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Engineer Crowell once had charge of an air brake instruction car. A stranger walked in, sat down and began to listen to the lecture, taking copious notes. Crowell asked him for his pass. He had none. He said he was just interested in railroading. Crowell eased him out. It developed that he was lawyer working on a case against the railroad and his purpose in being there was to gather information which would be helpful to him in prosecuting his case for his client.

Rowayton is a small station in Connecticut on the Shore Line. It was customary to toss bundles of newspapers off newspaper trains onto station platforms without stopping. One day a newspaper train slipped some tires on the locomotive while slowing for a station and the engineer was severely criticized. So the following Sunday, they threw a half-ton of New York Times at the Rowayton station at 70-mph and knocked the station clean off its platform. 

The "Ponies" were among the first electric passenger locomotives on the New Haven. They had no "dead man" feature which shuts off power automatically if the engineer takes his hand off the controller handle. One day an engineer fainted on a Pony while the fireman was in the rear end of the locomotive firing the train-heating boiler. The story goes that they got up to 100-mph on a 40-mph restricted curve before the conductor rushed up forward and tipped off the fireman what was going on. I might add that the Ponies were notoriously rough riders. The fireman evidently hadn't even paid attention to the tremendous lurch on the 40-mph curve.

It was against the rules, but some engineers when late would run behind another high-speed passenger train on the "yellow boards" instead of the green. On one such occasion, the engineer suddenly caught a red board at New Rochelle Junction and ran clean through a milk train on the crossing.

One famed expression for speed: "Goin' like the hobs of hell!"

I've written previously about New Haven West Cut where Lew Webb was nearly killed when he struck his head on a bridge column when looking out the locomotive side window to admire the long train. The West Cut is a lethal place for bums unfamiliar with the New Haven. They get knocked off trains when riding on the side ladders of freight cars.

A negro hopped a freight in West Cut, climbed to the car roof, where he sat down and rode with his head just about a foot from the 11,000-volt trolley wire. A brakeman saw him, pulled the air. The train stopped, pulling out two drawheads, and the nigger beat it up the nearest street.