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20

   I was in the washroom one day around the first of April and I overheard Rudy Krape say to someone: "A railroad president tells us that he has an appropriation for a three-car streamlined train to run 100 mph. He says he's going to buy one inside of a month." I mention this for two reasons. First, it is a positive indication that things were suddenly making a turn for the better. In 1932 no railroad president in his right mind would have contemplated seriously placing an order for a radical new streamlined train and if he had he probably would have been fired immediately for suddenly having taken leave of his sense. The second reason is that this was no idle chatter. The president was referring to what proved to be the now-famed "Burlington Zephyr" which was delivered in 1934, a stainless steel sensation built by Budd and using an Electro Motive engine and GE electrical equipment.
   However, although things were beginning to turn upward at last, there was quite a time lag before this began to show in our locomotive shop, which was practically flat on its face in the spring of 1933. One of the New York Central R2 freight locomotives which had burned up, No.1232, had been returned to Erie to be rebuilt and constituted just about the only thing in the locomotive shop. In early May it was completed and sent to Bldg. 60 to be tested. At 60, Metzner, the foreman, and Harry Craig, his assistant, were doing the testing them selves. Bird Hawk and I went over there one afternoon to look things over ostensibly but more fundamentally to kill some time, something which we had a great deal of to kill. Bldg. 60 was dead, quiet, depressing except for one thing--the array of memories it always summoned, for me, being there in 1926 in particular. That had been nearly seven years before and I'd been 24 years old. Now I was almost 31! And where was I, thanks to the Depression? At that moment, I'd had almost no work at all assigned to me because there was almost nothing to assign. It was a problem of stalling as gracefully as possible. I was very unhappy. I didn't enjoy having no work to occupy me and never had. If I'd been financially independent at the time, I'd have ditched the whole business and turned my attention 100% to me writing. But this was obviously impossible.
   Bird and I enjoyed talking together about old times and he had a wealth of experience in locomotive building and testing work. One of his stories concerned one of the big Milwaukee 3000-volt locomotives which developed a horrible stench while going through test. After almost endless searching, they found it was caused by a dead rat which had been electrocuted and was caught down in an utterly inaccessible niche which would have required a costly disassembly operation to remove. So they had to simply go on with their test program and put up with the stench until I believe the rat's remains were finally incinerated electrically by the accelerating resistors. I was reminded of three of my favorite test stories as follows: