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Updated: May 10, 2025
Shunting is sometimes a tedious process, involving much hauling, pushing, puffing, and whistling, on the part of the engine, and uncoupling of trucks and shifting of points on the part of pointsmen and porters.
They were too busy to do more than nod at Scott and Martyn, and stare curiously at William, who could do nothing except make tea, and watch how her men staved off the rush of wailing, walking skeletons, putting them down three at a time in heaps, with their own hands uncoupling the marked trucks, or taking receipts from the hollow-eyed, weary white men, who spoke another argot than theirs.
About four in the morning I was at a station again, industriously bending, poor wretch, at the sooty task of getting another engine ready for travel. This time, when steam was up, I succeeded in uncoupling the carriages from the engine, and by the time morning broke, I was lightly gliding away over the country, whither I did not know, but making for London.
While the conductor, the engineer, and most of the passengers were at breakfast, the train was seized, and being properly manned, after the uncoupling of the passenger cars, was started on its fierce race northward. Think of the exploit twenty men, with a hostile army about them, setting out thus bravely on a long and difficult road crowded with enemies.
It was a typical American crowd; long-suffering, giving and taking principally giving good-humored, just. All morning it came in a seemingly endless chain; uncoupling link by link, only to weld together again. All morning long, ferries, trolleys, trains were jammed with the race-mad throng.
When she heard that the uncoupling of the parlour car had caused a delay, she groaned. "Then all this terrible mishap is due to our own vanity?" she cried. "A consequence of our own presumptuous pride! If our dependents had sat with the boy in a common carriage with other decent travellers, the train would have passed the fatal spot long before the landslide was in motion!
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