPs OF WEIGHING.
What Crew Has to Do When Tracks
 Must Be Cleared.

What Crew Has to Do When Tracks Must Be Cleared.
 | In any case, night or day, hail, rain, ice snow or sunshine, with safety valve snorting, every pound of steam cram med on, and the fireman heaping coal, the locomotive fairly bounds across the ribbons of steel, taking crossings, tun- l nels and cuts just as fast as her gigan- tic drivers can whirl her taking tall bridges and skyscraping trestles like a scared cat along a fence and never slackening until the glimmer of a red | llkt or the flutter of a scarlet flag ahead gives warning, says a writer in Appleton's Magazine. The trouble may b9 slight, like a switch engine loafing off an open switch. in which case a i couple of jacks or the crane lifts the engine, and within fifteen minutes sets l. back upon the rails. An axle may have broken under fifty-ton coal car so that it has to be lacked up while the crane revolves, lifts a ponderous l fcur-wheel truck from the flatear be- i hind and deposits it on the rails in front of the car, neatly as you might telp yourself to an olive. Or, freight, like steel girders or an entire bridge truss, may have toppled from passing freight car and landed across the | tracks.
 On the other hand, the wreck may be serious one, with a score of the first cars knocked to flinders, and thir- ty cars behind telescoped or climbed all over one another or stood upside dcwn or on end, and scattered about the scenery as a boy might scatter a tin top train by kicking 1t across his playroom.
 i Whatever the condition like so many terriers sailing into 6 pit of rats, the wreckers dive into the work There ap- pears to be neither head nor tail to the attack, and yet every man knows his place; the one man who Is supreme, the one who decides at a single glance what to do, and the one upon whose official shoulders rests this mountain of junk and wreckage is called wreck master.
 The wreck may be an appalling sight which, it might seem, would require q week to clear, But within five minutes after the wrecker arrives things begin to move-not piece by piece or singly, | but by heaps and mounds and dozens. | If conditions warrant, the wreckmaster sends for the repair gang and within an hour or two from 100 to 200 Italians or Japanese swarm like flies over the landscape laying and tanping ties, spiking rails so quickly that you can fairly see the tracks creep over the ground around the obstruction. And while this temporary switch Is going down, the wreckers are performing | miracles in the line of clearing things While the crane crew burrows and tunnels and crawls beneath the locomo- tive to pass chains about the big ma- chine to remove this most formidable of all obstructions, the rest of the men have cut off the wreck train lo- ccmotive to put her to work Flaw sers are passed about heaps of wreck age piled high as barn. A warning "toot" to stand clear, and amid a crunching and splintering as if a house were falling in, the mountain of tangled, split oak Is dragged over rails and ties until 1t topples of itself into an adjoining field
 What the locomotive cannot pull out of the way the crane lifts. Within twenty minutes after arrival it's donkey engine tugs and puffs and shorts at the bent, battered leviathan weighing a hundred or more tons and lying on it's back, wheels in air and nose point ing in the direction it came from Up comes the ponderous heap of junk, al- most imperceptibly at first but steadily as if an unseen hand were lifting it into space Wheels of It's car clamped to the rails to prevent capslzlng, the crane groans and trebes under the enormous strain, but in something like an horu the sorry looking victim, boil CT stove in, cowcatcher, cab, smoke stack and pilot truck stripped, and crusted with mud and clay and ashes, is turned right side up and set upon its wabbly legs, where 1t stands like mortally wounded giant, ready to hobble on to siding.
 Clear the tracks at any cost" This is the unqualified order to the wreck master, and under the touch of his wonderful engines confusion vanishes like magic. Anything that can be thrown into a ditch quicker than 1t can be hauled out of the way Is sent flying There is no time to investigate what is inside of partly damaged cars. Freight cars and coal cars worth $1OO0 each, sometimes laden with costly fur nture, with pianos, glassware, or art pieces, are sent crashing over and over down forty-foot embankments.
 Neither property nor men the wreck master spares; for all this may take place while the world sleeps, after the wrecker has spent twenty-four hours of continuous duty elsewhere and fifty or hundred miles from the nearest town, and while the night Is so dark that you cannot see your hand in front of your eyes. For eight or ten hours al stretch the wreoker may crawl beneath shattered cars, planting his jocks, passing chains or hawsers Throughout torrential rainstorms, when bridges are threatened and he must grope and founder through knee-deep mud and icy water, soaked through to the skin, chilled to the marrow and chatterlng with cold. Or he may work in blizzard amid binding snow dust whipped by a seventy-mile gale of Arc tic cold that heaps drifts while he Jugs frost-nipped chains and bars and stag gers up to his knees in snow, sticking to his post for the sheer love of the fight and for the sake of the snow blow stalled on one side of the wreck,