Railway Adventures and Anecdotes Part 27

A NEWSPAPER WONDER.

The _Railway Journal_, an American newspaper, containing the latest intelligence with respect to home and foreign politics, the money market, Congress debates, and theatrical events, is now printed and published daily in the trains running between New York and San Francisco. All the news with which its columns are filled is telegraphed from different parts of the States to certain stations on the line, there collected by the editorial staff travelling in the train, and set up, printed, and circulated among the subscribing pa.s.sengers while the iron horse is persistently traversing plains and valleys, crossing rivers, and ascending mountain ranges. Every morning the traveller may have his newspaper served up with his coffee, and thus keep himself informed of all that is going on in the wide world during a seven days' journey covering over three thousand miles of ground. He who pays his subscription at New York, which he can do at the railway ticket-office, receives the last copy of his paper on the summit of the Sierra Nevada.

The production of a news-sheet from a flying printing office at an elevation of some ten thousand feet above the level of the sea is most a.s.suredly a performance worthy of conspicuous record in journalistic annals, and highly creditable to American enterprise.

MONETARY DIFFICULTIES IN SPAIN.

Sir Arthur Helps, in his life of Mr. Bra.s.sey, remarks:-"There were few, if any, of the great undertakings in which Mr. Bra.s.sey embarked that gave him so much trouble in respect of the financial arrangements as the Spanish railway from Bilbao to Tudela. The secretary, Mr. Tapp, thus recounts the difficulties which they had to encounter:-

"'The great difficulty in Spain was in getting money to pay the men for doing the work-a very great difficulty. The bank was not in the habit of having large cheques drawn upon it to pay money; for nearly all the merchants kept their cash in safes in their offices, and it was a very debased kind of money, coins composed of half copper and half silver, and very much defaced. You had to take a good many of them on faith. I had to send down fifteen days before the pay day came round, to commence getting the money from the bank, obtaining perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 a day. It was brought to the office, recounted, and put into my safe. In that way I acc.u.mulated a ton-and-a-half of money every month during our busy season. When pay week came, I used to send a carriage or a large coach, drawn by four or six mules, with a couple of civil guards, one on each side, together with one of the clerks from the office, a man to drive, and another-a sort of stableman-who went to help them out of their difficulty in case the mules gave any trouble up the hilly country. I was at the office at six o'clock, and I was always in a state of anxiety until I knew that the money had arrived safely at the end of the journey.

More than once the conveyance broke down in the mountains. On one occasion the axle of our carriage broke in half from the weight of the money, and I had to send off two omnibuses to relieve them. I had the load divided, and sent one to one section of the line and one to the other.

"'Q.-Was any attempt made to rob the carriage?

"'A.-Never; we always sent a clerk armed with a revolver as the princ.i.p.al guard. We heard once of a conspiracy to rob us; but, to avoid that, we went by another road. We were told that some men had been seen loitering about the mountain the night before.'"

A CARLIST CHIEF AS A SUB-CONTRACTOR.

The natural financial difficulties of constructing a railway in Spain were added to by the strange kind of people Mr. Bra.s.sey's agents were obliged to employ. One of the sub-contractors was a certain Carlist chief whom the government dared not arrest on account of his great influence. Mr. Tapp thus relates the Carlist chief's mode of settling a financial dispute:-

"When he got into difficulties, Mr. Small, the district agent, offered him the amount which was due to him according to his measured work. He had over 100 men to pay, and Mr. Small offered him the money that was coming to him, according to the measurement, but he would not have it, nor would he let the agent pay the men. He said he would have the money he demanded; and he brought all his men into the town of Orduna, and the men regularly bivouacked round Mr. Small's office. They slept in the streets and stayed there all night, and would not let Mr. Small come out of the office till he had paid them the money. He attempted to get on his horse to go out-his horses were kept in the house (that is the practice in the houses of Spain); but when he rode out they pulled him off his horse and pushed him back, and said that he should not go until he had paid them the money. He pa.s.sed the night in terror, with loaded pistols and guns, expecting that he and his family would be ma.s.sacred every minute, but he contrived eventually to send his staff-holder to Bilbao on horseback. The man galloped all the way to Bilbao, a distance of twenty-five miles, and went to Mr. Bartlett in the middle of the night, and told him what had happened. Mr. Bartlett immediately sent a detachment up to the place to disperse the men. This Carlist threatened that if Mr. Small did not pay the money he would kill every person in the house. When he was asked, 'Would you kill a man for that?' he replied, 'Yes, like a fly,' and this coming from a man who, as I was told, had already killed fourteen men with his own hand, was rather alarming. Mr.

