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sure that Frank Headley returned to Philadelphia weekends because it was nearby and cheaper for the Company to pay his rail fare than his keep in Washington; however, this wasn't true for me and I spent a number of weekends down there. At that point I didn't have many friends in Washington yet and it was pretty lonesome staying over. I find that Bill Sagstetter and I became quite chummy as a result of this, Denver being a fur piece to go for a weekend too, and Bill and I had some pleasant times together using his car to get around the area. On a memorable trip to Williamsburg Bill got arrested for speeding in Virginia. But even despite the fact he didn't have his driver's license with him, or maybe didn't even have one, he managed to talk his way out of the situation with merely a fine of $11. So it would appear that Bob Van Zandt wasn't the only one with persuasiveness. But Bill Sagstetter was a young man interested in action and not paper-shufflign and he wasn't really in his ideal spot in WPB. He became associated with the "locomotive mess" although he had no part in being responsible for it. But he got tarred with that brush nevertheless, got in bad with Andy Stevenson, and soon sought other employment. He wound up by going into Army Ordnance to work for a commission as a locomotive maintenance supervisor. He left WPB on July 31st. Only five days later, "Old Bill" Sagstetter hove into town along with Perry Egbert and Frank Foley of Alco, yelling for locomotive releases for the D&RGW. He had some fancy alloys in his specs but he was ready to settle for anything.

And so began our search for sponsors for the 400 or so locomotives we had on order. As I remember it, early in 1942 there were no large single orders yet on our books as there were later in the war, when the military procured large quantities of custom-built units for special clearances and track gauges for use in the theaters of operation in various parts of the world. Our "order board" contained a multiplicity of small orders from industry largely as well as army and navy installations in the United States. Of course, this situation multiplied the work involved because you had to look just as hard sometimes for a sponsor for one locomotive as you did for a sponsor for an order of a dozen. The Army is a good place to begin because it was probably the most confused. It might sound as though the Army would be simple because anything on order by the Army would obviously be okay and you should be able to proceed sans any release from WPB. But that wasn't the way it worked. The law said we had to have releases on everything. And this was probably good because the confusion in the Army and Navy was sometimes enormous; the right hand sometimes didn't know what the left hand was doing. Nor was there some single individual or even office where you could go to discuss all Army orders. It was a common gripe to find an Army officer who was supposed to have the answers complaining bitterly that he was ill-in-