By Margaret Coel, Visit Amazon's Sam Speas Page, search results, Learn about Author Central, Sam Speas,
As the USA, carried alongside by means of the increasing rail method, moved westward within the 19th century, few occupations appeared extra interesting or romantic than that of railroad engineer. And within the mountains and plains of the West, lengthy hours, backbreaking hard work, sour temperatures, and defective brakes have been the crucible during which the easiest of the early railroaders have been shaped: basically the main devoted and expert males handed the exams the narrow-gauge traces of Colorado meted out. In Goin' Railroading, Sam Speas tells the tale of his father, Sam Speas Sr., who left Missouri in 1883 to turn into an engineer in Colorado, and recounts his personal stories and people of his brothers and fellow railroaders at the Colorado and Southern Railway, from the golden period of the narrow-gauge strains in South Park to the ultimate days of steam energy at the entrance diversity and the arriving of the diesel engine.
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Example text
The telegrapher Page 18 wired the Boulder stationmaster to look for the child as soon as the train pulled into Boulder. The stationmaster found her, but not in the coach. She had climbed onto the cowcatcher and ridden it down the mountain. In the early 1920s, I was deadheading on passenger train 30 from Denver to Cheyenne when one of the senior conductors on the North End, Johnny Mans, sat down beside me for a chat. He told me that his wife had been that little girl. She had hung onto the cowcatcher for her life, he said, too terrified to scream.
He would hover around the boiler, the only source of heat, as much as possible in the winter, but in the summer, there was no escaping the heat from the boiler. The hardships of the fireman's job resulted from the fact that the mechanical engineers who designed locomotives for the manufacturing companies never actually rode in them. They were concerned with designing a powerful, efficient steam power plant, not with making life easier for railroaders. Two hours before the locomotive rolled out of the Denver yards, Sam was on the job, building the fire the hostler had started, checking the coal and water in the tender and the sand in the dome on top of the boiler, and lifting the headlight from its tapered tongue to replenish the oil in the dispenser, even though firemen considered the headlights useless.
Engineers not only had to know how to run the locomotive, they Page 19 had to know how every valve, flue, eccentric, piston, and cylinder worked. If any part broke down en route, the engineer had to fix it and get the locomotive and train safely to the next terminal. Engineers also had to know the company rules covering such things as which trains had right of track and which engines went on the point of a double header. The rules also covered the flag, whistle, bell, lantern, and hand signals that the railroaders used to communicate with one another in the day before radios.