Weehawken wires were getting reports from Conductor Sam Brown of the Chicago & St. Louis Express, who had come running out of the tunnel to the West Point depot. "Wire headquarters," he shouted to the agent, "that we've run into an avalanche. Morse and his fireman are crushed under the tunnel roof." And they began to get the wreckers busy down at Weehawken. When the chief despatcher up at Kingston finally got Weehawken, they told him about Sam Morse's fate. The truth of the thing came to him in an instant. He laughed hysterically, and his assistant jumped up. The despatcher's bad quarter of an hour was over. He jumped to his telephone, caught the yardmaster with it. "We won't need that hospital train," he said. "There isn't a soul hurt." And there was not. But there remained the worst railroad block on record. It was three months before they pulled the baggage-car out of that tunnel, and then they had to use dynamite. After that it was found necessary to line the entire bore with solid masonry. That was an accident that might not have been so lucky on repetition. * * * * * Enough of wrecks. They are not the only test when it comes to keeping the line open. Sometimes a crippled telegraph service may be quite as effective. Out on the Pennsylvania lines west of Pittsburgh a couple of years ago a severe wind and sleet storm levelled more than 40 miles of telegraph poles, in most cases dropping them across main-line tracks in the dark. A few months later--the never-to-be-forgotten inauguration day of President Taft--a similar storm did similar work on the lines leading to Washington. Thousands of militiamen and excursionists never reached the inauguration at all. In both storms the resources of a great railroad were well tested. An old-time Erie man remembers wire troubles of a different sort. It was in his salad days, when he was serving as assistant superintendent over the Meadville, in the western part of Pennsylvania. They had but one telegraph wire for railroad purposes on the division then, and one night it "grounded." Keys were silent, the road might as well have had no wire at all. The assistant superintendent started that evening with two linemen on a hand-car to find that "ground." They went miles from Meadville, and every test showed the wire working. Finally they came to a deserted little depot at a cross-roads and the railroader lifting his lantern high against the window verified his suspicions: the careless agent had gone home and left his key open. The superintendent broke open the window, climbed in, removed the telegraph set, placed it in his overcoat pocket and closed the circuit. He knew that he would hear from the agent on the morrow. He did. Word came by tedious train mail, a formal report on the road's yellow stationery. "Station at A---- burglarized last evening," that formal report read, "and agent's telegraph set, best pants, and ten dollars taken."