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13

Before going on to Providence, we made a very brief stop at Hartford and I can remember very little about it. Had I been on my toes, I might have looked up Dorothy Baptiste of the S.S. SOUTH AMERICAN cruise of 1936 but apparently this never occurred to me. I think we spent one night at Hartford. I have a recollection of a fine, clean, open city which I admired. Beyond that, I recall virtually nothing and I think it was my one and only visit to Hartford.

However, Providence was another matter. At Providence we encountered and an unusually articulate group of switcher crews and I had several notes on incidents with these men that are worth noting. Most of these happened at Northrup Avenue hump yard where we found a lot of action. As at most places, we found crews favorable to the diesels as well as others quite antagonistic to them. I remember distinctly standing beside the track one night taking data when a string of a dozen cars rolled by, pushed by a big 3400 Class 8-wheel switcher. It was a miserable night of fog and rain. Presently the locomotive roared by, the sand pouring onto the rails ahead of the drivers, which were slipping and grabbing, the exhaust explosive and uneven, rods churning away in the bedlam. If you let yourself be influenced by the noise, mechanical motion of the 3400's running gear, as well as the general confusion, you could easily imagine the 8-wheeler was smashing by at 15-20 mph--when in reality she probably wasn't doing as much as ten. But as she passed us, a big, burly young engineer leaned way out his cab window, grinned from ear to ear, and yelled at us at the top of his lungs, "Think the diesel'd do this? SHIT!" And as he disappeared into the rain and fog, we could hear him roar with laughter.

It may have been on this same job a few nights later, that the diesel put on quite a show. To start with, we had a very amenable and venturesome engineer whose first comment of the evening was: "Bring on the cars. I'll rattle 'em." And this he did. The diesel was a fragile-looking thing compared to the bulging 3400 including its tender, and most of the crews had great difficulty believing that the diesel could kick cars even better than a 3400 under some conditions. On this particular occasion, the engineer went after it with enthusiasm and we walked up into the yard into which the cars were being kicked just to see whether they were getting up there satisfactorily. We finally located a brakeman and inquired. He looked at us almost incredulously. "Sufferin' Christ!" he said. "I'll say they're gettin' up here! He just knocked a boxcar clean off her trucks!" I must confess that although this was an undesirable thing to have occur, I was secretly pleased.

There was a freight conductor named "Prick" McGill and I find a note to the effect that Prick McGill's stove in his caboose was knocked off its legs. However, I don't know whether or not we were responsible for that, more's the pity.