The thing had been done some time. The
fire had been drawn from the engine; there was only a sputtering
of steam. The passengers had been removed. A wrecking-car had
come up from down the line. A telegrapher was setting up a
little instrument on a box by the roadside. A lineman was
climbing a pole to connect his wire. A track boss with a torch
and a crew of men were coming up from an examination of the line
littered with its wreck.
I hardly know what happened in the next few minutes. We were out
of the motor and among the men almost before the car stopped.
No one had been hurt. The passenger-coaches were not turned
over, and the engineer and fireman had jumped as the cab toppled.
By the greatest good fortune the train had gone off the track in
this low flat land almost level with the grade. Several things
joined to avoid a terrible disaster; the flat ground that enabled
the whole train to plow along upright until it stopped, the track
lying flush with the highway where the engine went off, and the
fact that trains must slow up for this grade crossing. Had there
been an embankment, or a big ditch, or the train under its usual
headway the wreck would have been a horror, for every wheel, from
the engine to the last coach, had left the rails.
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