The Train That Ate the School Walk

The railroad now reaches our town so that children going to and from school are put to great inconvenience by freight trains standing directly across Howard Street, cutting off further passage unless the walker circumnavigates the train — an undertaking about as cheerful as trying to walk around a river, as the Northern Pacific trains now running over the route are of enormous length. Now if the track should be laid back of the school, or the school moved in front of the track, or the road extended underground, or moved on an elevated track, this drawback would not occur. But as these remedies are easier to write of than to be entered upon, it remains with the city authorities to devise schemes to regulate the existing difficulty. We believe that it is against the law for railroad trains to blockade traveled thoroughfares in a city — at least it ought to be — and if the right course is pursued the trouble may be obviated. It might work a hardship in some cases to the railroad hands, but the wheels of education must not be clogged, nor the lives and limbs of our children jeopardized, just to suit the convenience of even railroad corporations.