Cape Breton's Magazine

use the wing plow • they decided to put a man ahead of the engine, for safety first, more than anything else. He had air in there, an emergency "brake • he could pull it. (Were there ever people struck by the train?) Oh yeah. I killed two. We had gone to Inverness with the plow. And we were hauling a freight of coal, coming back. So when we called, coming into Glencoe • we had a cold day anyway and I had the window shut. So this little fellow was standing alongside the track, but he had his head down. So I waved. He had a black and white plaid jacket on. So he never picked his head up. So I opened the window and looked back and I didn't see him. All I saw was two rubber boots. So I stopped right off the bat and I said to the fire? man, fellow by the name of John Dan Mac- Lean was firing for me • "I think we got old Cameron." So we got off the engine, went back. It was another fellow. He was under the engine • back about third or fourth car. Now where he was standing, the two rubber boots were still standing right there. Right together. You couldn't place them any better alongside the tracks. I killed a brakeman down at River Denys (not on the I&R;). And I don't know why. We were on a gypsum train. We were going east. We came around a curve, at West Bay Road. There was a work gang putting in rails and stuff. And we had a radio, called in • they said it was all right to come up where they were working. So we crawled up and the foreman was there and he gave me a highball • so I blew two whis? tles, answered for him. As a rule, when I was flagged, I always moved by a section gang six or seven carlengths very slowly. I figured well, if there was anyone handy, they could move out. So we went by. I pulled her out. When she rounded the curve this fellow was sitting on the tracks, his feet inside the rail, his two hands right under his head. The fireman hollered. Jeez, well I dumped her (put her to emer? gency ), but I knew when I dumped her she wasn't going to stop • and we struck him anyway. Got down right away. Nothing we could do. Got the coroner, the Mounties came in • nothing we could do about it. You can't stop one of those trains on a dime. CONTINUED NEXT PAGE ITt' Vincent MacLellan, Brakeman; R. MacNeil, Roadmaster, alongside the train snowplow stuck .just south of Main Street Crossing, Inverness; Freddy Smith, Conductor. Vincent MacLellan, Brakeman: When the 79 wrecked at Glendyer • that's the first day I went to work, my first night on the railroad, July 12, 1912. I wasn't aboardo Murdoch Skinner, he went out firing. I took his place watching the engine that he'd been watching in the yard at Hast? ings. You'd have to keep a fire going at night, fix her up in the morning and all that • plenty work to do too. Murdoch went to Glendyer. That engine went off the track, killed Billy Campbell. Scalded ter? rible. And I was back working,on that eng? ine, afraid I wouldn't have it ready for the morning. I did most every part of the railroad. I manned conductor for awhile. Worked in the roundhouse down here when I wouldn't have work running on the road. Then I was brakeman quite awhile. A brakeman's job is making up trains and then braking them go? ing down hills. The air brakes wouldn't hold enough. You'd have to put handbrakes. Like down Glendyer. It was 5 or 6 miles long downhill. I'd be up on top of the cars, jumping from one to the other. There'd be a brake on each car. You'd put about 6 or 8 of them on, depending on how they were working • and go down there like the old devil. Cape Breton's Magazine/7