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thermometer readings of some of the apparatus back around the center of the locomotive. However, I'll try to put together some kind of a story because it seems to have been an interesting ride. The locomotive was 0362 again. It wasn't long before Charlie Hess pronounced 0363 "a ball of fire" and I don't think he was the first to bestow this honor upon her. Charlie had her up to 75-mph in notch AC15 which is pretty good for 15 Pullmans, particularly when there are still four notches to go to having her wide open. Charlie was looking for the speed at which the OSR (overspeed relay) tripped and found it was 77-mph after which he began holding the speed well below this to prevent our making too good a showing and thus not encourage the management to begin cutting schedules--for Charlie found that with 15 Pullmans, 0362 could easily beat the time of the YANKEE CLIPPER which normally had seven or eight and was the all-Pullman daytime flyer between New York and Boston and one of the darlings of the New Haven fleet.  So Charlie nursed her along a little much of the time. However, 0362 rode like a Pullman at high speed, sailing into curves so fast sometimes that you wondered just a little if Charlie was using his judgement, but having her take them beautifully. Nevertheless, the fireman expressed the hope that "she never leaves the iron wide open--it would be just too bad--they'd pick me up in a basket." The regular engineer was grumbling about something else. He opined somewhat heatedly, "They build an engine and then they try to find a place to put the crew!" The fat engineers would have to go on a diet if they expected to sit "up there in the pulpit." No one bothered to advise him that we'd built a fullsize wooden mock-up of the operating cab at Erie in an effort to get a good comfortable job. Bob Walsh and I spent a lot of time back in "the cave of the winds" as Jim Smith called the apparatus cab, which occupied the big central section of the cab and was absolutely jammed full of equipment between the two very-narrow outside aisles running from one operating cab to the other. The control was arranged so that the big JR air circuit breaker opened whenever the traction motors slipped, and since we had some rain during the test, this was a number of times. (I should have said, whenever the wheels slipped, which causes the motors to overspeed)Once when Bob Walsh was taking a thermo reading, the JR let go on a slip, splashing a big arc toward Bob, who started to run down the aisle and found me blocking him. For a guy who'd presumably spent quite a bit of time on electric locomotives, he was extremely timid about them. I gave him a laugh but he had one on me later when I ducked away from a ventilation grille when they went off the end of the third-rail with power on and threw out an arc as big as a bed sheet. Because of the rain, there was considerable slipping even at high speed and the JR barked at us several times. And when Charlie would shut off the controller, the transformer contractors going through their reverse sequence sounded for all the world like a machine gun.   

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