The engineer did not answer that quickly. He knew the point was well taken. Finally, pressed, he said that his was a "penalty train," which meant that it carried the mail and excess-fare passengers and that it would cost his railroad dollars and cents if it were more than thirty minutes late at its final terminal. To have stopped this train flat at the red signal, when he felt morally certain and could practically see that the line was clear and open, would have cost fifteen minutes or more. If the practice was repeated and even his detention sheets showed that the time lost was due to stopping at a signal that was out of order, he would not be censured. Oh, no! But sooner or later there would be a new man on that run--a man who had the reputation of bringing his train in on time over his division. That was what the engineer told me that night as we munched our crullers and sipped our coffee. * * * * * Freeman tells another story. Freeman says that he never ran past a red signal in his life and that he could not have held his run on the limited for five long years if he had not been in the habit of bringing her in "in her time." Freeman speaks a good word for the signals. You take note of it. Then you remember that in one of the innumerable cases that came up before the Interstate Commerce Commission down in Washington, the engineer of the Congressional Limited testified that in the five-hour run from the national capital up to the outskirts of New York he had to read and understand and observe exactly 550 signals. It was one of the things that he said made his job difficult. Yet when this run today is over and we are standing with Freeman by the side of the turntable in the big and smoky roundhouse, as his big long-boned black baby is edging gently into her bunk for a few hours of well-earned rest, he will tell you frankly that he has a genuine affection for the 162 signals that stand to beckon him on or to halt him in his run of 135 miles up the main line. "I just let myself think of another fairly fast run I had once--up on a side line, single-track at that, where there wasn't but two interlockings the whole distance or a single block protection from one end to the other." Then he adds, "I'd hate without the signals to pull Twenty-four at a sixty-mile-an-hour clip. To my mind they're like watchmen, with flags or lanterns every mile up the main line. Only a watchman couldn't see a mile and know of a break in the rail, the way that electric block knows it. Talk about a thing being human. That toy's better than human. It has a test record of less than one per cent of failures, and in that small failure record, ninety-eight per cent of the actual failures turned the signal automatically to danger."