Only a little while ago, one of the officers of an Eastern trunk-line railroad and a member of one of the State railroad commissions were coming toward New York. The trip was in the nature of an inspection on the part of the State official, but as a matter of comfort and convenience to the two men, it was made upon the former's private car. The comfort and convenience suddenly ceased while the two were still nearly 300 miles away from the seaboard. The road rested there for many miles in heavy country; its rails found their curving way in the crevices between high hills. It had rained steadily for a fortnight; the little mountain brooks were raging mill-races. In the low flatlands of one deep valley lakes were being formed. There were long stretches where the four rails of the double-tracked trunk-line railroad lost themselves under the glassy surface of the waters. Up and down the valley trains were standing helpless between those lakes, their passengers fuming at the delay. Fast freights stood axle-deep in water; their title, for that moment, was an occasion for joyous humor. The comfortable, convenient trip of the railroad operating man and the railroad commissioner was at an end. An embankment that the railroad had built for a branch down the valley was blocking the waters, and orders had come from New York to dynamite out that embankment. It would cost the railroad nearly $50,000 to destroy that half-mile of track but it might save the valley millions. There had been no hesitation on the part of the "old man"--the road's tried executive. That is a phase of American railroading not often brought to light. Orders came that the engine hauling the "special" of the operating man and the railroad commissioner was to be taken for a work-train down at that damming embankment. That's the way with railroading. When the clattering telegraph keys sound the note of trouble, even that mighty soul, the chairman of the board, may find himself "laid out" at some jerkwater junction, while his pet engine goes into service with a wrecking-train. But the chairman of the board, whose time is real money, offers no protest. He knows that to block the main line costs his road $250 a minute for the first 60 minutes; that that figure doubles and trebles in the second hour; in the third, his auditors may check off $1,000 a minute, at the least, as the cost of a blocked railroad. No wonder that they insist that it is "keeping the line open." Before the engine of that special was cut off to go scurrying down to the embankment where the skilled workmen were making preparations to dynamite away a half-mile of track, the operating man lifted his hand. He had, like any trained railroader, been listening to the clattering telegraph key.