Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 262, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 November 1915 — RECORD WITHOUT A STAIN [ARTICLE]

RECORD WITHOUT A STAIN

Engineer Has Run Trains for FiftyTwo Years Without an Accident of Any Sort. Fifty-two years as a railroad man and fifty years as an engineer on the New York Central railroad, without an accident or a black mark of any Sort against him, is the proud record of Dennis John Cassin, who retired from the service on August 18 at the age of seventy years. Cassin, an alert, keen-looking man, with a gray mustache and gray hair, does not show his age. Those who have seen him in the cab of the big locomotive that pulls the Empire State express from the Harlem yards at Albany would take him for a man of about fifty, but up at his trim little house at 597 Walton avenue, The Bronx, he has documents to prove that he was born on April 18, 1844, at Greenwich, now the City of Rensselaer. He became just fifty years ago on August 18 a full-fledged engineer. His first engine was one of the old wood-burning “dinkies” that used to run between Westchester county points and the old downtown Grand Central terminal. As engine building progressed he got a better type of locomotive and finally he became the dean and the most trusted engine driver on the road. Despite the fact that he started in when that sort of work was in its infancy, he has kept fully abreast of the times and has passed all the examinations that up-to-date methods require of railroad engineers. His proudest possession, outside of his family and his record, is a diamond ring he won some years ago in a popularity contest conducted by a railroad magazine, when he was voted, by a big majority, the most popular engineer in the United States. In addition to the important duty of taking the Empire State safely to Albany at a mile-a-minute speed, Cassin turns around in the Albany yards and brings whirling back to this city another of the crack trains of the road, the Southwestern limited. Better than *a mile a minute he makes at times with this train. In his time Cassin has carried millions of passengers and he can spin many a yarn about the big men he has had in the coaches behind him. Governors of New York, presidents of the United States, bankers, merchants, mayors and famous persons of all sorts have ridden behind Safe Dennis Cassin. In addition to being the dean of the Central forces, Cassin is one of the oldest active railroad engineers in the world.