Weldon Railroad

“ The crossing should probably be at Uniten. Should Colonel Sumner succeed in reaching the Weldon Road, he will be instructed to do all the damage possible to the triangle of roads between Hicksford, Weldon, and Gaston. The railroad bridge at Weldon being fitted up for the passage of carriages, it might be practicable to destroy any accumulation of supplies the enemy may have collected south of the Roanoke. All the troops will move with four days' rations in haversacks and eight days' in wagons. ”

“ We told them the railroad had offered to build to Logwater in consideration of city bonds alone (which was a fact) , but that the citizens of that cut-throat place wanted to saddle the whole thing on the poor farmers, saving expense to themselves, though, in fact, the townspeople were the only ones who would be really benefitted. ”

“ Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings into savage beasts? Nothing can be more terrible. A railroad tie was sunk into the ground, the rope was removed, and a chain brought and securely coiled around the victim and the stake. There he stood, a man only in form and stature, every sign of degeneracy stamped upon his countenance. His eyes were dull and vacant, indicating not a single ray of thought. Evidently the realization of his fearful fate had robbed him of whatever reasoning power he had ever possessed. ”

“ I had a cash capital of three or four dollars in my pocket, and the art of making soap-foam signs at my fingers’ ends. I had also heard of a pressing want for laborers in a construction gang which was working on an intersecting railroad, and if the worst came to the worst I was able to handle a shovel or pick against the best of them. I was not brought up on a farm for nothing. ”

“ Here is this watch, now; a fine Elgin, with a twenty-year case set in two plates of gold, adjusted to both heat and cold, with economical hair spring, regulated by sun, moon and stars, and it will even tell you the price of cheese in Canada. I’m not going to force you to take it at this moment, and as no one seems ready to make a decent bid I’ll lay it by until the gang gets in from the railroad, and switch off on to this elegant suit of underwear. ”

“ Culverts have been laid for each small run or kill or creek; the bridge-builders along the new line finish their work and cart off their kits; the day comes when there is an unbroken railroad from one end of the new line to the other. It links new rails and new towns; its localities produce for new markets, commerce from strange quarters pours down upon the land that has known it not. Passenger trains begin regular operation, the fresh-painted depots are brilliant in their newness, the shriek of the locomotive sounds where it has never before sounded. ”

“ The conductor catches a car step, the “preference” starts forward with all the rattling shakes and bumps peculiar to a long freight train. In a minute or two the red tail-lights are grinning at us from half a mile down the track. Another big freight goes scurrying by us—more market stuff, more meat, more fish for the hungry town, a town which houses 4,000 folk within a single congested tenement square. A third train follows; all refrigerator cars it is too. They come in quick succession, these market trains, to the metropolis. The railroad is doing its part. ”

“ Certain it is that Old England—every part of Great Britain—knows well the efficient handling of short-haul freight-traffic. The ten-ton goods-wagon (at the most, fifteen) of the British railway is a small unit, easily handled, if necessity arises, by a horse or two at a country station. It is an inexpensive unit [Pg 203] too; and being inexpensive England is able to have over a million freight-cars for her 25,000 miles of line as against but a little more than two million for 265,000 miles of railroad in the United States, which makes much for the flexibility of her railway freight service. ”

“ On main-line divisions, where traffic runs exceeding heavy, a locomotive stands, steam-up, with the four cars of the wrecking-train. Even on side-line divisions the call for the wreckers will bring the fastest and best engine out of the roundhouse, no matter what her train assignment may be. Things on the railroad stand aside for the wrecker. Limiteds may paw their nervous heels upon sidings while she goes skimming up the line—all time-table rights are hers from the moment that she goes into service. ”

“ In the days after the coming of Parsons and of Britton it began slowly, but very surely, to regain this quality so precious and so essential to the successful operation of any railroad. The property began to pick up amazingly. At first it was, indeed, a heartbreaking task. As we have seen, at the end of the Sloan régime little but a shell remained of a once proud and prosperous railroad. The road needed ties and rails, bridges, shops, power, rolling-stock—everything. More than these even it needed the future confidence of its employes. It needed men with ideas and men with vision. ”

“ Bridge to Massena Springs and was, I believe, with its 643 miles of route mileage, the longest single railroad division in the United States at that time. To run that division was a man’s job, and only a real man could survive it.
Yet into that grimy old station at Watertown there came, one by one, a succession of as brilliant railroaders as this country has ever known—Van Etten, Russell, Moon, Hustis, Christie. These were men tested and tried before they were sent up into the North Country—it was no place for novices up there. Once there they made good, by both their wits and their energies. ”

“ The gentle nature of the country to be traversed by the new railroad—the greater part of it upon the easy slopes at the easterly end of Lake Ontario—presented no large obstacles, either to the engineers or the contractors, these last, Messrs. Phelps, Matoon and Barnes, of Springfield, Massachusetts. The rails, as provided in the extension of the road’s charter, were fifty-six pounds to the yard (to-day they are for the greater part in excess of 100) and came from the rolling-mills of Guest & Company, in Wales. ”

“ The familiar Maryland, which is operated jointly by the New Haven and the Pennsylvania systems upon this route, will receive an entire passenger train of ordinary length, excepting, of course, the locomotive, upon her great deck, which is, in reality, a miniature railroad yard, equipped with two long parallel tracks that can be quickly attached to the ferry-bridges at Port Morris and Jersey City. The trip, with the loading and unloading of the train, is accomplished, under favorable weather conditions, in about an hour. ”

