The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-06-08
HARDSHIPS OF A
 RAILWAY WRECK CREW Ready at Seconds Notice to Hasten to Scene of
 Disaster.
CLEARING THE TRACKS
Marvellous Work That the Swan-Neck Crane
 Easily Does.

In any case, night or day, hail, rain, ice, snow or sunshine, with safety valve snorting, every pound of steam crammed on, and the fireman heaping on coal, the locomotive fairly bounds across the ribbons of steel, taking crossings. tunnels and cuts just as fast as her gigantic drivers can whirl her, taking tall bridges and skyscrap- ing trestles like scared cat along a fence, and never stacking until the gllmmer of a red light or the fiutter of a scarlet flag ahead gives warning, says a writer in Appleton's Magazine.
 The trouble may be slight. like switch engine loafng off an open switch; in which case a couple of jacks or the crane lifts the engine, and with in fifteen minutes sets it back upon the rails. An axle may have broken under fifty ton coal car, so that 1t has to be jacked up while the crane .revolyes, lifts a ponderous four-wheel truck from the flat car behind and de- posits it on the rails in front of the car, neatly as you might help yourself to an olive. Or, freight, like steel gir- ders or an entire bridge truss, may have toppled from passing freight car and landed across tracks.
 On the other hand the wreck may be serious one. with a score of the first cars knocked Into flinders, and thirty cars behind telescoped or climb ed all over one another or stood up side down or on end, and scattered about the scenery as boy might seat ter 8 tin toy train by kicking it across hi playroom.
 Whatever the condition like so many terriers sailing into pit of rats the wreckers dive into the work There ap- pears to be no head nor tail to the at- tack, and yet every man knows his place; the one man who is supreme, the one who decides at single glance what to do and the one upon whose official shoulders rests this mountain of junk and wreckage is called wreckmaster.
 The wreck might be an appalling sight which, it might seem, would re- uure a 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 war rant, the wreckmaster sends for the repair gang, and within an hour or two from 100 to 200 Italians or Japan csc swarm like flies over the land scape, laying and tamping ties, spik- ing rails so quickly that you can fair ly 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 locomotive to pass chains about the big machine to re- move this most formidable of all ob-
 structions, the rest of the men have cut off the wreck-train locomotive to
 put her to work. Hawsers are passed about heaps of wreckage piled high as barn. IA warning "toot" to stand clear amid a crunching and splintering as if house were falling in, the
 mountain of tangled, split oak is drag ged over rails and ties until it 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 don key engine tugs and puffs and shorts at the bent, battered leviathan weigh i ing a hundred or more tons and lying on it's back, wheels in air and nose pointing in the direction 1t came from. JJp comes the ponderous heap of junk, almost imperceptibly at first but stead- i ily as If an unseen hand were lifting it into space. Wheels of it's cars clamp ed to the rails to prevent capsizing, the crane groans and trembles under the enormous strain, but in something like an hour 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
 it's wabbly legs, where 1t stands like
 a mortally wounded giant, ready to hobble on to a siding.
 l Clear the tracks at any cost" This lis the unqualified order to the wreck master, and under the touch of his wonderful engines confusion vanishes 1 like magic. Anything that can be l thrown Into a ditch quicker than Il
 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 $1.-
 GOO each, sometimes laden with costly furniture. with pianos, glassware, or
 art pieces, are sent crashing over and
 over down forty-foot entertainments,
 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 a hundred miles from the nearest town, and while the night is so dark l that you cannot see your hand In front of your eyes. For eight or ten hours at
 a stretch the wreoker may crawl be-
 heath shattered cars. planting his jacks, 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 l ehattering with binding snow dust whipped by a seventy-mile gale of
 arctic cold that heaps drifts while he l Jugs frost-nipped chains and bars and
 staggers up to his knees in snow stick | ing to his post for the sheer love of
 the fight and for the sake of the snow
 plough stalled on one side of the wreck,