Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 235, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 October 1913 — MILES WITHOUT CURVE [ARTICLE]

MILES WITHOUT CURVE

LONGEST StRAIGHT STRETCH OF RAILROAD CLAIMED FOR TEXAS,

Headlight Can Be Seen for Forty-Nine % Miles, and Unsophisticated Traveler Really Need Not Have Been In So Much of a Rush.

B. H. Moeller; who recently returned from Kansas, where he has been traveling and making the Panhandle of Texas, received the following letter from a friend of his wh6 who made his first trip through the Panhandle: “I have been on the road for a Kansas City house now for six years traveling Kansas and Missouri, but the house has now added the Panhan'dle of Texas to my territory and I have just finished my first trip. The first town out of Kansas across the strip was Tyrone, Okla. I had spent the afternoon there and intended to take a night train back to Liberal. A bunch of us were sitting on the front porch of the Commercial hotel when I saw a headlight looming up down the track. I made a rush for my grips and yelled at boy to get his cart and take ’em over to the depot qujck. I didn’t wait for his answer, but ran over to the depot and rushed up to the window and demanded a ticket for Liberal.

'“How’s this?’ I said to the agent. ‘I thought this train wasn’t due for an hour, and here she is not a mile away.’ “ ‘Mister,’ he replied, ‘you better go back to the hotel and 'Buy cigars for that bunch. This is your first trip down here, ain’t it? Well, I thought so. That headlight is just 49 miles away; you’ve got pretty nearly an hour to finish that game of rummy. This is the longest stretch of straight track in the country, 76 miles, clear across the Panhandle withouLa curve. You see that house over there? That’s where I live. I don’t have to light a lamp until after 9 o’clock winter nights. About sundown the Golden State Limited looms up down about Texhoma and she shines right into my kitchen window for an hour, finally getting so bright that my wife has to pull the curtains, and ten minutes behind her comes No. 34, and it takes it 70 minutes to get by with its light. It’s a great saving for me, and my wife has gotten so she won’t wash dishes by anything but electric light. I never have to call the dispatcher to to get a line on the trains. I climb to the roof of the station, get a line on the headlight and mark up my board accordingly. Have you any baggage to check? —Fort Wayne JournalGazette.