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11 learning the art of railroad management. Jim Barngrove was a tall, rather homely young man who was to fill out in later years and rise in the Mechanical Dept. as I recall. I recall Jack Weller as a smallish guy, maybe about my size, and both smooth and good-looking; however, I've no idea what ultimately happened to him. All these young men, although they didn't realize it at the time, were working for a railroad which was to get a brutal kicking around ten or fifteen years later and their personal chances of weathering the storm were slim. Bill Libby finally committed suicide, as I've already written, Phil Hatch quit or was fired. But in 1937, things were rosy and we had a lot of fun running these tests. Although I kept no diary whatever in 1937, I do find a diary reference to one episode in 1937 in my 1939 diary recounting a reunion with Bill Libby in Boston in January that year. I was having dinner with Bill and his new wife, Beatrice, at the Coconut Grove, and we ran into Margot Clark and her brother, I having met Margot two years before in New Haven. I had retired in my room at the Taft when I was awakened by a phone call from Bill urging me to join them in the Grill Room. This I did, meeting Margot, and we wound up drinking in Jack Weller's apartment--and for some obscure reason, Margot thought it was my apartment. I can remember sitting around that night in the kitchen of Jack's apartment drinking highballs and talking over mutual experiences. It is evident from this one incident in 1937, that I was on a fairly intimate basis with the younger New Haven gang and I did enjoy them thoroughly, particularly Bill. I'm very sorry to be unable to come up with more of our experiences together, that is, our non-business experiences. As for the 1937 tests, I believe we started them at New Haven and worked our way eastward to Boston from there. Most of the work we did at New Haven was out at Cedar Hill yard which handled the extensive freight classification work generated as a result of its location at the junction of the electrified line to Oak Point and Bay Ridge, the Maybrook line, and the Hartford-Springfield line, as well as the Shore Line to Providence and Boston. It was a huge yard and very modern. It was designed around a double hump and an elaborate car-retarder system that was fascinating to watch in operation and we'd sneak a trip to the hump tower occasionally just to watch them break up a train with the aid of a train-consist teletype system, loudspeakers in the yard, special humping signal system, and four-position retarders which could be set correctly for the weight of each car as ascertained from the teletype as it came across the hump. It required great skill to run this set-up but it was a remarkable piece of machinery. The entire hump yard was equipped with switch-heaters and it took a very severe winter storm to tie it up. For the life of me, I can't remember now if they used any car riders at all with this car-retarder installation but we heard plenty of stories about humping with riders
