Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 185, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 August 1916 — WITH THE MAN IN THE ENGINE CAB [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

WITH THE MAN IN THE ENGINE CAB

DID RAPID THINKING HOW FIREMAN SAVED TRAIN AFTER CONNECTING-ROD BROKE. Simple Thing, In His Estimation, but At Meant, the Preservation of Lives and Property — Just a Hero of the Rail.

The fireman stood on his narrow perch before the fire box, and between times of filling the box he would look at the silhouetted form of the engineer—in his little cab forward, perched almost amidships of the long black boiler. He did not have much time to look; for the box was forever demanding more hard coal. There-was a hiss of steam, a crash of metal —and the fireman dropped his shovel. The connecting rod had broken. They were going 60 miles an hour, and the loosened end of the heavy steel rod that had come crashing up with the force of ten thousand men and horses, and thrown the entire side of the engineer’s cab down into the ditch beside the track. Now the rod was pounding back and forth —a mighty commotion, not soon to end; for the hand that clutched the throttle lay inert upon it; the lifeless form of the engine driver was caught in the wreckage of the cab. And somewhere in that wreckage the trembling needle of the speed indicator still hung close to the 60 mark. The fireman thought quickly—lt’s a way with the men in the engine cab. He knew that the engine must be stopped—And at once. But It was impossible for him to get through that wreckage and to the air-brake control quickly. He did the next best thing. He took a stout iron bar, and climbed over to the top of the swaying tender and down into the narrow space between it and the first of the heavy cars of the train. With a short, quick blow he broke the air-hose" connection between the engine and the cars. The brake set automatically, the train stopped, and the fireman went forward to get his companion’s body. In a few minutes they were crowding around him —the folk from the cars —and making a good deal of fuss over him. They said he was a hero. But he merely replied that he had done a simple thing—and perhaps the connecting rod had broken one of the air-pump connections and so would have set the brakes anyway. But today he sits on the right hand of a standard locomotive cab —for the “camel-back” engines, with .their clumsy separate engineer's cab set midway upon the boiler’s crown, are going out of style. He sits there, knowing that responsibility rides beside bim. He knows other things. He knows th»t the connecting rod may some time break again—it Is one of the most common forms of locomo-, tive accidents, and in the very nature of things must so remain. He knows that danger in a thousand forms forever confronts him —a broken rail, a wheel, or a bit of metal dislodged from the flying rush of a passenger train upon a neighboring track, the breakdown of the human structure of the operation of the railroad upon which his safety and the safety of those intrusted to his care is so very dependent. If you would know something of the man in the engine cab, go and ride a little way with him. It is not easily managed. The railroads have now grown very in the enforcement of the rule forbidding strangers in the engine cabs. Yet, in this one instance, it can be arranged. You merely sign tremendously portentous legal “releases,” whose verbiage, freely translated, gives you the distinct impression that you are going to your sure doom.— Sunday Magazine of the Washington Star.