All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

CHAPTER VI The Westinghouse Brake and its Effect on Travel One afternoon, away back in 1866, a young man boarded the New York Central train at Troy in the State of New York, bound for his home at Schenec- tady, twelve miles distant. He was only a young man of twenty, and but a few months before had returned from the turbulent South, which had been riven and torn by the Civil War. Even in those days the journey between the two towns was only a matter of twenty minutes or so, but on this afternoon about two and a half hours were occupied in the run. The train was brought to a standstill at a lonely point and forced into idleness for two hours. Two goods trains had disputed the right of way with the inevitable result—a tangled heap of debris scattered over the railway, completely obstructing traffic. In common with the other passengers, the young man fretted and fumed at the delay, but the loss of time and the inconvenience did not affect him so seriously as it did several other fellow travellers. The young man whiled away his time as best he could under the circumstances, but as he waited an idea which had suddenly occurred to him kept running through his mind with uncanny persistence and frequency. These trains had probably come into collision n5