We are not particularly glad to hear this. Already the locomotive is rocking a good deal more than is quite pleasant to the uninitiated, and the contrast between the hard seat and the pleasant one at our disposal in the Pullman car is becoming more and more obvious. Just as we are wondering how it will be possible to preserve one's equilibrium while going around a curve in the distance, a cow strays sheepishly on to the track, apparently some 200 yards ahead. The engineer plays a tune with his whistle, and the cow proceeds to trot down the track in front of us. That singularly misnamed appendage, the cow-catcher, strikes her amidships. She is thrown twenty feet in the air, and all that is left of her rolls into the ditch by the side of the track.
For the moment we had forgotten George Stephenson's reply to the member of the British Parliament, who asked him what would happen in the event of a cow getting in front of one of the trains George was proposing to run, if necessary powers could be obtained. His reply, which has long since become historical, was that it would be very bad for the cow. We remembered this, and agreed with the pioneer railroad man when we saw the unfortunate bovine turn a quadruple somersault and terminate her existence in less than a second. But a moment previously we had been wondering what would happen when the inevitable collision took place.
The fireman observes that the occurrence has somewhat unnerved us, and in a good-natured way assures us that a little thing of that kind doesn't amount to anything. It is pretty bad, he says, when a bunch of cows get on a track, and he remembers once, several years ago, having a train stopped out in the Far West by a bunch of fat steers, which blocked up the track. "But," he adds, by way of parenthesis, "that was on a very poor road with a broken-down freight locomotive. If we had had "87," with a full head of steam on, we could have got through all right, even if we had to overload the market with beef."
Now the train rushes around a curve in one direction and now in another. The engineer never relaxes his vigilance, and, although he affects to make light of the responsibility, and assures his somewhat nervous passenger that there is no danger of any kind, his actions do not bear out his words. We are running special, a little ahead of the mid-day express schedule, and at every station there are waiting passengers who herald our approach with delight, and, gathering together their packages, advance to the edge of the platform evidently supposing we are going to stop for them. That we are to dash through the station at a speed of fifty or sixty miles an hour, does not occur to them as a remote possibility, and the looks of astonishment which greet us as we rush past the platform are amusing. Finally, we reach a long stretch of level track, where the rails are laid as straight as an arrow for apparently several miles ahead.
"Now's your time, if you want to take a good mile," says the friendly fireman.
We take his advice, and by aid of a stop watch, especially borrowed for the occasion, we ascertain the fact that a mile is covered in fifty-two seconds. The next mile is two seconds slower, but the speed is more than maintained on the third mile. Reduced to ordinary speed figures, this means that we are making something like seventy miles an hour, and doing vastly better than was even anticipated. Our good work is, however, interfered with by the sudden application of the air brakes and the shutting off of steam as we approach a little station, where the signal is against us. A change in train orders proves to be the cause of the hindrance to our progress, and the engineer grumbles somewhat as he finds he will have to wait at a station some twenty miles further on, provided a train coming in the opposite direction is not on the side track before he gets there. The execution of this order involves a delay of five or ten minutes, but when we have the line clear again such good time is made that we accomplish our task and pull into the depot, where locomotives are to be changed, on time to the second.
Such is a ride on a locomotive in broad daylight. At night of course the dangers and risks are increased ten-fold. The head-light pierces into the inky darkness, and frequently exaggerates the size of objects on and near the track. The slightest misunderstanding, the most trivial misinterpretation of an order, the least negligence on the part of any one connected with or employed by the road, may involve a wreck, to the total destruction of the train and its passengers, and the engineer feels every moment the full extent of his responsibilities and the nature of the risks he runs.
These responsibilities are increased ten-fold by the great speed necessary in these days of haste and hurry. Few of our great-grandfathers lived to see steam applied as a motive power for locomotion. Most of our grandparents remember the first train being run in this country. Many of those who read these lines can recollect when a philosopher placed himself on record that a speed of twenty miles was impossible, because, even if machinery could be constructed to stand the wear and tear, the motion would be so rapid that the train men and passengers would succumb to apoplexy or some other terrible and fatal malady.
It is less than seventy years ago since the time that the so-called crank, George Stephenson, ventured modestly to assert that his little four-and-a-half-ton locomotive, "The Rocket," was actually capable of whirling along one to two light carriages at the astounding velocity of twelve miles an hour. He was laughed to scorn by the highly intelligent British Parliamentary Committee engaged in the investigation of his new method of land traveling. At the present day, with regularly scheduled trains on many lines thundering across wide continents tirelessly hour after hour, at the rate of a mile a minute, it is the deliberate judgment of the most conservative students of railway science that the ultimate limit of speed is still in the far distance, and that 100 miles per hour will not be deemed an extraordinary rate of travel by the time the first decade of the Twentieth Century shall have closed.
It is true that railroad schedules seldom call for mile-a-minute traveling, but the engineer is called upon very frequently to go even faster. The majority of people, even the most intelligent among those who habitually travel, obtain their conceptions of speed from the figures of the time-table, forgetting that in nearly every instance considerable portions of the route must be traversed at much more than the average speed required to cover the total distance in the schedule time. There are very few, if any, of the fast express trains which do not, on some part of each "run," reach or exceed a speed of a mile a minute. Yet, by reason of superior roadway and well constructed cars, the accelerated velocity is unnoticed; while running at from sixty to seventy miles an hour the passenger calmly peruses his paper or book, children play in the aisle, and a glass brim full of water may be carried from one end to the other of the smoothly rolling coach without the spilling of a drop. All the while the nerves of those in charge of the train are kept at high tension, and, oblivious as the passengers may be as to the danger, actual and imaginary, the risks incurred are never for a moment lost sight of by the two men on the locomotive.