Potosi journal. (Potosi, Mo.) 1894-1929, 1907-09-04

train by which the railroad com
mlssiouers were to make an ~
spection trip over the Iron Noun
tain, took regular passenger
train from St. Louis to Arcadia,
and writes to his paper as follows
as to the track conditions as he
found them:
''All / got to see of the Iron
Mountain tracks between St. Louis
and Arcadia was from the rear end
of one of its fast trains, which on
this particular occasion was not so
fast. But what saw was enough,
as l shall presently show. The i'll
luck, which forced me to ride ON
that fast train or walk, gave way
to good luck when the system got
to working and the dispatcher got
to firing in orders to pass other
trains at certain points. | was al
so favored, either by slow orders
over bad track or by heavy grades,
| could not learn which, from the
train crew. This combination of
circumstances gave me a chance
to look more closely at the track in
"a number of places, sometimes
with the train going at rate of
ton miles an hour and sometimes
with the train at standstill. The
old railroader, whom | had met on
the train, was Of some assistance,
while members of the train crew
inadvertently gave good deal of
information. For the greater part
of the trip, the train was going at
a high rate of speed for this part
of the country. Little opportunity
was offered to gain an idea of what
the track was like. But one thing
| did observe in the track afler we
had gone some little distance out
of st. Louis. I saw u great num-
Der of tie ends protnding from un-
der the rails at an angle of some
thing like 80 or 45- degrees. This
meant just one thing. Those ties
had become so rotten that they
had broken square in two beneath
the rails. The pressure upon the
rails had then forced the ends of
the ties up into the position in
which they were observed. Ties
in this condition plainly cannot
hold rail spikes. They are worse
than useless. There were start
ling number of such ties between
st. Louis and Arcadia. In no
place did many of them occur with
in few feet, and if the ties which
were thus plainly rotten and worse
than useless we're the only defec-
tive features of the roadbed, the
track mi ght be considered fairly
safe, although by NO means in that
condition which could be described
as fine But had this part of the
track received recent attention,
the ties, the ends of which stood
up outside the rails, would have
been removed along with any 9TH
er defective ties which might have
been in those stretches of track.
The fact that the ties described re-
mained in the track indicates that
the track has been neglected.
Moreover, according to railroad
men experienced in track work,
most ties do not break under the
rail and stand up, at the ends.
They usually rot and crumble
Several railroad men told me that
the fact that there were ties such
as those under discussion in the
track, indicated that there were
others Practically as bad which
could have been detected by a per-
son walking the track. As
the train approached Summit the
block signal got in its work. The
train came to a stop and | got off.
l had time to look at the first few
hundred feet of track just behind
the train. In that distance l
counted sixteen broken and decay
ed ties in consecutive order.
Nearly every tie in the stretch
looked at was badly decayed and
broken. Many Of the ties were So
rotten that the rails had sunken
into them one Or two inches. /
kicked strips Of wood an inch or
two in thickness and nearly foot
long from several of the ties in