“Now’s your time, if you want to take a good mile,” says the friendly fireman.

We take his advice, and by aid of a stop watch, especially borrowed for the occasion, we ascertain the fact that a mile is covered in fifty-two seconds.  The next mile is two seconds slower, but the speed is more than maintained on the third mile.  Reduced to ordinary speed figures, this means that we are making something like seventy miles an hour, and doing vastly better than was even anticipated.  Our good work is, however, interfered with by the sudden application of the air brakes and the shutting off of steam as we approach a little station, where the signal is against us.  A change in train orders proves to be the cause of the hindrance to our progress, and the engineer grumbles somewhat as he finds he will have to wait at a station some twenty miles further on, provided a train coming in the opposite direction is not on the side track before he gets there.  The execution of this order involves a delay of five or ten minutes, but when we have the line clear again such good time is made that we accomplish our task and pull into the depot, where locomotives are to be changed, on time to the second.

Such is a ride on a locomotive in broad daylight.  At night of course the dangers and risks are increased ten-fold.  The head-light pierces into the inky darkness, and frequently exaggerates the size of objects on and near the track.  The slightest misunderstanding, the most trivial misinterpretation of an order, the least negligence on the part of any one connected with or employed by the road, may involve a wreck, to the total destruction of the train and its passengers, and the engineer feels every moment the full extent of his responsibilities and the nature of the risks he runs.

These responsibilities are increased ten-fold by the great speed necessary in these days of haste and hurry.  Few of our great-grandfathers lived to see steam applied as a motive power for locomotion.  Most of our grandparents remember the first train being run in this country.  Many of those who read these lines can recollect when a philosopher placed himself on record that a speed of twenty miles was impossible, because, even if machinery could be constructed to stand the wear and tear, the motion would be so rapid that the train men and passengers would succumb to apoplexy or some other terrible and fatal malady.

It is less than seventy years ago since the time that the so-called crank, George Stephenson, ventured modestly to assert that his little four-and-a-half-ton locomotive, “The Rocket,” was actually capable of whirling along one to two light carriages at the astounding velocity of twelve miles an hour.  He was laughed to scorn by the highly intelligent British Parliamentary Committee engaged in the investigation of his new method of land traveling.  At the present day, with regularly scheduled trains on many lines thundering across wide continents tirelessly hour after hour, at the rate of a mile a minute, it is the deliberate judgment of the most conservative students of railway science that the ultimate limit of speed is still in the far distance, and that 100 miles per hour will not be deemed an extraordinary rate of travel by the time the first decade of the Twentieth Century shall have closed.