THIRTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART IV 197 



Another thing. We think we have as fine an agent in our town 

 as there is on the Rock Island. He is courteous, and seems to be 

 everything that he should be ; but if we try to find out something, 

 he tells us that the dispatcher will snap his head o&. if he asks him 

 a question. We never can find out whether or not we are going to 

 get cars, and it is often a difficult matter to learn where the train 

 is. As near as I can find out, the reason the stock leaves our station 

 and goes over the North Western and Milwaukee is because the 

 agent can't tell even the night before whether we will be able to 

 L)ad a car the next morning, unless they are standing on the track. 



I was on the train going to Chicago three or four weeks ago, and 

 at West Liberty they let one of your trains off the B., C. R. & N. 

 come in ahead of us, and they had a lame engine. Finally we got 

 to Walcott, and there were two good-sized trains of stock — prob- 

 ably thirty or forty cars to the train — and we were behind this 

 engine that died at Walcott. We w^ere four hours getting coupled 

 up as near as I can remember. Of course, I don't understand why. 

 The railroad men were using some big language, and they didn't 

 seem to be to blame for it ; they were in a hurry, trying to get out. 



Mr. Whitenton: I am very familiar with that particular inci- 

 dent, and I want to say to you that it was one of the rottenest 

 pieces of railroading, if you will excuse the language, that I have 

 over been in contact with. There was absolutely no excuse for it. 

 It is another case of the employes being absolutely incompetent, and 

 still they had been there for years. They said their engine had 

 been lame all day. It was put on the train at Cedar Rapids, and 

 came right out of their roundhouse. The engineer had never said 

 a word to anybody that he was having trouble with his engine. The 

 trainmaster was at West Liberty, and he said nothing to him about 

 it. There were two conductors; one of them h^id been in the serv- 

 ice of the company fifteen years and the other about twenty-one 

 \ears. They were in charge of that doubling-up process after the 

 engine failed. The only thing to do was to double up and clear the 

 main line, and any boy fifteen years old ought to have handled the 

 arrangement and gotten the thing to moving in forty-five minutes ; 

 but they sat down there and indulged in big talk and absolutely did 

 nothing. 



Now, after that performance, they went on to the junction at 

 Davenport, and had another delay because of the other train just 

 ahead of that. What happened then ? An engineer coming down 

 the hill (and this is only eight-tenths of one per cent grade), with 



