Casey Jones

4.5

Casey Jones was the great American railroad engineer hero who would not save his own life but died doing his duty. Casey was engineer of the American train Cannon-ball which ran between Tennessee and Mississippi. He was skillful and brave and always brought the train in on time. He was skillful with the whistle too — the locomotive whistle. He had a special way of blowing it: beginning very softly, rising to a shriek, and dying away. It would make people’s hair stand on end in their beds as the train passed by in the night. “There goes Casey,” they would say.

On the night of April 29, 1900 when Casey had just finished his own run and brought the Cannon-ball into the town on time, he learned that the engineer of another engine was ill and could not make his run. Casey offered to make the run for his friend and pulled the big engine out of the station at 11 p. m. already one hour and thirty-five minutes late at the start.

Casey wanted to make up the time and he worked very hard at the engine.

By four o’clock in the morning he had made up most of the time, but suddenly in front of his engine, as he came round a curve, he saw a standing freight train on the rails.

“Jump, Sim,” he cried.

Sim Webb, fireman to Casey Jones, jumped and lived to tell the story. Casey’s body was found with one hand still on the whistle and one on the air-brake.

There is a monument to Casey Jones in his native town in Kentucky. In 1950 the United States Government put out a three-cent stamp in honor of American railroad engineers, which has the portrait of Casey Jones and a picture of old Engine 382.