On the whole, Holman's moonshine schemes were too modest to attract a flood of attention, and those in-the-know tended to give his odd and suspicious activities a wide berth, the net result being that he had plenty of time on his hands to devote to his lifelong passion for inventing things. His fixation over compound rails never left him, and in 1879 the Patent Office awarded him a patent for new design that in no way resembled his oddball first attempt of 1856. This time around it resembled "U" rail, which had found more favor in the industry than compound rail, but had likewise failed to catch-on generally. Compound rail itself had completely fallen out of use by the end of the Civil War because of its primary bugaboo, a propensity for its binding nuts and bolts to work loose, causing the rail to fall apart. Holman now was certain that he had engineered a solution - three-part rails that "will require no other device, appliance, or attachment to make perfectly secure rails than to place them together and spike them to the cross ties." The inconvenient fact that locking pins had to be inserted into the rail to prevent horizontal creep escaped mention until a couple of paragraphs later. Whether it actually was a technical triumph or not did not matter much. It was if he had invented a revolutionary new type of buggy whip fifteen years into Model T production, and expected automobile owners to sit up and take notice due to its technical brilliance. What he did not grasp was that the horse was still dead.

His next patent exercise gave him some relief from the ever-accruing lawsuits of the early 80's. This time, he took on as partner Micah C. White of Minneapolis, Kate's oldest brother. The pair spent three years immersed in improving the rigidity and rot-resistance of uncovered wooden truss bridges. Iron and lately, steel, bridges were now replacing wooden spans on heavy duty main lines, but the cost advantage of wooden bridges still encouraged their ubiquitous use in less demanding applications. The two men figured that they could extend bridge life with two novel variations from conventional design. To reduce mechanical wear caused by fasteners, they designed a novel locking nut and bolt arrangement that supposedly would prevent nuts from backing off. These were applied to the corners of timbers (instead of flat surfaces), which themselves were set at 45 degree angles to horizontal to enable them to readily shed moisture. Holman received a patent for the bridge in late 1883 and assigned half the rights to White. A Canadian patent followed in 1885, but no bridge is known to have been built according to their specs.

1890-1894: Exactly who was this guy Caldwell, anyway?

By November Caldwell had completed a miniature prototype of the truck. Holman sent out invitations to the undoubtedly anxious stockholders to "see a complete roller-geared locomotive working by steam power - a severe test and pronounced success" on the night of November 7th at what is presumed to have been a hotel ballroom located a couple of blocks from Chigago, Milwaukee & St. Paul's downtown depot. (the "General Office" was located in Holman's home across the river)

Both the St. Paul Globe and the Minneapolis Star Tribune noted the event with reports that, despite their brevity, may have struck discord between the partners. The Star Tribune wrote on November 16:

Holman's patently stupid antics petrified NP officials, who promptly dismissed him from their railroad.

Soo Line managers likely witnessed Holman's high speed antics with chagrin, but with a measure of amusement over the discomfort of their cross-town rivals. They were kind enough to forgo an immediate rescue of engine #6 in favor of allowing it to accompany Holman's creation for display at the Minnesota State Fair, no doubt under the proviso that it be a static display.

Although banned from NP, Holman had achieved his immediate goal, stimulus for stock subscriptions. Railway Review helped out by publishing a photo of #6 and Holman (see image) along with an accompanying article whose only criticism had to do with the front truck's design. The journal Industry then proceeded to call the Review to task over its flattering remarks, saying, "The editor must know it is clotted nonsense, impossible on mechanical grounds, and a freak on all other grounds." The wounded Review editor weakly responded that he "did know it was "clotted nonsense," but thought it the best way to counter the the positive statements seen in the daily press was to portray the thing as it actually appears." Yeah, you bet.