Bra.s.sey and his partners suffer a great amount of loss by their contracts for the Bilbao railway."

HOW TO BEAR LOSSES.

During the construction of the Bilbao line, shortly before the proposed opening, it set in to rain in such an exceptional manner that some of the works were destroyed. The agent telegraphed to Mr. Bra.s.sey to come immediately, as a certain bridge had been washed down. About three hours afterwards another telegram was sent, stating that a large bank was washed away; and next morning, another, stating the rain continued, and more damage had been done. Mr. Bra.s.sey, turning to a friend, said, laughingly: "I think I had better wait until I hear that the rain has ceased, so that when I do go, I may see what is left of the works, and estimate all the disasters at once, and so save a second journey."

No doubt Mr. Bra.s.sey felt these great losses that occasionally came upon him much as other men do; but he had an excellent way of bearing them, and, like a great general, never, if possible, gave way to despondency in the presence of his officers.

RAILROAD INCIDENT.

An Englishwoman who travelled some years ago in America writes:-"I had found it necessary to study physiognomy since leaving England, and was horrified by the appearance of my next neighbour. His forehead was low, his deep-set and restless eyes significant of cunning, and I at once set him down as a swindler or a pickpocket. My conviction of the truth of my inference was so strong that I removed my purse-in which, however, acting by advice, I never carried more than five dollars-from my pocket, leaving in it only my handkerchief and the checks for my baggage, knowing that I could not possibly keep awake the whole morning. In spite of my endeavours to the contrary, I soon sunk into an oblivious state, from which I awoke to the consciousness that my companion was withdrawing his hand from my pocket. My first impulse was to make an exclamation; my second, which I carried into execution, to ascertain my loss, which I found to be the very alarming one of my baggage checks; my whole property being thereby placed at this vagabond's disposal, for I knew perfectly well that if I claimed my trunks without my checks the acute baggage-master would have set me down as a bold swindler. The keen-eyed conductor was not in the car, and, had he been there, the necessity for habitual suspicion incidental to his position would so far have removed his original sentiments of generosity as to make him turn a deaf ear to my request; and there was not one of my fellow-travellers whose physiognomy would have warranted me in appealing to him. So, recollecting that my checks were marked Chicago, and seeing that the thief's ticket bore the same name, I resolved to wait the chapter of accidents, or the reappearance of my friends. With a whoop like an Indian war-whoop the cars ran into a shed-they stopped-the pickpocket got up-I got up too-the baggage-master came to the door. 'This gentleman has the checks for my baggage,' said I, pointing to the thief. Bewildered, he took them from his waistcoat pocket, gave them to the baggage-master, and went hastily away. I had no inclination to cry 'stop thief!' and had barely time to congratulate myself on the fortunate impulse which had led me to say what I did, when my friends appeared from the next carriage.

They were too highly amused with my recital to sympathize at all with my feelings of annoyance, and one of them, a gentleman filling a high situation in the east, laughed heartily, saying, in a thoroughly American tone, 'The English ladies must be cute customers if they can outwit Yankee pickpockets.'"

NOVEL OBSTRUCTION.

On a certain railroad in Louisiana the alligators have the bad habit of crawling upon the track to sun themselves, and to such an extent have they pushed this practice that the drivers of the locomotives are frequently compelled to sound the engine whistle in order to scare the interlopers away.

-_Railway News_, 1867.

BABY LAW.

The railways generously permit a baby to be carried without charge; but not, it seems, without incurring responsibility. It has been lately decided, in "Austin _v._ the Great Western Railway Company," 16 L. T.

