It is true that railroad schedules seldom call for mile-a-minute traveling, but the engineer is called upon very frequently to go even faster.  The majority of people, even the most intelligent among those who habitually travel, obtain their conceptions of speed from the figures of the time-table, forgetting that in nearly every instance considerable portions of the route must be traversed at much more than the average speed required to cover the total distance in the schedule time.  There are very few, if any, of the fast express trains which do not, on some part of each “run,” reach or exceed a speed of a mile a minute.  Yet, by reason of superior roadway and well constructed cars, the accelerated velocity is unnoticed; while running at from sixty to seventy miles an hour the passenger calmly peruses his paper or book, children play in the aisle, and a glass brim full of water may be carried from one end to the other of the smoothly rolling coach without the spilling of a drop.  All the while the nerves of those in charge of the train are kept at high tension, and, oblivious as the passengers may be as to the danger, actual and imaginary, the risks incurred are never for a moment lost sight of by the two men on the locomotive.

The man in the signal tower has an equal responsibility.  In some respects the burden upon his shoulders is even greater, because he has the fate of perhaps a score of trains in his hands, with the lives of hundreds of passengers.  Now and then, when the wrong lever has been pulled and a train is wrecked, we hear of a signal man sleeping at his post, but few of us stop to think how many thousand times a day the right lever is pulled, and how exceptional is the lapse from duty.  There are heroes of the sea, and there are heroes of the battle-field, but there are ten times as many heroes who perform their deeds of heroism on locomotives, in switch and signal towers, and in railroad yards.  It may not be fashionable to compare these savers of human life with those who destroy life on the battle-field, but the valor and endurance of the former is at least as conspicuous and meritorious as the daring and suffering of the latter.

In “Scribner’s Magazine” there recently appeared a most graphic description of a two-storied, square signal tower at “Sumach Junction.”

“This tower,” says the contributor to the magazine named, “had two rows of windows on all sides and stood at the intersection of branches.  At this point the trunk line resolved itself from four tracks into two, and here the gravel track, which looked as if it had been laid by a palsied contractor, left the main line and respectability behind, and hobbled out of sight behind the signal station with an intoxicated air.  Beneath the tower, to the right hand, a double-tracked branch tapped a fertile country beyond the sand hills.  And beneath the signal tower, to the left, a single-tracked branch, only a mile long, brought South Sumach, one of those tiresome towns that manufacture on water-power, in touch with the middle man.  This petty branch (as if the case had been with petty people), made more trouble than all the rest of the lines put together.  The signal man found this out.