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15

A typical Mahoney statement regarding conductors would go something as follows: "Look at that con. He's got a switch-list there as long as a whore's dream and doesn't know what to do with it." If Mahoney suspected the "cheerleaders" of being at all dissatisfied with the speed with which he was doing the work, he'd say something like: "Okay, you son of a bitch! I'll turn her upside down this time!" Using this line of thinking, it was said that Mahoney had once left the throttle wide open on a switching move and hit a boxcar so hard that the car wound up "welded" to the front of the locomotive. Another wild tale, this one when Mahoney was in road-freight service, had him stripping an R-1 (4-8-2) freight locomotive on a devil-may-care run when one main rod got loose at speed and devastated that entire side of the engine. But Mahoney had seemed to live a charmed life and had never been injured in any of his escapades from anything that I could gather. Also, he would occasionally depart from his arrogant manner and inquire of the fireman, for example, quite docilely as to when they'd get their "twenty", which meant when would they get their lunch period. But most of the time when we were on with Mahoney, he was rarin' and roarin' about something or at somebody.

We proceeded from Providence to Boston, where we concluded our testing. As I remember our work in Boston, it was relatively undemanding and hence left little impression on me. Perhaps this was because our travail in Boston with the CP38 compressor having been such a short time before the tests, they suffered by contrast. As we did during the compressor mess, the diesel was serviced at Dover Street enginehouse where the foreman was a 35-year-old good egg named Croke. We did no switching at South Station because I assume that was 6-wheel territory. Really about the only switching scenes I am able to conjure up out of my memories of the tests in Boston, is working a tremendous area which was largely among city streets. I think part of it was a huge market where the railroad delivered carload after carload of fruit and vegetables. Or possibly it was the other way around and the foodstuffs were delivered to the railroad in this area and hauled out. I remember a big team track area where we worked. I recall vaguely working in these places during some miserably wet weather. I'm quite mystified at my inability to recall not only more about the work in Boston but also the work at Hartford. There were only two ^[[Boston]] crew members who have survived in my memory and they primarily because of their names. One was a guy named Cement Head Huns and I think he was a conductor. The other was Kidney Feet Tommy, so nicknamed because he had stiff feet--but in spite of this affliction, he was a conductor also and had to do a lot of moving around on the ground. And so the picture seems to be one of Cement Head Huns and Kidney Feet Tommy working and their brakemen unknown as well as their engine crews, and all this taking place in a very