"THEY STRUCK THE MISSISSIPPI BRIDGE AT FULL SPEED."
Another question I asked was about stopping a train at great speed for an emergency—how quickly could they do it? "I've stopped," said Bullard, "in nine hundred and fifty feet, pulling five cars that were making about sixty-two miles an hour. I don't know what I could do with this new train, only three cars, and going eighty or ninety miles an hour. That's a hard proposition."
"Would you reverse her?"
"No, sir. All engineers who know their business will agree on that. I'd shut the throttle off, and put the brakes on full. But I wouldn't reverse her. If I did, the wheels would lock in a second, and the whole business would skate ahead as if you'd put her on ice."
Then we talked about the nerve it takes to run an engine, and how a man can lose his nerve. It's like a lion-tamer who wakes up some morning and finds that he's afraid. Then his time has come to quit taming lions, for the beasts will know it if he doesn't, and kill him. There are men who can stand these high-speed runs for ten years, but few go beyond that term, or past the forty-five-year point. Slow-going passenger trains will do for them after that. Others break down after five years. Many engineers—skilled men, too—would rather throw up their jobs than take the run Bullard makes. Not that they feel the danger to be so much greater in pushing the speed up to seventy, eighty, or ninety miles an hour, but they simply cannot stand the strain of doing the thing.
"This doubling up is what breaks my heart," said Bullard. "Since they've put on their new schedule I have to divide 590 with another fellow. John Kelly takes her on the fast run East while I wait here and rest. And so I've lost my sweetheart, and I don't feel near as much interest in her as I did. You see, she ain't mine any more. And, between you and me," he added, confidentially, "I don't think 590 likes it much herself; you see, engines are a good deal like girls, after all."
The next night, in workman's garb again, I made my way to a gloomy round-house, ready for the run to Omaha. I was to ride the second relay, as far as Creston, on locomotive 1201, with Jake Myers in the cab, so I had been informed. Being hours ahead of time, I saw something of round-house life.
First, I followed a gaunt, black-faced Swede, with stubby beard, through his duties as locomotive hostler; saw him take the tired engines in hand, as they came in one after another from hard runs, and care for them as stable hostlers care for horses. There were fires to be dropped in the clinker-pit, coal and wood to be loaded in from the chutes, water-tanks to be filled, sand-boxes looked after, and, finally, there was the hitching fast of the weary monsters in empty stalls, whither they were led from the lumbering turn-table with the last head of steam left over dead fire-boxes. And now spoke the Swede: