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Stealing a Locomotive

One day, in April, 1862, a passenger train was on its way from Marietta, Georgia, bound North.

At Marietta, about twenty men, in civilian clothes, had boarded the train, nobody paying any special attention to them. Yet these men were bent upon a desperate adventure.

Eight miles beyond Marietta the train stopped ten minutes for breakfast at the station, called Big Shanty. Everybody was hungry, and soon the passengers, the conductor, the engineer, and the fireman were in the breakfast room. The men who had boarded the train at Marietta quietly stole toward the locomotive, instead of following the others. No one paid any heed to their movements, in spite of the fact that a sentinel was walking his beat hardly a dozen steps away.

One of the men climbed into the cab of the locomotive, another slipped in between two cars and pulled out the coupling pin, while the others climbed into an empty box-car. Finally, the man in the cab laid his hand upon the throttle. The engine moved off with three box cars, leaving the passenger coaches standing on the tracks.

The sentinel, in alarm, fired off his gun, and the passengers ran out just in time to see the locomotive and cars disappearing in the distance. The engine had been stolen, and the men were on their way to the Federal lines. The conductor was so frightened by this disaster that he started on a run up the track, in frantic but useless haste to overtake the fugitives. The amazed passengers stood helplessly on the platform, quite powerless to do anything.

The men who had stolen the locomotive were a party of Northern scouts, who had made their way in disguise into the Southern lines, with the intention of stealing a train, burning the bridges behind them, and make useless the only railroad by which troops could be sent to Chattanooga to oppose the Union forces. Their enterprise had succeeded thus far, and they were rapidly making their way North.