ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE ROAD.
Next in importance to knowing well how to manage the engine, and intimate familiarity with the time-table and its rules, comes acquaintance with the road. In the light of noonday, when all nature seems at peace, when every object can be seen distinctly, the work of running over a division is as easy as child’s play. But when thick darkness covers the earth, when the fitful gleam of the headlight shines on a mass of rain so dense that it seems like a water-wall rising from the pilot, or when blinding clouds of snow obliterate every bush and bank, it is important that the engineer should know every object of the wayside. A person unaccustomed to the business, who rides on a locomotive tearing through the darkness on a stormy night, sees nothing around but a black chaos made fitfully awful by the glare from the fire-box door. But even in the wildest tempest, when elemental strife drowns the noise of the engine, the experienced engineer attends to his duties calmly and collectedly. A cutting or embankment, a culvert or crossing, a tree or bush, is sufficient to mark the location; and every mile gives landmarks trifling to the uninitiated, but to the trained eye significant as a lighted signal. One indicates the place to shut off steam for a station, another tells that the train is approaching a stiff-pull grade; and the engine-men act on the knowledge imparted. And so the round of the work goes. Working and watching keep the train speeding on its journey. Nothing is left to chance or luck: every movement, every variation of speed, is the effect of an unseen control. As a stately ship glides on its voyage obedient as a thing of life to the turn of the steersman’s wheel; so the king of inland transportation, the locomotive engine, the monarch of speed, the ideal of power in motion, pursues its way, annihilating space, binding nations into a harmonious unit, and all the time submissive to the lightest touch of the engineer’s hand.
To get a freight train promptly over the road day after day, or night after night, an engineer must know the road intimately, not only marking the places where steam must be shut off for stations or grades, but every sag and rise must be engraved on his memory. Then he will be prepared to take advantage of slight descents to assist in getting him over short pulls, where, otherwise, he would lose speed; and the same knowledge will avail him to avoid breaking the train in two while passing over the short depressions in the track’s alignment, called sags in the West.