MARRIED 15 YEARS AND NEVER SAW HIS WIFE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3363, 1 November 1911, Page 7

MARRIED 15 YEARS AND NEVER SAW HIS WIFE.

RAILROAD TRACKWALKER IS ALSO THE HOLDER OF RECORD AS A PEDESTRIAN.

After walking 203,670 miles through snowsheds for the Southern Pacific Company, battling with tramps and enduring all sorts of hardships, Manuel K. Silva, a Portuguese, decided last month that he’d like to visit his .wife. “ I’ve never seen her, and we’ve been married about fifteen years now,” he told the officials in applying for leave of absence. His application was granted l and he was placed on the pension list. The railroad looked up his record and found that it is one probably without parallel in railroad history. Silva entered! the employ of the Southern Pacific in 1879 as a section laborer. A year later he was appointed watchman on the night shift in the snowsheds at the summit of the Sierra Nevada mountains. For thirty years he has held that position, working faith, fully and steadily and being absent from duty only twice, and then because of illness. For thirty-one years, he walked eighteen miles a day, making three round trips every night over a beat of three miles. And this aggregates 6750 miles a year or 203,670 miles in thirtyone years, more than eight times round the world. Not since he began work has there been a complaint registered against him: Fifteen* years ago he married the sweetheart of his youth by proxy—under what is known as a contract marriage. He, the groom, was in America—the bride in Portugal—and on their wedding night lie walked liis solitary beat through the mountain darkness as usual.