The extreme easterly forty-five miles of the main New York-Boston line of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad was, up to thirty-four years ago, a separate railroad, the Boston and Providence, extending between those two cities. From the old Park Station in Boston down to the station in Providence and back again--ninety miles--was a day's work for one of its locomotives. On some of its suburban runs the engines did even less. They were pampered bits of mechanism. * * * * * Last year I rode from New York to Cherbourg in the giant steamer _Olympic_ and spent many hours in what is the finest engine-room upon all the seven seas. The tireless engines, the racing shafts, never ceased their impetuous speed for six days and for six nights. If necessary, and if the fuel had been available, they might just as easily run on for twenty-six days and twenty-six nights or even longer. It all comes to proper lubrication and attention, and nothing else. A twenty-four hour continuous test of an automobile is as nothing; a five hundred or a thousand-mile test of its engine without resting, these days, a mere child's sport. You do not think after you have driven your own car ninety miles that you must rest it before you set it in service once more. If you could not drive it upon necessity twice or three times that distance without resting it you probably would feel like selling it. Yet there are many ninety-mile engine-runs left in the United States to this day; some of them, like those between New York and Philadelphia, are matters of operating convenience that cannot easily be changed. Tradition holds others. One hundred and fifty miles still remains a typical division in the minds of many conservative railroaders. And a real boast upon the part of the progressive manufacturers of the electric locomotive is that their machines can easily cover two such typical divisions without either rest or inspection. But it should be borne in mind that when the inspection finally is made it must be like that at Calais, of the most thorough sort.