1896:

Despite the setback, Holman judged the trials as promising enough to ramp-up his stock sales. In January, 1896 he, his namesake son and seven others, incorporated the Holman Speeding Truck Company. Oddly, their initial announcement declined to reveal the particulars of their proposed product, suggesting an attempt at secrecy, but our old acquaintance St. Paul Daily Globe chuckled that, "The device is not such a secret in this vicinity". Indeed, it was less than a mystery out in New Jersey, too. What surely took center stage attention, though, was company's staggering $10 million capitalization - the equivalent to more than $300 million in 2020 - an amount which left many people wondering why such an enormous amount of capital was required to fund the development and marketing of a mechanism that could have been farmed out to a medium size foundry. From its onset, the 'new' business's cover was blown as merely an upscale, more ambitious version of what Holman had been doing for more than five years.

By month's end, SJ and WJ&S were embroiled in a semi-formal speed competition, one that would continue on occasionally for decades. It was a natural-enough development for two competitors who ran within sight of each other for the eleven miles between Cape May and Cape May Courthouse, nearly half of it within 50 feet apart. As a consequence, South Jersey instituted a new fast train dubbed the Century Flyer by the winning entry in a naming contest. South Jersey officials must have figured that Holman's locomotive was an ace in the hole, but the inventor evidently was too busy signing stock certificates to be bothered with public exhibitions. It was close to two months before Holman got around to staging one.

When the trials took place at last, they were an absolute Holman PR master-stoke. A wire service reporter wrote of the first run on July 29:

The reporter also alleged that, from scratch, the 11 1/2 mile run between Cape May and Cape May Courthouse consumed eleven minutes for an average speed of 60 2/3 mph. He also related that the speed indicator on the engine touched 90 mph once (another source claimed 94 11/12th mph), and spent much of the time hovering around the 70 mph mark. These figures, as almost always, came from Holman's contingent, for the reporter made no representation about riding the engine. The newsman was not completely wide-eyed, however and brought up some generally circulating skepticism surrounding Holman's claims of increased economy:

His readers were left to themselves to wonder how all of that extra machinery - twenty bearings supporting ten axles and twenty wheels - was supposed to increase efficiency. At this point Holman still may have been in denial that this was a significant problem, or if he did understand, he was not about to broach the subject. He clearly was more concerned about reaching speeds above the century mark than addressing concerns of fuel economy. Fuel economy was not the stuff of banner headlines. Indeed, if he actually did measure fuel and water consumption during the test - not a given - he would have insured that the figures never see the light of day. They would not have been encouraging.

Later in the same day, June 29, Holman's machine reputedly equaled the 94 mph peak of the first sprint. Another round of tests followed the on the next morning, again departing from Cape May, supposedly carrying "200 people, including prominent railroad officials interested in the experiment."

This time Holman gave West Jersey a running start, according to the New York World:

This was such good press that it appeared in Holman display ads early the next year.

Holman anticpated conducting long distance tests during the following week, but they never materialized, nor was loco #1 sighted for the remainder of the year. A hurricane put much of New Jersey under water in mid-October, which may have affected his plans, but Holman had already realized his current locomotive lacked the power to surpass the 100 mph barrier - forget about the 120+ mph for which he was shooting. He even admitted as much and put his mind to plotting his future camapaigns.

South Jersey RR #10 or #12, Locomotive Engineering, 12-1898

1897: "In a way, he has proceeded to out-Fontaine Fontaine."

His 1897 campaign got to an early start. In February Holman began targeting large cities with a series of impressive quarter-page+ advertisements (see image at left) featuring woodblock likenesses of the locomotive and a bold print, all-caps proclamation that "THE UNIVERSAL ADOPTION OF THE HOLMAN TRUCK IS A CERTAINTY - ALREADY ADOPTED BY SOUTH JERSEY RAILROAD". Underneath, a reproduction copy of a letter from South Jersey General Superintendent Charles A. Beach (the replacement for the mysteriously departed super of the year before) proclaimed that because the Holman consumed about one-third less coal than his own locos while proving to be easier on the track, his railroad had ordered two of their own, scheduled for May 1st delivery, only three months away. The ad flatly asserted that, "The present adoption of the Holman Truck insures its universal adoption, and best of all for people who wanted to get in on the action, the company for a limited time would be offering the $100 par stock at a trifling $25 per share with an assurance that it would pay "acceptable" dividends the first year. Holman's device had finally cracked the big time, it seemed.

