Loses Life But Saves Hundreds

Printed Jan. 1908

Tunnel Track Walker Wins Glory In His Death

New York. — A few laboring men dropped around to Tommy Ryan's house on West Forty-ninth street "to help pack up and move." They took their hats off in the dark hall below and walked up the stairs with muffled feet. In the front room a neighbor's daughter was trying to amuse two pretty babies, one four and the other two years old.

Tom Ryan, big, hearty, good-natured Tom, who loved his wife and children, was not there. He was buried and his two babies were cared for at the home of a neighbor while his friends followed him to the grave. The children do not know he is dead. Neither does his wife, who is sick unto death in a hospital where for four weeks she has been battling with typhoid fever. She thinks that she is so sick that the nurses will not let her see even her husband. And no one, not even the hospital physicians, have yet dared take the responsibility of letting her know the truth.

This story should interest those persons who took the 9 p.m. local train for Westchester county from the Grand Central. Their train went safely through the tunnel, carrying them to their waiting families in the suburbs, but they never knew why. They didn't even know that as they passed the signal lamp at Eighty-sixth street in safety their train had swept over the body of the man who had saved them.

Thomas Ryan had been married about a dozen years. His oldest child had died and six months ago, to give his wife and the remaining children the home he wished, he took the hazardous position of lamp man in the New York Central tunnel. He was a sober, industrious man, six feet in his stockings and perfectly healthy. His day began at 6 p.m. and ended at 7 a.m., and it was his duty to patrol the tunnel and keep the lamps burning on the signal towers.

Two weeks ago his wife was taken ill with typhoid fever, and grew rapidly worse. He told his fellow-workers he feared his wife would die before morning. Nevertheless, he set about his task of seeing that the lamps were all right so that the passengers hurrying home would pass in safety. At 9 p.m. he saw that the distance signal lamp on the outbound track three was smoky. He remembered that several accidents costing human live had happened because of smoky lamps.

He ran across the tracks, dodging a down train and reached up for the signal lamp. With his pocket handkerchief he rubbed the chimney bright and turned down the wick a little. As he did this the lamp swung around in answer to the signal tower man, cautioning the up train to go slow. A down train came tearing through the tunnel, making a great noise and drowning the noise of the approach of a train in the opposite direction. Then he stepped down on the track, conscious that he had probably saved an accident — and the next instant the train hit him.

"The engineer, with his eyes on the signal — as was his duty — did not see the shadow that flickered for an instant under the forward wheels. But the track-walkers, passing a few moments after, found the crumpled mass under the light of their lanterns. They found the handkerchief with the lampblack on it, and saw the finger-marks of the man on the signal lamp chimney, and they understood. The case was reported to the police and entered on the station house blotter.

But it was "just a man killed in the tunnel — a trackwalker or a lampman." It was not till days after that a stray word dropped by a trackwalker revealed that big Tom Ryan had given his life to send a trainload of commuters home in safety.