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I lean over to count the stationary trucks in the sidings. "Wouff, wouff, wouff," interrupts Archie from a spot deafeningly near; and I withdraw into "the office," otherwise the observer's cockpit. Follows a short lull, during which I make another attempt to count the abnormal amount of rolling stock. "Wouff Hs sss!" shrieks another shell, as it throws a large H.E. splinter past our tail.
This process of shunting, we may explain for the benefit of those who don't know, consists in detaching trucks from trains of goods and shoving them into sidings, so that they may be out of the way, until their time comes to be attached to other trains, which will convey them to their proper destination, or to have their contents, if need be, unloaded and distributed among other trucks.
I noticed that cars of certain numbers thirty-one nought thirty-four, thirty-two one ninety well, the numbers don't matter, but anyhow, these cars were always switched onto the sidings by Mr. Truslow's main elevator D soon as they came in. The wheat was shunted in, and they were pulled out again. Well, I spotted one car and stole a ride on her.
To keep from delaying the track, sidings 1,500 feet long were graded, about 7 miles apart.
For catching the parcels thrown out from the van a much simpler set of apparatus is sufficient. On a larger scale, no doubt in course of time, a somewhat similar plan will be brought into operation for causing loaded trucks to run from elevated sidings and to join themselves on to trains in motion.
The study at Wellington Terrace is upstairs, and is a large room lighted by two windows. One of these looks across the river, which at this point washes the base of the town walls, to the dingy village of Tweedmouth, rising towards the sidings and sheds of a busy railway-station and the Northumberland uplands beyond.
Many long and heavily-laden grain trains were in front of them, and they could feel the hand of Jimmy Hawkins from far off. They waited in extemporised sidings blocked by processions of empty trucks returning to the north, and were coupled on to slow, crawling trains, and dropped at midnight, Heaven knew where; but it was furiously hot; and they walked to and fro among sacks, and dogs howled.
Nearly all the docks caved in or sheds were knocked down, and all the streets along the water front were a mass of seams, upheavals and depressions, car tracks twisted in all shapes. Cars that had stood on sidings were all in ashes and still burning."
On awaking early at Brest the trains of the Bulgarians and Turks were standing on adjacent sidings. Weather magnificent now: cold, and the air as at St. Moritz. I went across to Kühlmann, had breakfast with him, and talked over events in Berlin. There seems to have been desperate excitement there.
The daylight faded into starlight, the sidings grew very dim, and a faint white figure blurred against the bars of the slip-panel. It was the last day of the threshing shortly after New Year at Rocky Rises. The green boughs, which had been lashed to the veranda-posts on Christmas Eve, had withered and been used for firewood.
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