D&H RUNNING OUT OF TIME.(Business)

Byline: Leslie Zganjar Associated Press

This is the story of a man and a railroad, linked together through more than 40 years of sweat and toil and the sound of thunderous steel rushing down miles of track.

Dick Williams, tall and lean with eyes the color of blue steam pouring from a main engine, was a young boy living in Albany, mightily impressed by his father, a train dispatcher, and that mysterious mountain of steel when the friendship began.

The Delaware & Hudson Railway was at its peak in the 1920s, for America hadn't forsaken it yet in favor of cars and trucks and planes.

Williams believed it always would survive because the D&H was the oldest railroad in the country, a founding father of the romantic myth of the past.

Now, the man who thought he would be dead long before the scrap heap …