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That evening, 0362 returned to Grand Central hauling #29, 14 cars, 940-tons, with Engineer Charles Swartz at the helm. This was our heaviest train so far and Swartz had her wide open on Notch AC19 going up West Haven Hill. But there were no problems and 0362 settled down in Grand Central to spend the night and cool off after a day of stepped-up labor. 

I wish it were possible for me to recapture the utter thrill of riding these big beautiful locomotives up and down the New Haven. You might think that people living through this high-class area would have little interest in something as prosaic as a locomotive but actually during those first days of operation, there were many people hanging around the swanky little stations who had quite obviously come down to see the new engines. Among the proudest moments of my life were those when we'd come roaring into a station for a stop, the odor of red-hot wheel treads in the air, sparks flying from the shoes, and I sitting in a cab window, sometimes even the fireman's, and looking out and down at the people standing along the platform and gazing up at us as we decellerated past them--and the biggest thrill of all, allowing to pass through my mind the thoughts that I fancied were passing through the minds of those locomotive watchers: what a fantastic machine! Wonder who that guy is up there in the window--God! but what he must know about the thing--maybe from GE? from the New Haven offices? The chills would run up and down my spine. I even would kid myself sometimes that they might even think I was running the locomotive--and that was the biggest super-thrill of them all. And another tremendously exciting and satisfactory feeling at the time was the consciousness of the suddenly bulging response that we experience when we transferred at Woodlawn from 600-volt DC third-rail to the 11,000-volt AC overhead trolley. The locomotive all of a sudden became an entirely new animal, surging with what seemed like double the power--and wasn't far from it either. I sued to enjoy this same feeling at Hoboken on the Kiddie Cars when we switched from internal power of battery-engine to the 3,000-volt overhead and the locomotives suddenly changed personalities completely. And as I've already said, it was just a thrill to ride up that New Haven line and whiz through all the lovely little towns and get a fleeting glimpse now and then of Long Island Sound in the distance. It was a lot of fun--thrilling fun, particularly from an emotional point of view. I can still thrill at it. 

Along in this first week sometime, we made a test run with 15 Pullmans from Mott Haven to New Haven and return. In addition to the regular engine crew, Charles Hess, our principal road foreman friend, was aboard and handled the locomotive while the regular engineer got a free ride with pay. Jim Bracken was with us as well as Bob Walsh and myself. Instead of keeping a good record of the run, I simply jotted down ^[[later]] a lot of incidents that occurred and not necessarily in chronological order, the read being that I was pretty busy taking