Enough of wrecks. They are not the only test when it comes to keeping the line open. Sometimes a crippled telegraph service may be quite as effective. Out on the Pennsylvania lines west of Pittsburgh a couple of years ago a severe wind and sleet storm levelled more than 40 miles of telegraph poles, in most cases dropping them across main-line tracks in the dark. A few months later—the never-to-be-forgotten inauguration day of President Taft—a similar storm did similar work on the lines leading to Washington. Thousands of militiamen and excursionists never reached the inauguration at all. In both storms the resources of a great railroad were well tested.
An old-time Erie man remembers wire troubles of a different sort. It was in his salad days, when he was serving as assistant superintendent over the Meadville, in the western part of Pennsylvania. They had but one telegraph wire for railroad purposes on the division then, and one night it “grounded.” Keys were silent, the road might as well have had no wire at all.
The assistant superintendent started that evening with two linemen on a hand-car to find that “ground.” They went miles from Meadville, and every test showed the wire working. Finally they came to a deserted little depot at a cross-roads and the railroader lifting his lantern high against the window verified his suspicions: the careless agent had gone home and left his key open. The superintendent broke open the window, climbed in, removed the telegraph set, placed it in his overcoat pocket and closed the circuit. He knew that he would hear from the agent on the morrow. He did. Word came by tedious train mail, a formal report on the road’s yellow stationery.
“Station at A—— burglarized last evening,” that formal report read, “and agent’s telegraph set, best pants, and ten dollars taken.”
The real test of keeping the line open comes when winter descends upon the land, when the heaviest freight traffic of the year comes, together with those forces of nature that sweep off the summer joys of railroading. The mighty battles of the western transcontinentals with the snows of the Rockies have long been known, their miles of snow-sheds making safe crawling bores for through trains under the snow-banks, and the avalanches of the mountain-sides are as familiar to the tourist as the Great Salt Lake or the wonders of the Yellowstone. Only a few months ago the newspapers told the story of how a passenger train, stalled at the entrance of a Washington tunnel, had been carried by an avalanche down a great cliff. Every railroader, east and west, knows full well the hazard of mountain line in the depths of a treacherous winter.
There is a snow-belt extending around the south edge of the Great Lakes that annually gives the Eastern railroad men a good opportunity to sympathize with the Westerners. Long years ago a little railroad reaching north in this belt from the main line of the New York Central became discouraged in the all but hopeless task of keeping its line open. It had been a hard enough battle to find the rails of its main line from Rome to Watertown through one blizzard crowding upon the heels of another. There had been ten days when Watertown was entirely cut off from the world to the south of it. But that little railroad owed some obligations to its chief town, and it kept at its brave efforts although every night the fresh wind blowing down from the Canadas across Lake Ontario filled the long miles of railroad cuts, and nightly erased all trace of rails. But there was a branch from Watertown to Cape Vincent run at a dead loss throughout the entire winter, and in that hard winter the railroad gave up the branch, and hired a liveryman to take the mails in his cutter over the country drifts. It was one of the few instances on record of a railroad giving up the fight.
After the railroad had been abandoned a fortnight a delegation of citizens from Cape Vincent drove to Watertown and there confronted H. M. Britton, the general manager of the line. They made their little speeches, and those were pretty hot little speeches—hot enough to have melted away one good-sized drift.
“When are you going to cart that snow off our line?” finally demanded the spokesman of the Cape Vincent folk.