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Updated: June 24, 2025
Fifteen minutes later, with men filling her cab and clustered on the tender, the engine was under way, rushing eastward. As rapidly the speed was increased, the locomotive rocked and leaped over the new roadbed, but with the superintendent at his elbow, the engineer drove her up to the last notch, and the prairie streamed by them like a blanket.
Only in case different companies operated their cars upon the same roadbed something which, in the earliest days, they actually did on certain lines could they compete, and any such system as a general practice is clearly impracticable.
When you look back to the beginning at the Missouri River, with no railway communication from the east, and five hundred miles of the country in advance; without timber, fuel, or any material whatever from which to build or maintain a roadbed itself; with everything to be transported, and that by teams or at best by steamboats, for hundreds and thousands of miles; everything to be created, with labour scarce and high you can all look back upon the work with satisfaction and ask, under such circumstances, could we have done better? . . .
There was one piece of roadbed, not more than ten rods in length, where the track seemed to run on a narrow shelf barely wide enough for the cars to pass, which is said to have required seven years to render available. We can well conceive it to have been so, for the whole road from Vera Cruz to Mexico was about five times seven years in building.
"And I'm willing enough to take it, sir, if you don't run trains over the Man-killer until the new roadbed has stood tests that I'll put upon it." "It'll cost at least ten thousand dollars to repair the mischief that the scoundrels have done to-night," figured Harry Hazelton thoughtfully.
By means of reports sent in by hundreds of different operators, he knows the exact location of all trains at all times, the number of "loads" and "empties" in each train, the number of cars on each siding, the number of passing tracks and their capacity, the capabilities of the different engines, the gradients of the road, the condition of the roadbed, and, above all, he knows the personal characteristics of every conductor and engineer on the road.
Had the train pulled down there the situation of the crew and passengers would have been much better. They would not have been stalled in this drifted cut. Cliffdale, to which Uncle Dick and his party were bound, was twenty miles and more ahead. The roadbed was so blocked that it might be several days before the way would be opened to Cliffdale.
The soldiers in the centre retired a little way down the roadbed, stood bunched together for a little time while their officers evidently conferred together, then left the road by twos and fours and began spreading out and pushing the other lines out still farther.
All these things the engineer must bear in mind, and beside his jockey-like handling of his iron horse, he must watch for signals that flash by in an instant when he is going at full speed, and at the same time keep a sharp lookout ahead for obstructions on the track and for damaged roadbed.
The men in the tender jumped to the ground. So, likewise, did George, the engineer and his assistant. Andrews remained standing in the cab. He looked like some sea captain who was waiting to sink beneath the waves in his deserted ship. He worked at the lever and touched the valve, and then leaped from his post to the roadbed.
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