CAUSES THAT MAKE BRAKES INOPERATIVE OFTEN EASILY REMEDIED.
Any engineer of ordinary intelligence, who will spend one hour a day for two weeks studying up the Westinghouse instruction book, will understand the brake so well, from the pump to the hind end of the train, that any imperfection happening to its working will be as readily located as an ordinary defect in a locomotive. Yet it is an intensely hard matter to induce men running passenger engines to go through this trifling mental exercise. The consequence is, that the brake sometimes becomes inoperative from causes so slight that men should be ashamed to report them; and they would be so if they only comprehended how small a mole-heap became their mountain. I knew a case where all the train men—that is to say, engineer, fireman, conductor, baggageman, and brakemen—wrestled for twenty minutes over a triple valve, trying to find out how to cut the air off a car; and, when the crowd was vanquished, a colored porter came, and showed them how the thing was done. This was on a road where straight air was generally used. One day some winters ago, a passenger train on the road I worked for was delayed an hour or more at a station, waiting for something. When the engineer tried to start the air-pump, it would not work. He fumed and fussed over it for fifteen minutes, gave it a liberal dose of copper hammer medicine, and saturated it with oil, but all to no purpose. It would not pump a pound of air, so the old-fashioned Armstrong was called into operation. In the course of its journey, this train had to pass the round-house at headquarters; and the engineer stopped to see if his pump could be given some quick remedy. I happened to be the doctor consulted. On learning the particulars of how the pump stopped working, I set fire to a piece of greasy waste, and held the flame to the check-valve of the air-drum; and the pump went right to work. All the trouble was, that the check-valve was frozen in its seat. I felt sorry for that engineer, he appeared to be so thoroughly ashamed and crestfallen at being baffled by such a small trouble.