“The despatcher may have come from some lonely country station”
“The superintendent is not above getting out and
bossing the wrecking-gang once in a great while”
When that superintendent came puffing into his office in the Jersey City terminal it was one o’clock of a blizzardy Sabbath morn. He dropped into a chair beside his chief despatcher and took the entire situation in hand. Things looked pretty bad from every point of view. From up in the foothills came reports of discouraging nature, trains were losing time, they were having added trouble every hour in handling switches and cross-overs. At the terminal the switches were a most prolific source of annoyance. The intricacy of the interlocking system was being bothered by ice freezing about its exposed working parts.
The superintendent was perplexed, but he did not show it. He kept lighting cigars and throwing them away half-smoked. And all the while he was sending orders over his wire. If a narrow strand of steel, stretching for miles through darkness and through storm could carry infectious courage, that wire carried the superintendent’s courage out to every far corner of his division through those early hours.
“Keep at it,” was the tenor of his message. “Keep everlastingly at it.”
And between times he was planning how to help them to keep everlastingly at it. Men were summoned to report Sunday morning at the shops—they might need to make some quick repairs, and it is a matter of record on that division that a locomotive has been torn apart, entirely overhauled and placed in service again in twenty-four hours—others were ordered to stand by important switches against breakdowns in the interlocking.
There were special problems in plenty to be considered, a new one arising every hour. One of them will suffice to show the measure of that superintendent’s problem that night.
Up in a narrow pass between overhanging hills a much-delayed local, with a light road-engine, was still struggling to get the Christmas celebrators home. It was a hard proposition; and just a block back of the suburban train was chafing the midnight express through to Chicago—one of the road’s best trains. The superintendent saw in an instant that his main line stood in imminent danger of being blocked. He caught Middleport, the station ahead of the struggling local, and ordered it side-tracked there for a moment.
“I want to get that midnight with her big engine ahead from there,” he explained to his despatcher.