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down switch. Smitty pulled it. As the receding pan severed 7,000-KW of power, simultaneously melting part of the overhead, the reflection of the tremendous arc on the side of the cut blinded us. The locomotive went dead with an enormous backward jerk. We could hear shouting in the forward cab and then the crash of the emergency brake application. 

Following the brakeman, Smitty and I stumbled into the narrow passage. Lew was lying on the catwalk, motionless and soaked with blood. His face looked blue to me. If he wasn't dead, he was out absolutely cold and looked dead. I'd never seen anyone like that before and I couldn't believe what I was experiencing was real. It had to be an incredible, impossible bad dream! The Train ground to a jolting halt. While the brakeman unloaded to find a phone, Smitty and I carried Lew to the forward-operating cab and soon transferred him to a switcher which had been rounded up to carry him out of the cut to where he could be put into an ambulance. He was still alive when they put him into the ambulance but none of us ever expected to see him alive again. But we had to get back to the test as we were tying up the main line and the railroad had to go on regardless of accidents. So they took Lew off to New Haven Hospital and returned to the locomotive.

We proceeded with our run and I think we wound up at Bay Ridge, which is a part of Brooklyn, because they didn't want such a horrendously long train as this at the moment in either Grand Central or Penn Terminal. Jim Bracken was always inclined to be a nervous, worrying type, and as I recall it, the New Haven had usually been quite casual about have people like us sign releases to protect the railroad against liability in just such cases as this, and poor, old Jim, a really great guy at heart, worried about what the New Haven might be into with this thing, all the rest of the day. At Bay Ridge, we checked the hospital to find Lew still alive, and then we began our trip back to New Haven.

We put the train away, drifted up to Kelsey's place, where we left 0351, and then went into the station washroom to clean up a little before returning to the Taft Hotel, meanwhile having ascertained that Lew was still hanging on. We all had on old clothes and any of us who'd handled Lew at all, were bloodstained, Smitty and I the worst of all. My jacket, shirt and slacks were a sight. And while we were attempting to wash off a little of it, I spied a cop looking at us over a partition in the washroom, and looking extremely suspicious. But for some reason, he failed to challenge us and we soon got a cab for the Taft.

After putting on some respectable clothes and cleaning up some more, or vice versa, we went to New Haven Hospital to get the story and to see Lew if possible. Lew had had a ghastly contusion on his head. What had happened? Lew remembered nothing. But the New Haven people suspected and soon found a large piece of his scalp stuck to a bridge column in the cut. Lew

Transcription Notes:
Changed pen to pan.