The hardships of cold and stormy weather are serious, both because of the test of endurance involved and the added difficulties in handling a train. The Westinghouse automatic air-brake, which has served so admirably on passenger trains for the past fifteen years, has only recently been adapted and cheapened so as to make it available for long freight trains, but it is now so perfected that in a few years the brakeman who now has to ride on the outside of cars in a freezing condition for an hour at a time will be privileged to sit comfortably in his caboose while the speed of the train is governed by the engineer through the instantaneous action of the air-brake. On the steep roads of the Rocky Mountains, and a few other lines, this brake is already in use. [Illustration: Braking in Hard Weather.] But "braking by hand" is still the rule. In running on ascending grades or at slow speeds, the brakemen can ride under cover, but in descending grades, or on levels when the speed is high, they must be on the tops of the cars ready to instantly apply the brakes, for the reason that there are generally only three or four men to a long train weighing from 500 to 1,000 tons, whose momentum cannot be arrested very quickly. In descending steep grades, only the most constant and skilful care prevents the train from rushing at breakneck speed to the foot of the incline, or to a curve, where it would be precipitated over an embankment and crushed into splinters. One of the mountain roads in Colorado which now uses air-brakes is said to be lined its whole length with the ruins of cars lying in the gorges, where they were wrecked in the former days of hand-brakes. Even on grades much less steep than those in Colorado the danger of this sort of disaster is one that has to be constantly guarded against. Take the case of a 40-car train descending a 1½ per cent. grade (79-2/10 feet per mile). Before all of the cars have passed over the summit and commenced to descend, the forward part of the train will have increased its velocity very perceptibly and will thus by its weight exert a strong pull on the rear portion, "yanking" it very roughly sometimes, and if one of the couplings between the cars chances to be weak it breaks, separating the train into two parts. Mishaps of this kind are frequent, and two or more breakages often occur at the same time, dividing the train so that one of the parts--between the two end portions--is perhaps left with no brakeman upon it. The engineman then has the choice of slackening his speed and allowing the unmanageable cars to violently collide with his portion, or of increasing his own speed to such a rate that he is soon in danger of suddenly overtaking a train ahead of him. To avoid this breaking-in-two the brakemen must be wide awake on the instant and see that their brakes are tightened before the speed even begins to elude control. As soon as the whole train has got beyond