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Updated: October 14, 2025
'It comes cheaper to kill men that way than to put air-brakes on freight-cars, said the brakeman. Thirty below freezing! It was inconceivable till one stepped out into it at midnight, and the first shock of that clear, still air took away the breath as does a plunge into sea-water.
Transfixed, he stood there, at first hardly able to see and to comprehend. For miles the valley was as light as at noonday. An awful beauty attended the scene. How lurid and sinister the red heart of that fire? How weird and hellish and impressive of destruction those black, mountain-high clouds of smoke! He saw the freight-cars disappear under this fierce blazing and smoking pall.
We had seen the two great rivers sweep into each other's arms in a broad glory of sunlit water, meeting at the bosky end of a wooded promontory, and yes! there was the Susquehanna glittering far beneath the beautiful name I had so often seen and wondered about, painted on the sides of giant freight-cars! Yes, there was actually the great legendary river.
It owned a line of iron steamships that carried the ore to the Pittsburgh railroad connections. It owned the railroads that brought the ore from the mines to the docks, and it owned the docks. It owned vast coalmines in Pennsylvania, and it owned a controlling interest in the Connellville coke-ovens, whence five miles of freight-cars, in fair times, were daily sent to the mills, loaded with coke.
And talking of freight-cars, it came to me with a sense of illumination how different the word "Passaic" looks printed in white letters on the grey sides of grim produce-vans in begrimed procession, from the way it looks as it writes its name in wonderful white waterfalls, or murmurs it through corridors of that strange pillared and cake-shaped rock, amid the golden pomp of a perfect summer day.
The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps, running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineers scratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable, self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea they were heroism, they were to Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons. To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground.
When Prescott got up the next morning, dawn was breaking across the muskeg. There was frost in the air, the freight-cars on the side-track and the roofs of the shacks were white, and a nipping breeze swept through the camp.
She continued mending his stockings. Finished ones lay rolled at one side of her chair, and upon the other were more waiting her attention. "And I'm going to turn back hand-springs on top of all the freight-cars," he stated, more loudly. She indulged again in merriment, laughing sweetly at him, and without restraint. "And I'm sick of what you all keep a-saying to me!" he shouted.
Kurt heard rumbling in the distance. But they went beyond the station, across the track, and turned to the right. Kurt was soft-footed and keen-eyed. He just kept the dim shadows in range. They were heading for some freight-cars that stood upon a side-track. The dark figures disappeared behind them. Then one figure reappeared, coming back. Kurt crouched low.
It was originally planned to bring over 960 standard locomotives and 30,000 freight-cars from the States, all equipped with French couplers and brakes so that they could become a permanent part of the French railroad system. These figures have since been somewhat reduced by the purchase of rolling-stock in Europe.
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