At one station down the line where we were to get coal for our engine, we were delayed several hours because there was no coal. The mine was not far away, but with typical Siberian procrastination, the coal was allowed to run short at the station. When a train arrived which needed coal, it was time enough to order an engine and a dozen coal cars to proceed to the mine, load up, and return with a supply. So we lay in the yards, and kept other trains at other stations waiting, till we had coaled and released traffic in both directions. The branch line running to the mine could have kept the coal yards full, with a switch engine and one coal-car, but that would require planning ahead, and doing something before it was actually necessary to do it. At another station, we waited five hours to change a hot “brass” on a journal. This job at home takes some ten minutes. As I watched a poor Chinese mechanic scraping the bearing in forty-below weather, using a primitive tool, I realized that the “hordes of cheap labor in Asia” need not worry us at home. This mechanic would put the semi-cylindrical bearing into the journal-box and take it out. Where it showed oil stains, the metal had to be scraped away to get a good fit for the bearing. He always scraped too much off where the oil showed it to be ill-fitting, and of course, when he put it in again, oil revealed that the spots which he had not scraped, now stuck up. So he scraped these spots away and repeated the process. We were held up one night at a tiny telegraph station on the plains. After six hours wait, Captain B---- and I attempted to ascertain when we might expect to go on. We learned that there was a wreck two versts ahead. There were two cars off the track--freight cars. It developed later that the reason we had to wait so long to get two freight cars off the track, was due to the fact that some cases containing books had been smashed in the wreck, and the books scattered along the line. Before that freight train would come in, these cases had to be repacked and renailed till they presented their original appearance as near as it was possible to make them, by Siberian railroad men working with a single old lantern which burned lard-oil. While they tinkered with cases of books in semi-darkness, the train for Vladivostok, and all other traffic for miles in both directions, were held nearly all night. Fancy an American passenger train held till smashed cases of freight could be rebuilt and repacked!