THE LOCOMOTIVE ENGINEER
I
HOW IT FEELS TO RIDE AT NIGHT ON A LOCOMOTIVE GOING NINETY MILES AN HOUR
IT is 8.30 p.m., any night you please, and for miles through the yards of East Chicago lights are swinging, semaphore arms are moving, men in clicking signal-towers are juggling with electric buttons and pneumatic levers, target lights on a hundred switches are changing from red to green, from green to red; everything is clear, everything is all right, the Lake Shore Mail is coming, with eighty tons of letters and papers in its pouches. Relays of engines and engineers have brought these messages, this news of the world, thus far on their journey. Up the Hudson they have come, and across the Empire State and along the shores of Lake Michigan, nearly a thousand miles in twenty-four hours, which is not so bad, although the hottest, maddest rush is yet to come.
It is a fine thing to know the men who drive the engines on these trains; just to see them is something, and to make them talk (if you can do it) is better business than interviewing most celebrities you have heard about.
To this end I set out, one evening early in January, for the great round-house of the Northwestern road, that lies on the outskirts of Chicago. A strange place, surely, is this to one who approaches it unprepared—a place where yellow eyes glare out of deep shadows, where fire-dragons rush at you with crunchings and snortings, where the air hisses and roars. It might be some demon menagerie, there in the darkness.
To this place of fears and pitfalls I came an hour or so before starting-time, and here I found Dan White, one of the Northwestern crack-a-jacks, giving the last careful touches to locomotive 908 before the night's hard run. In almost our first words my heart was won by something White said. I had mentioned Frank Bullard of the Burlington road, a rival by all rights, and immediately this bluff, broad-shouldered man exclaimed: "Ah, he's a fine fellow, Bullard is, and he knows how to run an engine." White would fight Bullard at the throttle to any finish, but would speak only good words of him.
"Tell me," said I, "about the great run you made the other night." From a dozen lips I had heard of White's tremendous dash from Chicago to Clinton, Iowa.
"Oh, it wasn't much; we had to make the time up, and we did it. Didn't we, Fred?"