Viewing page 108 of 113

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

36

The test in which I participated consisted of checking temperatures of apparatus and collecting other pertinent data on a O351—type locomotive while hauling 24 coaches from New Haven to New York. The 0351s were passenger locomotives and such a train was well beyond anything they'd been designed to handle. However, I believe that on certain occasions like a big football day at New Haven, they wanted to use them handling football specials that were unusually heavy. As I remember it, the crew that had assembled to run this test consisted of Jim Bracken and maybe Tex Dowden of the New Haven, Jay Walker and Jim Smith of our New York Office, and A.E.Smith, Lew Webb, and I from Erie. In addition, there were an engineer, fireman and head brakeman riding the locomotive. Lew webb was not a well man, frail, thin, without color, and with a case of diabetes which required regular insulin shots to keep him alive. He didn't travel much because of his condition but he did enjoy occasionally getting out on a special job like this just to keep his hand in. He was a fine man, never caustic or critical, never complaining, but always quiet and helpful and thoroughly intelligent, and I was very fond of him; neither had I forgotten all the help and encouragement he'd given me at the time of my ordeal getting off test in 1926, nor my subsequent service under him in control engineering. So what was soon to happen affected me even more perhaps than the others involved.

It was a gray October morning and 0351 (I'm not sure now just which of the ten it was so I'll say 0351), loaded with instruments, coupled to the test train in the New Haven passenger yard south of the station.  Characteristically, Lew chose to read some meters alone in a hot, cramped, isolated and thunderously—noisy location. It was a hard drag accelerating the train through a myriad of crossovers. Smitty and I were in the rear cab reading motor amperes and volts. Glancing out the window, I shouted, "Smitty, there is [[underlined]]some[[/underlined]] train! Look at that string curving up out of the yard!"

By this time, we had nosed out onto the main line. The deep drone of the gearing, the grind of wheels over sanded rails, the creaking draft gear and the acrid odor of hot insulation said that 0351 was near her limit. Proceeding west along the main line and accelerating slowly, we were soon in the narrow cut which runs for a mile or so between vertical rock walls and which is traversed by numerous overhead bridges carrying streets over the cut, these bridges supported in the middle by steel columns standing between the two tracks.

"Things are looking good," I yelled at Smitty. And then all hell broke loose. 

The bulkhead door flew open and the head brakeman rushed in, screaming, "Stop her! A man‘s been killed!"

"What in God's name---," I shouted.

"Don't argue," he screamed, "STOP HER!"

All the controls in our cab were locked because it was at the rear of the locomotive--a11 were locked but the pantograph-