FOREWORD

Summed up short, the Hill Division is a vicious piece of track; also, it is a classic in its profound contempt for the stereotyped equations and formulae of engineering. And it is that way for the very simple reason that it could not be any other way. The mountains objected, and objected strenuously, to the process of manhandling. They were there first, the mountains, that was all, and their surrender was a bitter matter.

So, from Big Cloud, the divisional point, at the eastern fringe of the Rockies, to where the foothills of the Sierras on the western side merge with the more open, rolling country, the right of way performs gyrations that would not shame an acrobatic star. It sweeps through the rifts in the range like a freed bird from the open door of its cage; clings to cañon edges where a hissing stream bubbles and boils eighteen hundred feet below; burrows its way into the heart of things in long tunnels and short ones; circles a projecting spur in a dizzy whirl, and swoops from the higher to the lower levels in grades whose percentages the passenger department does not deem it policy to specify in its advertising literature, but before which the men in the cabs and the cabooses shut their teeth and try hard to remember the prayers they learned at their mothers' knees. Some parts of it are worse than others, naturally; but no part of it, to the last inch of its single-tracked mileage, is pretty—leaving out the scenery, which is grand. That is the Hill Division.

And the men who man the shops, who pull the throttles on the big, ten-wheel mountain racers, who swing the pick and shovels in the lurching cabs, who do the work about the yards, or from the cupola of a caboose stare out on a string of wriggling flats, boxes and gondolas, and, at night-time, watch the high-flung sparks sail heavenward, as the full, deep-chested notes of the exhaust roar an accompaniment in their ears, are men with calloused, horny hands, toilers, grimy of face and dress, rough if you like, not gentle of word, nor, sometimes, of action—but men whose hearts are big and right, who look you in the face, and the grip of whose paws, as they are extended after a hasty cleansing on a hunk of more or less greasy waste, is the grip of men.

Many of these have lived their lives, done their work, passed on, and left no record, barely a memory, behind them, as other men in other places and in other spheres of work have done and always will do; but others, for this or that, by circumstance, or personality, or opportunity, have woven around themselves the very legends and traditions of their environment.

And so these are the stories of the Hill Division and of the men who wrought upon it; the stories of those days when it was young and in the making; the stories of the days when Carleton, "Royal" Carleton, was superintendent, when gruff, big-hearted, big-paunched Tommy Regan was master mechanic, when the grizzled, gray-streaked Harvey was division engineer, and little Doctor McTurk was the Company surgeon, and Riley was the trainmaster, and Spence was the chief despatcher; the stories of men who have done brave duty and come to honor and glory and their reward—and the stories of some who have gone into Division for the last time on orders from the Great Trainmaster, and who will never railroad any more.

F. L. P.