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and we swung immediately into the now familiar "wild Irish" life of our Boston office - breakfast at St. Clair's, some interchanges in the office and "coffee" at St. Clair's at 10 AM with Roy, Neil and Stanley Thomas. Roy was in rare form telling stories he heard at a [[underlined]] Retreat [[/underlined]] over the weekend.

We picked up Larry Richardson at 11 AM and drove him to North Billerica where we had a short session followed by a lousy lunch in the restaurant there. From Billerica we hopped to Whitinsville to look at an ancient G.E. standard 50 ton 600 volt trolley locomotive purchased by Whitin Machine Works second hand from the Southwest Missouri Railway and suffering from a broken wheel. Donovan checked the job to see if a 33" wheel could be substituted for the present 36" wheels. I inquired of Roy, why the change? He said they wanted to haul more. I asked if the equipment was overheating now? He said no. I then opined changing to 33" wheels wouldn't allow them to haul one ton more - they needed more weight or the equivalent. Thus the whole course of the thing changed and I took away a proposition for bolstering up the job somehow to haul 400 tons instead of 300. I felt I really had earned my day's pay by catching that one. We rushed back to the office at Boston, getting there at 6:15 PM, train time 7:00 PM. We had just time to clean up our work, have a couple of scotches at the usual place and I caught the train by