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Updated: June 7, 2025
The officious man in the blue cap on the dock had shouted "All aboard!" the moment the passengers left the cars of the little narrow-gauge railroad, on which the girl had been riding for more than two hours; but it was some minutes before the wheezy old steamer got under way.
At Blind Indian Lake we had a shipyard, two warehouses, ice-houses, a company store, and a population of three hundred, and had nearly completed a ten-mile roadbed for narrow-gauge steel, which would connect us with the main line when it came up to us. I was completely lost in my work. At times I almost forgot Brokaw and the others.
This road and narrow-gauge railway took a short cut across the valley and proved a godsend in relieving the congestion on the regular road, and was of inestimable value in achieving our end. On the 2nd day of April, 1917, stage manager Haig ordered the curtain raised and, with its raising, vengeance was let loose.
They were following the line of an abandoned narrow-gauge railway, abandoned twenty years ago, along which had been dumped, at intervals, little piles of perfectly good anthracite, imported from Pennsylvania, for use by the portable engine used in the construction of the road. My friend declares that he is entirely ready at any time to swear that there are deposits of anthracite in Cuba.
If from Bundoran to Donegal, less than twenty miles, you must again go to Enniskillen, thence to Strabane, where you arrive after the best part of a day's journey, ten miles further away than when you started, thence to Stranorlar, changing there to the narrow-gauge railway for your final trip. Travelling on the west coast is tedious and expensive, whether you go round by rail or drive direct.
For one hundred miles, up to Shelton, they rode over a narrow-gauge, four-foot railway on a hand-car drawn by dogs. And it seemed to Alan, at times, as though Mary Standish were with him, riding in this strange way through a great wilderness. He could see her. That was the strange thing which began to possess him.
He had secured a fairly good education and, in many ways, seemed well fitted for the vocation he had chosen to pursue. A careful examination, however, showed two fundamental deficiencies in Marshall Mears which training could only partially overcome. First, his was one of those narrow-gauge, single-track minds. He was incapable of any breadth of vision.
As to the strength of the rail, it is much greater in proportion to the load than would at first sight be thought; all narrow-gauge railways being formed on the principle of distributing the load over a large number of axles, and so reducing the amount on each wheel. For instance, the 9 lb. rail used for the portable railway easily bears a weight of half a ton for each pair of wheels.
We sometimes feel that, almost alone in the harassed and weary modern world, we love that life, and yet we are the least afraid to leave it. It is usually dark when the shabby little narrow-gauge train brings us home to Hillsboro from wanderings in the great world, and the big pond by the station is full of stars.
We were striding through the valley now a death-trap passage, two hundred yards across at its widest point, and less than three-quarters of a mile long. I counted twenty-seven dead horses, lying in grotesque attitudes, some of them cruelly mangled. The narrow-gauge railway had become scattered bits of scrap-iron, the ground a churned waste of shell-holes.
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