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[[underlined]]August 3, 1931[[/underlined]]: Spent the afternoon with Guynes, Chapman and Aydelott talking Flying Machine again and it was after five before I knew it. The work has grown fascinating again and I'm happy as a lark at the office.

[[underlined]]August 24, 1931[[/underlined]]: Have so much work at the office that I went down to dictate after supper and was there until nearly ten o'clock.

[[underlined]]August 25, 1931[[underlined]]: Never have been so enthusiastic about the job. Am very busy and the prospect of getting into the New York Central main line job again is thrilling.

On the innovative end of the Flying Machine project, I was pushing water and oil-cooled rheostats as well as reduced-field starting to compensate for weight-shifting in the driving trucks. I have a recollection of making a trip to Pittsfield to look into pyranol for accelerating-resistor cooling. But Bull Hamilton told us in August that there wasn't a chance of building the Flying Machine soon because they couldn't get a nickel for development at the moment--things were beginning to pinch bad about that time, nevertheless, we took on the job of revisiting Armstrong's 1928 New York Central Main Line Report which meant a lot of interesting work. In fact, my job was like a dream come true. I reflected that if I could have seen myself in 1921, doing this work in 1931, I wouldn't have even begun to believe it possible. I was very thankful and determined to push ahead with all the energy and originality I could command, But we were soon to be told that Andrews had given us a bum steer on the main line job and all that was in prospect at all at this time was South Station in Boston and the Boston and Albany main line from Boston to Albany. But even this would be a whale of a job involving locomotives, MU cars, regeneration, the works--real mountain railroading in the Berkshires, so GREAT, let's go and eat it up! We worked hard on the costs-- Guynes, Doc Huggins, Chapman, Aydelott, Baldwin, Bredenberg and others. Guynes told Alf Bredenberg the control on the 3,300 hp 2-D-2 should be $8,000 instead of $26,000 and Alf only grinned at him, knowing Maurice pretty well, but the funny part of it was that Maurice was deeply serious (although he knew little about control). Maurice said we had to cut our locomotive cost-per-horsepower in half compared to costs of a year or two ago and he said to Bredenberg, "--and, by God, we'll do it too!" That was Maurice. We struggled on through the fall trying to get costs down. We costed the Flying Machine again in December and it was still too high. I wanted to know the truth of the 11,000-volt AC vs 3,000-volt DC argument. Maybe DC wasn't the way to do it after all. I spent the day before Christmas at the office with Bredenberg trying to work down the control costs on the Flying Machine and made some real progress but didn't finish the job. I loved everything about the job but the pay and philosophized that would improve with better times.

Transcription Notes:
Change Bostin to Boston.