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The engineer on our first run the next day may have been a distant cousin of mine because his name was Phelps. He piloted #50 to New Haven on a run with a mere six cars which about like running light for 0362. After laying overnight at GCT, the Pyranol temperature had cooled from its maximum way down to 43° when we left and the run was so light that it soon dropped still further to 37° and remained there all the way to New Haven. It was seldom we were to get anything like that. In the meantime, the ambient had dropped to 73°. And then we had our first assignment to Pennsylvania Terminal in New York as well as one of the most interesting engineers we were to encounter, John "Didoe' Nickerson. The train was #175, fourteen cars, and one of the several operating from Boston to Penn Terminal and beyond in some cases. I believe this train was THE PATRIOT, a day train from Boston to Washington. "Didoe" normally made his runs on the Hell Gate Bridge Route to Penn Station. In appearance, he was 60ish, tall, almost chinless, a florid dissipated-looking face, pale-blue eyes and thinning gray hair. When Didoe boarded 0362 at New Haven, it was evident that he was no ordinary individual and I shall have more to say about him shortly. I think this was my first run over Hell Gate and through the East River tubes into Penn Station. Didoe didn't fool around, shooting up West Haven Hill at 65-mph with his sizeable train of fourteen cars behind us. At New Rochelle Jct. we departed the main line, dropped down through Hunt's Point, Oak Point, and then over the great bridge onto Long Island, thence through Brooklyn, under the East River and into Penn Station three minutes early. One classic story relates that one New Haven engineer used to go through the East River tubes so fast that he threw a cloud of dust ahead of the locomotive so thick it was impossible to see the signals. On our trip however, nothing untoward happened and it wasn't long before we were en route back to New Haven with #176 behind us, fourteen cars, Didoe again at the throttle and arriving at New Haven two minutes early. We got back in time to handle #59 once more and play around with THE MERCHANTS, which was ahead of us with six cars and pulled by 0305, an old Baldwin-Westinghouse job, referred to commonly as the "oh-three hundred." However, Charlie Hess was with us this time and he wouldn't allow Engineer Gundy pass, making him keep a few car-lengths behind all the way to Bridgeport, where we stopped and the MERCHANTS was soon long gone. We called it a day when we reached New York but 0362 returned to New Haven with #56 and Road Foreman Henry Kramer aboard just in case but all went well. It was probably o362's biggest day to that point. [[paragraph indent]] The story of Didoe Nickerson was told me by Frank Goebel, one of the Road Foremen and follows: Didoe was the black sheep of a fine family, one brother being a New York judge and another an executive in a big New York utility company. Didoe started at West Point but was expelled. Later he was accused of squealing on a gang of Connecticut horse thieves and went west to [[end page]]

Transcription Notes:
On the left side of the page are three black circles indicating that this was three-holed punched. mandc: I don't believe the page number was preprinted. Looks like typewriter font.