“ The third division is the Junction shops, where the new locomotives are built; 1,800 men are employed within it, and there men take the new castings and forgings (most of the castings coming up from the giant foundries that we have just noticed) , and from them they create that almost human thing, the railroad locomotive. When the [Pg 396] locomotive emerges from that shop it takes its turn upon the testing-table, the mechanical experts place their final stamp of approval upon it, and at last it goes out from the shop, under its own steam, to perform the great work for which it was created. ”

“ Engine the 107 was not rebuilt for a long time and was never again employed in passenger service. The foreman in one of the repair shops wrote to Philadelphia and learned that the 109 was completed on Thursday and the 107 on Friday. As I said a while ago, railroad employees are not superstitious,—they will all tell you so,—much less railway officers; but it is a fact to-day that a new locomotive or a locomotive that has been rebuilt is never taken out on the Denver and Rio Grande on Friday. ”

“ I rode a little more than a year ago on a huge steam locomotive of the El Paso and Southwestern railroad. The brightness of her appearance, the efficiency of her performance, seemed to belie the fact that it was eleven years since she had left the big shop in Philadelphia where she had been born.
Always it is as one comes further east that the American railroad machine grows more and more shabby, until in New England we see it at its worst. Our entire railroad structure, speaking nationally and subject only to a few exceptions, is worn down a bit. It is a shoe outgrown. ”

“ The builder takes down his blue-prints—the same old engine that he has been building for ten, twenty, thirty years past. No staff has worked to perfect that old-fashioned machine. He figures rapidly. His opponents are figuring against him. And finally he shoots in his bid. The railroad can buy a lot of locomotives for ten million dollars; a goodly quantity for one tenth of that figure if it is not too fussy about the details.
After which will you wonder when I say that no steam locomotive in the United States to-day represents anything like the ultimate possibilities of the machine itself? ”

“ The crowd drew aside apprehensively, and he tramped straight up to the locomotive.
“What do ye mean,” he roared, “by having engines out here to scare hosses into conniptions? Take that thing off this lake and put it back on the railroad tracks up there where it belongs!” He shook his fists over his shoulder in the direction of the distant embankment.
“You will observe,” said Parker, blandly, “that there is some twenty inches difference between the gage of the wheels and the gage—”
“I don't care that”—and Colonel Ward snapped the great whip—“for your gages and your gouges! ”

“ On shot the locomotive, like an arrow from the bow, the men throwing over the ties until the train was well nigh unloaded, when just as they were close to the curve by which the train arrives at the station, they saw the dreaded cars strike a tie, or something equally of service, and with a desperate plunge rush down the embankment, some fifteen feet, to the little valley, and creek below. ”

“ He has risen from the ranks of the telegraphers, most likely from some lonely country station or forlorn signal-tower, and his knowledge of railroad operation, both theoretical and practical, must approach perfection. On sunny, serene days he proceeds with the theoretical railroading; when storms or unexpected influxes of traffic come [Pg 234] to harass the division, he will need every bit of his practical knowledge. Handling a number of special trains—freight or passenger—is a strain, and that strain is most felt at the despatcher’s desk. ”

“ Far to the north, the Grand Trunk Pacific is finding its way across the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, creating a great city—Prince Rupert—at its western terminal. It should be ready for its through traffic within the next three years.
This then, in brief, is the history of American railroading—an eighty-year struggle from East to West. The railroad has passed through many vicissitudes; days of wild-cat financing, and days when men refused to invest their money under any inducements whatsoever. ”

“ Understand that for such farmers a small narrow-gage railroad as this—the feeder to a branch or main line of some standard steam railroad, running all the way from ten to twenty miles in length, inexpensively laid down alongside the highway and equipped with a single small locomotive (with perhaps one held in reserve against emergencies) and from one hundred to two hundred small four-wheeled flat-cars—would be a boon, and the capital outlay would be comparatively slight. It ought to be built and operated by the farmers that it would serve. ”

“ The four and even six tracks to each of them are hardly enough for the great volume of high-class freight and passenger traffic that press upon their rails. There are some side-lines, with but two or three trains a day—side-lines that reach the main-line only through other branches. But there are no hoejacks, nor peanut branches, nor jerkwaters upon that system. Hereafter there are to be none upon this. The man who is hauling a train on the most remote corner of this railroad is doing its work quite as much as the biggest trainmaster here at the terminal. ”

“ But the wilderness was no more, and Henry knew that the world's greatest civilizer, the locomotive, had been the pioneer in all this great work of peopling the plains. The pathfinders, the real heroes of the Anglo-Saxon race, had fought their way from the Missouri River to the sundown sea. He recalled how they used to watch for the one opposing passenger train. ”

“ It is good low-grade line and an engine of even moderate capacity ought to handle a 3000-ton freight-train over it easily, if it were not for that nasty little hill half-way down the line. A chain is no better than its weakest link. A railroad division is no easier than its stiffest hill. This particular one means that the maximum train-load on that division may never exceed 2700 tons.
Now we put the booster on—that little miniature locomotive for the trailing-wheels that we saw a few minutes ago, built like an automobile engine and having the same gritty driving power. ”

“ Its freight train which ran over the entire length of the line from Rome to Cape Vincent each day did an equally good business. Already it had the third largest freight-car equipment of any railroad in the state. Its success was [Pg 58] a tremendous incentive to all other railroad projects in the North Country. From it they all took hope. We have seen long ago the serious efforts that were being made to build a road direct from Sackett’s Harbor up the valley of the Black River to Watertown and Carthage and thence across the all-but-impenetrable North Woods to Saratoga. ”

“ There was no switching and but little delay en route, and the train generally went through from the Missouri to the Delaware in considerably less than a week. Such a prompt through movement, with its saving of time and money, was quite unheard of in the days of competitive railroad management. ”