720:____________________________________________________

Special thanks to Jim for providing today’s opening line. Jim’s impressive daily blog is a great resource for learning about Pennsylvania, interesting statistics and Dan Ariely. He’s also an impressively consistent commenter, and an accounting professor at Villanova.

____________________________________________________ A steady drone was coming over the receiver from Hortonville.

One of the perks of being a telegraph operator is that there’s plenty of time for books, and on this particular night I was ensconced in a collection of Philippa Foot essays. I was really having a good time, thinking about the moral relatively of trolley cars and people and their perspective conditions in the time-space continuum when the continuous bar of noise started.

Something was clearly not right. I tried to dash out a line to Hortonville, but nothing. I figured something must have fallen on the transmitter or something. The 9:07 had just passed my shack, and would be coming into Hortonville in about 11 minutes. I was sure it would get straightened out then.

I waited about fifteen minutes, but the drone continued unabated.

Weird.

I turned out the light and went to bed.

The paper the nest day said that the Hortonville operator had died of a heart attack right before he was supposed to throw the switch to stop the 9:47 from Chester and the 10:03 from Cleveland from running into each other. His young son had run out onto the tracks, and gotten crushed by the 9:47. Then the 9:47 and the 10:03 collided, killing everyone on both trains (a total of 231 people.)

I read the paper with curiosity and then returned to my Philippa Foot essays. It’s so interesting when practical philosophical questions play themselves out in the real world.

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