From The Aegis & Intelligencer, March 30, 1866
One of our railroad engineers, some years since, was running an express train of ten well filled cars. It was in the night and a very dark night too. His train was behind time, he was putting the engine to the utmost speed of which it was capable, in order to reach a certain point at the proper hour, he was running on a straight and level hack, and at this unusual velocity, when a conviction struck him that he must stop. “A something seemed to tell me,” he said, “that, to go on was dangerous, and that I must stop if I would save life.
I looked back at my train and it was all right. I strained my eyes and peered into the darkness, and could see no signal of danger, nor anything betokening danger, and there in the daytime I could have seen five miles. I listened to the working of my engine, tried the water, looked at the scales, and all was right.— I tried to laugh myself out of what I then considered a foolish fear; but like Banquo’s ghost, it would not down at my bidding, but grew stronger in its hold upon me. I thought of the ridicule I would have heaped upon me if I did stop but it was of no avail.
The conviction—for by this time it had ripened into a conviction—that I must stop, grew stronger, and I resolved to stop. I shut oil, blew the whistle for brakes accordingly. I came to a dead halt, got out and went ahead a little without saying anything to anybody what was the matter. I had a lamp in my hand and had gone about sixty feet, when I saw what convinced me that premonitions are sometimes possible. I dropped the lantern from my nervous grasp, and sat down on the track utterly unable to stand.”
He goes on to tell us that there he found that some one had drawn a spike which had long fastened a switch rail, and opened a switch which had always been kept locked, which led on to a track —only about one hundred and fifty feet long which terminated in a stone quarry! “Here it was wide open, and had I not obeyed my premonitory warning—call it what you will—l should have run into it, and at tho end of the track, only about ten rods long, my heavy engine and train moving at the rate of forty-five miles an hour, would have come into collision with a solid wall of rock eighteen feet high.
Source: The aegis & intelligencer. [volume] (Bel Air, Md.), 30 March 1866. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83016107/1866-03-30/ed-1/seq-1/>