Modest ads soon materialized in smaller newspaper markets, and by all accounts Holman's agents performed yeoman duty hauling in subscriptions. It all would have been perfect had not Philadelphia Enquirer, who hosted some of Holman's largest ads, ran a story in its back pages about Holman #1 being attached by the Cape May constable. Holman reportedly had eluded payment of wages to the crew that had worked for him during the 1896 trials, and the constable had caught up with him just as he was about spirit his steed out of town. The implications of the non-payment charge surely mortified Holman as a looming PR disaster, but fortunately for him he managed to obtain a page one retraction that appeared a few days later. The blowup actually involved W.L. Simmons, a Philadelphia Contractor who, in the process of scrapping the engine, had a carload of scrap attached over "a question of wages" due his workers.The revision still got it partly wrong, nevertheless. South Jersey #1, not Holman #1, was the engine being broken up.

Angus Sinclair, the journalism field's august and authoritative lead voice on all subjects railroading, had been following Holman's operation all along with mounting distaste expressd in a few stray remarks here and there. Holman had already been found out, so why waste ink on this doddering old con man? He would self destruct soon enough.

But this present onslaught on life savings with South Jersey's glaring complicity was an escalation that demanded a more forceful editorial approach. Sinclair was the person to do it (once he set his sights on it), as nobody in his trade approached his depth of background, or skill of the pen. Now 57 and in full carreer stride as editor of the journal Railway and Locomotive Engineering, Sinclair began his railway career as a telegrapher in his native Scotland, rose to running locomotives when he was still in high school and received his initial engineering training in the shops of the Scottish Northeastern. After a time as a marine engineer, he came to America, where he first ran locomotives on Erie Rail Road, then moved west to Iowa, where he continued as a locomotive engineer on Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern. During this time he specialized in water analysis while studying chemistry at Iowa State University, which earned him a job on the Burlington road as a combination chemist and roundhouse foreman. He took an interest in the problems of fuel economy and smoke prevention, which led him to advocate new methods which were met with skepticism at firts, but ventually became univerally accepted.

His writings for various railway and other publications turned into a full time career in 1883, when he joined the editorial staff of the American Machinist. After a few years, he purchased the journal's publishing company and began Railway and Locomotive engineering. By 1897, Sinclair was a member of nearly every leading engineering society in North America and Europe, and had authored several technical and historical tomes about locomotives. His first book passed through 26 editions.

Sinclair could not confine his antithapy towards all things Holman to his own journal. He continued his harange in the New York Times, albeit with rehashed material from a couple of years prior. In part:

A rehash it was, but it found its mark. Holman habitually shied away from addressing attacks, but his son Harry could not hold himself back. His response is the sole example yet encountered of a Holman camp member giving an interview in direct rebuttal to a critic, so Harry's complaints are reproduced in full:

Harry's was a straightforward, in-your-face callout of Sinclair, whose rather lazy, cut-and-paste mockery relied upon his personal reputation as a giant of technology, rather than any concrete science. In terms of reception by Holman's technoligically unsophisticated clients, his plain response to Sinclair's uncharacteristic (but wholly justified) nastiness was brilliant, made even more compelling by the latter's weak admonition to avoid buying stock until future tests proved the truck's value. This inferred to readers that Sinclair was a bit foggy on the concept. Furthermore, had he sent his men afield to investigate Holman, they may have uncovered the skulduggery underlying Holman's current moves, but this was not the sort of activity that trade publications undertook. Had Sinclair fully understood the extent of Holman's perfidy towards stockholders, he would have choked on his cigar.

Having two engines on the books boosted the invention's legitimacy in Holman's eyes. Since this in turn "assured" that mass production was inevitable, he was certain that he had a sufficient reason to inflate the public perception of his company's magnitude. The company would soon receive thousands of orders for his game changing device, he said, so it was imperitive that it locate manufacturing sites now. The Speeding Truck Company was now going big-time. rationale to feed to the public as justification forfor pumping up public