Rep., N. S., 320, that where a child in arms, not paid for as a pa.s.senger, is injured by an accident caused by negligence, the company is liable in damages under Lord Campbell's Act. Three of the judges were clearly of opinion that the company had, by permitting the mother to take the child in her arms, contracted to carry safely both mother and child; and Blackburn, J., went still further, and was of opinion that, independently of any such contract, express or implied, the law cast upon the company a duty to use proper and reasonable care in carrying the child, though unpaid for. It may appear somewhat hard upon railway companies to incur liabilities through an act of liberality, but they have chosen to do so. The law is against them, that is clear; but they have the remedy in their own hands. There was some reason for exempting a child in arms, for it occupies no place in the carriage, and is but a trifling addition of weight. But now it is established that the company is responsible for the consequences of accident to that child, the company is clearly ent.i.tled to make such a charge as will secure them against the risk. The right course would be to have a tariff, say one-fifth or one-fourth of the full fare, for a child in arms; and if strict justice was done, this would be deducted from the fares of the pa.s.sengers who have the ill-luck to face and flank the squaller.

-_Law Times_, 1867.

RAILROAD TRACKLAYER.

The railroad tracklayer is now working along regularly at the rate of a mile a day. The machine is a car 60 feet long and 10 feet wide. It has a small engine on board for handling the ties and rails. The ties are carried on a common freight car behind, and conveyed by an endless chain over the top of the machinery, laid down in their places on the track, and, when enough are laid, a rail is put down on each side in proper position and spiked down. The tracklayer then advances, and keeps on its work until the load of ties and rails is exhausted, when other car loads are brought. The machine is driven ahead by a locomotive, and the work is done so rapidly that 60 men are required to wait on it, but they do more work than twice as many could do by the old system, and the work is done quite as well. The chief contractor of the road gives it as his opinion that when the machine is improved by making a few changes in the method of handling rails and ties it will be able to put down five or six miles per day. This will render it possible to lay down track twelve times as fast as the usual rate by hand, and it will do the work at less expense. The invention will be of immense importance to the country in connection with the Pacific railroad, which it was calculated could be built as fast as the track could be laid, and no faster; but hereafter the speed will be determined by the grading, which cannot advance more than five miles a day. Thirty millions of dollars have already been invested on the Pacific railroad, and if the time of completion is hastened one year by this tracklayer, as it will be if Central and Union Companies have money enough to grade each five miles a day, there will be a saving of three million dollars on interest alone on that one road.

-_Alla California_, 1868.

A GROWING LAD.

"This your boy, ma'am?" inquired a collector of a country woman, "he's too big for a 'alf ticket." "Oh, is he?" replied the mother. "Well, perhaps he is now, mister; but he wasn't when he started. The train is ever so much behind time-has been so long on the road-and he's a growing lad!"

FORGED TICKETS.

Attempts to defraud railway companies by means of forged tickets are seldom made, and still more seldom successful. In 1870, a man who lived in a toll-house near Dudley, and who rented a large number of tolls on the different turnpikes, in almost every part of the country, devised a plan for travelling cheaply. He set up a complete fount of type, composing stick, and every requisite for printing tickets, and provided himself with coloured papers, colours, and paints to paint them, and plain cards on which to paste them; and he prepared tickets for journeys of great length, and available to and from different stations on the London and North-Western, Great Western, and Midland lines. On arriving one day at the ticket platform at Derby, he presented a ticket from Masbro' to Smethwick. The collector, who had been many years in the service of the company, thought there was something unusual in the ticket. On examination he found it to be a forgery, and when the train arrived at the platform gave the pa.s.senger into custody. On searching his house, upwards of a thousand railway tickets were discovered in a drawer in his bedroom, and the apparatus with which the forgeries were accomplished was also secured. On the prisoner himself was the sum of 199 10s., and it appeared that he came to be present at the annual letting of the tolls on the different roads leading out of Derby. The punishment he received was sufficiently condign to serve as a warning to all who might be inclined to emulate such attempts after cheap locomotion.

-Williams's _Midland Railway_.