Train Control and the Safety Factor.

Lounging cosily in your carriage reading, musing, dozing, or glancing at the moving pictures of pleasant farms, rivers, forests and mountains, you have taken for granted that the railway folk will stick to their principle of “Safety, Comfort, Economy.” You believe their statement

Wellington-Wanganui. Train-Control Diagram.
Explanatory particulars of the above diagram are given in the accompanying letterpress.

that they have not killed one of their 150 million passengers during the past six years, and you feel sure they will not be cruel enough to make a start on you. The song of the “tame tattoon” in the axle-boxes is very soothing, and you have cheerfully forgotten the slump. It's a good world after all—very nice to have some experts working for you while the miles fly by.

Yes, they are working. They gave much thought to your train before it started, and also to the line and all else. That little room off Bunny Street has a tab on your train all the time. The controller has followed you on his chart; he has gone several stations ahead, for he is working hard to give your train the quickest possible crossing at a loop on the single track.

Perhaps, when your train has unexpectedly halted ten minutes or more on a siding you have thought—well, you have thought * * ? ? ! !; and you have gone on to exchange explosions with a fellow-passenger. One has alleged that the enginedriver and the fireman have gone off fishing, and the other has asserted that the guard is playing two-up with a porter in a quiet corner. You would quickly apologise for such thoughts and remarks if you could hear the voices passing to and fro on the wire that joins the train-control office with the stations. You would know that the delay was for your safety, and that your train moved at the earliest possible moment after the stop.

Railwaymen, indeed, hate a hitch; they keenly dislike a delay, for the time-sense is in their brain and brawn. You know the tradition about His Majesty's mails. There is even more concern for His Majesty's subjects when they travel by rail.

Goods trains in the Wellington-Wanganui district are mainly pilgrims of the night. Between midnight and 7 a.m. they look for a right-of-way when passenger trains are least likely to hinder them. One thinks of them creeping furtively from cover in the stilly night, and page 47 making the best of their nocturnal opportunity while the going is good. Recently, in those first seven hours of the working day—midnight to 7 a.m.—eight trains came into Wellington on the Main Trunk line, carrying a total of 2,500 tons of goods, chiefly live stock and perishable produce.

Watching a train-controller at work reminds you of a game of chess. The trains are his pieces, which he moves or checks in accordance with the flow of information through the ether. His little room is the clearing-house; he is the dictator of the day, and his decisions are necessarily quick. He works on the rule of the quickest passage for the most important trains.