To keep up with the anticipated clamor for orders, Holman proclaimed that two plants would be required, one to handle the East Coast trade and the other in Minneapolis to take care of the West (which presumably stopped at the foot of the Rockies' Front Range, where the restrictive inconveniences of tight tunnel clearances and stiff grades likely prove to be a damper on the market). In an interesting bit of timing, Holman announced the "probable" purchase of the abandoned Gilbert Car Works plant at Green Island, New York while his son and Sinclair were engaged in their editorial squabbling. The news may have been his personal response to the journalist - "You're now talking to a heavyweight, buddy!" - and it came with an assurance to stockholders that he had negotiated a splendid deal at half the appraised value. At the same time, he maintained that he was "under obligation to the city of Minneapolis" to locate a facility there (on fertile ground hosting his largest group of stockholders). The company's bylaws required that the directors be given 10 days advance notice of a large transaction to allow for deliberative meetings, he disclosed, so nothing definite could be announced for awhile.

Yes, Holman was fully capable of believing that investors would buy into the farfetched proposition that the sale of two locomotives somehow absolutely guaranteed thousands of orders would follow. A few of his more ignorant marks probably did, as well, but for reasons unknown nothing more came of the matter. Maybe the Gilbert plant owners were a little surprised and put off to hear that they were selling their plant for half-price.

With the completion of the "South Jersey" engines still a ways off - Baldwin's schedule conformed to the requisites of reality, not an addled inventor's imagination - Holman had ample time to take full advantage to pursue sales generated by his waves of propaganda. As always, he assiduously avoided railroad men. In fact, he preferred to sidestep men altogether, because they were more apt to have some understanding of mechanical gadgets, a serious hindrance to sales. Besides, long experience told him that he did his best work catering to what he would have regarded as the frailties of women - appreciation of home, family, warmth, honesty and all that other nonsense. He was pretty good, not great, mind you, but pretty good at hiding his hard heart when need be.

But by now he commanded a small flock of agents who each had his own method of parting funds from people. In May, Machinery revealed that they were "again" in Philadelphia, attempting to sell stock in their "prize freak in railroad lines". Holman was there, too. In between sales, he was in an opportune position to keep in-person tabs on the locomotives' progress at Baldwin. Perhaps he offered a few insightful suggestions regarding their proper manufacture.

Then, he gave his permission anyway. The thought of hosting the world's speed record was just too much for him to resist, unless his reluctance was contrived poppycock in the first place. If her timeline of events is accurate, Swan must have had her bags packed while Pulitzer awaited a reply, as the first special ran on the morning of October 20th, two days after Beach's OK.

The first day was nearly a washout of wind and rain, "yet", according to McGuirk, "we covered a mile in 33 seconds [95 mph]." She continued:

And then the tension. Half a minute is not long as a lifetime goes, but, but McClain and myself, the fireman and Mr. Holman lived hours in time.

I leaned far out of the cab window. Nothing but white spots could be seen of the speeding truck wheels. They were turning so fast the revolution could not be seen. All the shaking was gone. Watch in hand, I could sit bolt upright without support. There was nothing in the world but a long steel knife ahead that vanished the instant I realized it. Woods disappeared. Everything mingled and formed one brick red tunnel.

The seconds were flying. Ah, would she make it. And then my heart stood still. It seemed as if No. 12 answered. How she did catch hold of the track and straighten out. No racehorse ever laid herself out, no arrow ever went straighter or stiffer to its finish. The red flag was not in sight, and from my watch I knew we would win. All I was conscious of [was?] the triumph. The speed indicator said 128 miles an hour. [Holman and Morrow claimed that they timed the last half mile in 27.5. seconds, 131 mph] Even as I read it I knew the red flag was passed. The whistle was blowing No. 12's victory out over all that Jersey loneliness. For another mile the victor flew along and then we slowed up. McClain and I looked at each other in sort of a dazed, speechless fashion, and nobody said a word… McClain picked up a bit of waste and and nervously rubbed the boiler before he asked how much.

Thirty-two seconds was the time for the distance… McClain's first exclamation was: "Give me a decent track and I'll make two and a half miles a minute, I know."

