Part 1, Chapter 1, Section 2

An unnamed woman with a face of “angular planes” (p 12) and “dark gray eyes” (p 16) sits by the window in a coach seat on the Taggart Comet (p 15). “She looked like a young girl; only her mouth and eyes showed that she was a woman in her thirties.” (p 16) She listens to a brakeman whistle a tune with “the freedom of release and the tension of purpose” while hearing the train wheels knock in an even rhythm, “every fourth knock accented, as if stressing a conscious purpose.” (p 13) She knows the song is by composer Richard Halley, but then realizes she never heard it before and startles: “When did Richard Halley write this?” Despite knowing every note written by Halley, the song is foreign to her (p 14). She asks the brakeman what piece is and he tells her it is Richard Halley’s Fifth Concerto. She retorts that Halley only wrote four concertos, causing the brakeman to return to his work and evade further questioning.

The woman nods off but is reawakened by the silence of the stopped train (p 15). She rushes outside to find a small crowd of idle workers. She commands What’s the matter? She is informed that the train took a wrong track due to a faulty switch and has been stuck at a red light for an hour. The engineer dare not move the train forward because, “I don’t intend to stick my neck out.” The woman orders that the train cautiously proceed forward and return to the main track. When asked who she is, she responds without offense: Dagny Taggart. She is only the Vice President in Charge of Operations, but once she returns inside the engineer remarks, “that’s who runs Taggart Transcontinental” to the brakeman (p 17). The train soon jolts back into motion.