On this chart only the more important trains are shown. Dotted lines
have been used to represent white cords, or east-bound trains, and solid
lines to represent red cords, or west-bound trains.
(Click on image to see a larger version.)
“I don’t see how any could be safer,” said Allan. “And I’m awfully glad you showed me how it works.”
“Oh, I’d do that, of course,” laughed the superintendent. “I want you to know everything there is to know about railroading. It will all come in handy some day. Now, I’ll turn these notes over to the printer, and we’ll have another bout when we get the proofs.”
In a few days, the first proof of the new time-card was returned to Mr. Schofield, and he and Allan went over it carefully, comparing it with the chart to make certain that there was no error in figures and that every meeting-point was provided for. With the chart to go by, it was impossible that any meeting-point could be overlooked. A second proof was treated in the same way, and finally O.K’d. Then the time-cards were printed—not at all in the form with which the public is acquainted with them, but as large oblong pamphlets of twenty-four pages,—distributed to the road’s employees, and at twelve o’clock midnight on December 21st, the new card went into effect. All the public knew of it was a few lines in the newspapers announcing that this train or the other would arrive a few minutes later or earlier than it had been doing, and most people wondered, if they thought about it at all, why it had been necessary to get out a new time-card at all for changes so unimportant.
CHAPTER VI
THE LITTLE CLOUD
The installing of a new time-card is not so simple a thing as one might imagine. For that one night, every engineer and conductor has to bear in mind two schedules, the old one and the new one. For, though the new one goes into effect, technically, at midnight, it is, of course, impossible that it should do so in reality. A train, for instance, which started under the old schedule at 10.50 P. M. and which, under the new one, would start fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, could not, once it was out on the road, make up that time, so it was compelled to run by the old schedule until it had finished its trip, even though that carried it over the time after which the new schedule went into effect. In other words, every train which was on the road at midnight, must continue under the old schedule until it reached its destination.
So that night was always one of anxiety. Trainmen, who often get mixed on a single schedule, are only too likely to do so on a double one!
It so happened, however, that the exciting events of that night were not due to forgetfulness, but to a danger which no one could foresee or guard against, and which is, in consequence, one most feared by railroad men. And it developed the latent heroism in two men in a way which is still talked of on the rail, where these tales are passed on from mouth to mouth wherever trainmen congregate.