In recent years, that nasty stretch of railroad line has kept the railroaders still busy. Within the decade it was blocked for six long days, while a force of snow-fighters and a battery of ploughs forced their way into the drifts. And while the superintendent up at Watertown grew nervous, then desperate, there came the worst blow of all: the telegraph wire no longer brought news from the front. Afterwards that super knew the reason why. His train-master was at the front with ploughs and the hungry, tired, straggling men. The train-master was nervous, too, wearied explaining to his boss. He remembered Dewey at Manila, and he cut the cable! He lost sight of the outer world for long hours, for days, for nights, until that January evening when he brought his battered snow-fighting force triumphant into Richland Junction. When a big road whose rails rest through a snow belt finds the winter clouds blackening, it puts on its fighting armor. Every man at headquarters sticks by his desk. The superintendent will get bulletins from each terminal and important yard every hour, perhaps oftener. Those bulletins will give him exact information--the amount of motive-power ready at each roundhouse, freight congestion, if any, amount and direction of wind, cloud and snow conditions. In other days the signal for an oncoming storm was followed by quick orders from headquarters to pull off the snow-freights. Traffic was quickly cut down to passenger and perishable-freight trains, and, if the blizzard grew bad enough, the perishable-freights were run in upon the sidings. The railroad concentrated its motive-power upon the passenger trains and the ploughs. Nowadays they do it better. Not that the old fellows of the last generation were anything less than prize railroaders, for remember they did not have the locomotives in those days that even side-line divisions possess in these. So to-day the superintendent can growl at the first of his men who even hints that a scheduled train of any class be sent upon a siding. "We keep the traffic moving," said one of the biggest the other day. "We keep the line open. A train every thirty minutes over our rails will do more toward keeping them usable than a rotary going over them after a night's inaction.