Forty years a locomotive engineer thrilling tales of the rail

Reed’s book recounts highlights of his railroad career beginning with his first job working as a tallowpot ( fireman) on the Toledo, Wabash & Western in April 1868 at the age of 20 working out of Springfield, Illinois and ending with a car/horse and buggy accident at the age of 65. In between those two temporal mileposts Reed’s career saw him working on the Wabash, Illinois-Midland, Santa Fe and Northern Pacific. He went out on the Great Strike of 1894, was blacklisted by NP, and took up the life of a boomer for a few years. He was able to finally beat the blacklist and was employed by the Great Northern. From the Great Northern he went down to Mexico and worked on the Mexico National. In time he decided he would like to return to show more the U.S. so he went to the northwest and found work with the Oregon Navigation and Railroad Company where he finished out his career.

The book is well written and the recounted adventures and misadventures provide an interesting glimpse of 19th Century railroading in the U.S. For example:

“…we hit a wagon on a road crossing 20 miles out [of Terre Haute]; we fortunately didn’t kill anybody but we certainly demolished that wagon; but that was not the worst of it. It was a junk wagon and the driver had gathered up a full load of feathers and eggs. When that locomotive tore into that load there was created the worst mixture of fresh ranch eggs and goose feathers one ever saw, and that spank engine came out the most bedraggled and besmeared looking sight that one most ever saw. She limped off the scene looking like a cross between a whipped rooster and a sad eyed goose. There were the maddest men in that cab that ever rode a locomotive, and the facts are that I pulled goose feathers and wiped [the remains of] fried eggs off that engine for three months afterwards. “

(Note: at that time in the U.S. you were assigned to a specific engine so it was “your” engine and the crews usually took great pride in the appearance of “their” iron horse).

The book went through at least two printings in 1913 and it has been reprinted several times since. (Text Length - 148 pages, Total Length - 148 pages.) show less