Given the lack of independent observers, it was a simple matter for Holman to doctor-up the outcome. The measured "mile", supposedly laid out by surveyors during South Jersey's construction, was a likely candidate for shortening - McGuirk was in no position to know the difference. At a time that virtually no locomotive had exceeded 100 mph - did a recorder designed for 128 mph even exist? McGuirk claim to have "leaned far out the cab window" at over 110 mph without negative repercussions is hard to swallow. (Note: I certainly was not foolish enough to stick my head far out the window at the comparatively glacial ~80 mph speed that I routinely operated my locomotives!)

Suspicious as all of this was, none of it disproved the possibility that Holman #12 did achieve a remarkable speed. Mcguirk's description of her sensations at high speed match my own experiences, sensory overload that I think of as the "tunnel effect". "There was nothing in the world but a long steel knife ahead that vanished the instant I realized it. Woods disappeared. Everything mingled and formed one brick red tunnel." The one time that I sat in the cab of a locomotive traveling at the sort of speeds that McGuirk claimed, it seemed as if I was watching the event through a fisheye lens, much as she described. The track merged into an apparently motionless swath of steel ahead, while on the periphery, trees merged into narrow tunnels of green that expanded at the last moment to accommodate the train's dimensions. The experience was so foreign that my mind could not process it. To me, McGuirk clearly had traveled at a speed unprecedented for her, well above her 75 mph on the B&O.

But how fast? There is no way of telling. People much smarter than me maintain that humans experience differential changes in perception of speed due to motion adaption, or as I would put it, after awhile your brain gets used to going fast, and adjusts. My brain was attuned to the jet age, not the horse-and-buggy era. One wonders, nevertheless. If the run indeed turned Engineer McClain speechless, as she claimed, it does suggest that he had entered into speed territory well beyond previous personal experience.

What speed McClain actually achieved, we shall never know. Even theorizing a reasonable top speed for an engine of #12's power would likely wind up being an educated guess due to the significant numbers of unknown specs and variables. The most telling stat may have been that Kate Swan did not lose her hat.

Then, a few days later, creditors foreclosed upon South Jersey. Cape May business was simply too sporadic to carve up between two railroads. During its not-quite four years of existence, the company never came close to turning a profit. For a month, Holman's prospects remained in limbo as he waited for the foreclosure sale. This time around, Philadelphia & Reading was not about to stand back and allow Pennsylvania Railroad to swoop in. After placing the winning bid on March 29, P&R formed subsidiary Seacoast Railway Company to assume ownership, which it quickly leased out to another P&R subsidiary, Atlantic City Railroad. Atlantic City Railroad was no fan of Holman, having previously rebuffed his entreaties to run demonstrations. His locomotives were evicted along with South Jersey's corrupt management.

Whac-A-Mole and a curtain call after the show shut down

Suddenly the one railroad company on the continent that was willing to host his Speeding Trucks was gone, never mind that after three years of trying, his plan for elevating his locomotives from the sand lots of South Jersey into big league railroading was crushed. In the past, he remained resilient in these down moments, but now, at close to 80, he lacked the energy to pull himself through. By summer he went missing, dividing his time between Minneapolis, Philadelphia and perhaps elsewhere, to avoid pursuing stockholders in a game of Whac-A-Mole. Financial journals pronounced his securities as worthless. Locomotive Engineering labeled this "The End of the Holman Monstrosity", but the pundits were premature.

With the revenue stream dried up, finances soon became so tight for the Holman family that daughter Birdie, son-in-law Strella (who had returned to selling real estate) and their three young children moved in to her parents' home, already shared with her sister Nora and brother Oliver. With the two company principles responsible for signing stock certificates literally in-house, it was probably inevitable that, once the heat was off, they would return to their old game, which they did for a short time in 1901 with little success. Without the demonstrations, it was tough to drum up enthusiasm. This all must have been too much for Strella, for he soon abandoned his family, causing Birdie to divorce him in 1902.

Although now solidly in his 80's, Holman's mind remained sufficiently active for him to continue fiddling with compound rail. In May, 1903, he filed for a patent for a slightly modified version of his 1879 creation. And, he still had enough left in the tank to give his Speeding Truck a last go.

