Control

A railroad train is thundering through the night, between Boone, la., and Council Bluffs. The engineer is sick, fainting. The fireman drunk, at his post, does not know. On the block of track a mile ahead, a wheezy freight grumbles up a grade, behind schedule and on the flier's rails. Disaster whines through the cab window, for the prostrate engineer has not seen the block signal, his throttle yawns unheeded.

What are those blue sparks under the engine's front truck? What whistle is this that hoots in the cab? The engineer does not stir, the tipsy fireman cannot hear above his clanking rake and the ' shattering roar of the coal car. The whistle in the cab changes its note.

What is this? Miraculously the plunging express is slowing down, 50, 40, 30 only 20 miles an hour. But the freight is only half a mile ahead now.

Still the men in the cab and coal car are oblivious. The warning whistle stops. There is a scream of airbrakes all along the train, an unseen hand shuts the steam throttle, the express comes to a grinding, jolting halt. The life it carries is safe. The conductor, trotting beside the ties to investigate, thanks his stars that the Chicago & Northwestern Railway installed its new automatic train control along that particular stretch of track.*

For that is what saved this extremely hypothetical situation, a device tested and approved by the Interstate Commerce Commission, installed by the company named at a cost of $5,300 a mile on its 150-mile stretch between Boone and Council Bluffs, and announced last week. Fifteen locomotives are already equipped, others being made ready at five per week to a total of 112. The device consists in a series of coils placed in front of the engine's wheels and six inches above the track. The block signals are connected with switches controlling a powerful electric current which enters the rails. The series of effects described above takes place if the engineer does not act at the first warning note of the automatic whistle.

*The Northwestern's announcement came almost exactly on the hundredth anniversary of the steam engine. On Sept. 27, 1825, with no small ceremony and excitement the hitherto horse-drawn cars running from the Darlington coal mines to the Stockton docks (County Durham, England) 37 miles away, were hitched to a steam-driven wagon invented by Engineer George Stephenson of Scotland.