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word they said and we all believed them. But, sadly, it was a disastrous industrial tragedy in the making, so bad, in fact, that as a result of it, Busch never did get into the locomotive engine business.

Rudolph Schneider was a heavy-set, pink-cheeked, pleasant man of middle age with whom it was a treat to do business. He was always courteous and considerate and fully cooperative. He had visited Erie a few times during the course of the locomotive design and we had tried to see that his calls on us were enjoyable. As I remember him, he was a rather serious man and not too much of a drinker. He would reciprocate our hospitality whenever we came to St. Louis. I remember his taking us to dinner one evening and then going out to Forest Park to attend the municipal opera there which was put on in the impressive open-air theater, which was the largest of its kind in the country at that time. The production was "The Desert Song" as I remember and beautifully done. It was a warm but pleasant evening and delightful to be sitting outdoors in the big, handsome amphitheater under the stars and witnessing a fine performance along with thousands of others who obviously appreciated something truly well done and in highly good taste. The staging, lighting, costuming, acting and singing were all strictly top grade. I couldn't help contrasting this evening with some of the sleazy, crummy experiences I'd sometimes had elsewhere with people of a lot less taste. Somehow, I don't recall Mr. Schneider as a particularly happy-acting man. Nor do I remember ever meeting his wife or learning much about his domestic life. I do have a record, however, of his having once told of his return to Switzerland in 1935, or only about a year before, to see his last surviving sister. He found that she was out of her mind, didn't know him, and he had to put her into an institution before returning to St. Louis. In the meantime, she had died. It may be that this episode had been affecting him.

As I've indicated, one could not avoid being deeply impressed with the Busch-Sulzer organization, facilities and reputation. Their major competitors were probably Nordberg and McIntosh & Seymour but I believe that Busch was rated at the head of the list of builders of very large diesel engines. When we would talk of railroad road service being tough and requiring an engine that could really take it because of the high load factor, Mr. Schneider would merely say that their marine engines were designed to run continuously at full load from the time they left the Panama Canal until they arrived in China, and this took around 30 days in freight service; certainly railroad service couldn't remotely approach this sort of demand but their railroad engine, nevertheless, was designed to exactly the same standards. They had no qualms whatever about its ability to stand up successfully in railroad road service. All they said was true and we, not being engine designers at the time, failed to see the

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