Shortly after receiving word of his ejection from South Jersey, Holman sold loco #1 to Buffalo & Susquehanna, but the exact fate of #10 and #12 and their trucks is unclear. Baldwin received a "special order" for something pertaining to them in June, 1898, which probably means that they were being readied for sale as conventional locomotives. He hung onto his original friction bearing truck (a reporter later mentioned that it had bronze sleeve bearings), however, which he brought out of mothballs in February, 1904 more than six years after the Pulitzer special.

Somehow or another, he had managed to cajole a genuine big time railroad, Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburg (later part of Baltimore & Ohio) into a trial run. Rather than being a publicity stunt as in the past, this one was a genuine demonstration run ostensibly put on to entice BR&P officials into a sale. Even the railroad's president had enough curiosity to show up, although it is hard to fathom his railroad's interest given its generally hill and dale profile that required mammoth, small-driver locomotives to cope with the grades. For the most part, BR&P was no racetrack.

By February's end, BR&P people had placed an unknown locomotive on top of Holman's Speeding Trucks in its DuBois, Pennsylvania shop. BR&P had no locos so small in stature that they would mate with his machine, so it is possible, even likely, that nearby Buffalo & Susquehanna allowed the former #1 to be re-united with its trucks. The tests then awaited Holman's arrival from New York City, which had been delayed because of a "slight indisposition" of his health. When he finally was fit enough to travel, he chose to go home to Minneapolis, where he died on April 9th, less than two months short of his 85th birthday. Three weeks later, the Patent Office granted him a patent for his latest compound rail permutation.

W.J.'s son Harry, who had performed all of the heavy lifting in the event, carried on. The Holman Locomotive made its farewell runs on May 24, 1904 on the 12 mile expanse between Rochester, New York and outlying Scottsville. Young Holman had no opportunity to doctor the results this time. The loco managed a 70 mph average over the distance, but but it lost 40 pounds of steam in the process due to a ride so unsteady that the fireman could not heave coal into its firebox. (Were all the previous claims of a smooth ride contrived, or was BR&P track that bad?) Afterwards, the crowd piled off to watch the Holman perform a one mile speed burst, which the BR&P men timed at 44 seconds (82 mph). As respectable as the performance was, the BR&P superintendent-in-charge was underwhelmed enough to score it as "satisfactory", a kiss of death that Harry totally misconstrued. He proclaimed there would be more tests in the future, but they never came. In the few years since the Cape May trials, steam locomotive technology had raced by while The Holman sat motionless in a siding.*

In early 1905, Sinclair's journal, ever ready to lambast Holman's foibles, reported the engine as resting "at liberty".

The demonstration was brief, but conclusive. Given an "honest" chance, the Speeding Trucks's performance did not match the hype. The miracles of friction gearing only exhibited themselves within the doctored universe of Holman, and Holman was dead.

His death went unremarked outside of the Twin Cities area, and his family surely supplied the inauthentic biographic data used to note his passing. Fittingly, only old ally St. Paul Globe covered his death as news, with a two paragraph article that name-dropped his famous cousin William S. Holman in the headline, a good indication about which of W.J.'s lifetime accomplishments was deemed the most significant. The Globe also related that "though not widely known in the city he was well known in mechanical and scientific circles," yet not even Angus Sinclair recognized his passing. The Improvement Bulletin of Minneapolis, which dealt mostly with construction and architecture, was the only professional journal to run an obituary. It read:

Holman's lifelong progression of scams ultimately all went south on him, this we know, but that does not necessarily mean he deserves a summary judgement as a total failure. He did achieve a measure of success in that he never spent time in prison and managed to live comfortably (but not sumptuously) off of the proceeds of his defeats. This ranks him as a fairly adept confidence man, better than the jail birds, but a bush leaguer compared the big-timers who milked not only stock holders, but entire markets.

Had Holman not been a figurative poster boy for the Dunnning-Kruger Effect; had he not confused ignorance with brilliance, he would not have waded blindly into a subaqueous tunnel, proposed saddling up to herd buffalo, or bet one and one-half decades' worth of work on a mythical truck. Likewise, had he not been a little thick in the head, he would have perceived that most people viewed him as a crook and a bit of a whacko. As it was, Holman's industry, persistence and resilience were all balanced upon self deceit - he would prevail because he was smarter than the next guy.