TRAINS AT WORK

ILLUSTRATED BY
DAVID LYLE MILLARD

GARDEN CITY BOOKS GARDEN CITY, N.Y.

SAM IS A FIREMAN:

Sam is the fireman on a big freight locomotive. Like lots of people who work on trains, Sam belongs to a family of railroaders. His father was a locomotive engineer. His grandfather was one, too. And, long ago, grandmother was an “op.” That means she operated the fast-clicking telegraph key in a railroad station. Her telegraph messages helped to keep the trains running safely and on time.

When Sam was a little boy, he listened to his father and grandfather talking railroad talk. They used all kinds of words that ordinary people didn’t understand. They had wonderful nicknames for each other, and slang words for many of the things they did.

For instance, grandfather called his big locomotive a hog. Since he ran it, he was the hogger. After every trip, he brought his engine to the roundhouse, where men cleaned it and fixed it all up. Pig-pen was one nickname for the roundhouse. Can you figure out why? Another nickname was barn, because people often called a locomotive an Iron Horse. The barn had stalls for the engines. A modern roundhouse does, too.

The lumps of coal that grandfather’s engine burned were called black diamonds. Fireman was the regular name for the man who shoveled coal, cleaned out the ashes and helped to grease the wheels with tallow fat. But the fireman also had a whole string of nicknames—diamond pusher, ashcat, bakehead and tallow pot. He called his shovel his banjo.

Once an old-fashioned train began rolling, it was hard to stop it. A man had to run from car to car, putting the brakes on by hand. Naturally, he was the brakeman, but his friends called him the shack.

In the days before electric lights, railroads needed signals just as they do now. The first ones were large balls that hung from a tall post. A black ball hanging halfway to the top of the post meant STOP. A white ball hanging high in the air meant CLEAR TRACK.

Lots of things have changed since then, but a signal

to go ahead is still the “highball” because railroaders still use many of the old words. Firemen and brakemen now have machinery that does many of the things they used to do, but they keep their old names. And one thing hasn’t changed at all: People still love trains. The men who work on the huge powerful engines would rather work there than almost anywhere else. That’s how Sam feels about it.

When Sam reports for work, his big steam locomotive is all ready. Men have oiled it and checked it. The fire is roaring in the firebox. In the old days, a fireman spent most of his time shoveling coal. The faster the train went, the more steam it needed and the faster the fireman had to work with his banjo. Sam knows how to use a shovel if he needs to, but that’s not his main job. His locomotive has a machine called an automatic stoker which feeds coal into the firebox.

Sam just checks up on the fire. He looks at dials and gauges in the locomotive cab, and they tell him what he wants to know. There is enough steam. Everything is ship-shape.

Sam and the engineer and a brakeman work at the front of the train, so they are called the head-end crew. Another brakeman and the freight conductor work in the caboose—the last car on the train. In between the caboose and the locomotive are sixty cars of important freight that has to be delivered fast. A fast freight is called a hotshot or redball. A slow one is a drag.

Sam and the engineer are ready to go. Far down the track the conductor raises his arm and gives the highball signal. He is ready, too. Now the engineer pulls the throttle lever. The long train snakes out of the freight yards onto the main line, and pretty soon they are “batting the stack off her”—which means making fast time.

Sam, on the left side of the cab, watches the track ahead. The engineer sits on the right, keeping a sharp lookout. When they come to a curve, Sam looks back along the train to make sure everything is all right.

After a while they see a little town up ahead, and beside the track stands a signal they have been expecting. It looks like a round plate, with places for nine lights in it. But only three of the lights are ever flashed at once. At the top of the page you will see what each set of lights means.

This time three green go-ahead lights are showing.

“Clear signal,” Sam calls to the engineer.

“Green eye it is,” the engineer replies.

All through the trip he and Sam will call the signals back and forth to each other, just to make sure there is no mistake. The engineer gives one long blast on his whistle to tell the station agent in the little town that the train is coming.

As they go past the station, Sam leans out of the cab and snatches a hoop from the station agent’s hand. Quickly Sam takes a piece of paper from it and tosses

the hoop out again. In the meantime the agent hands another hoop to the conductor in the caboose.

The paper that Sam takes off the hoop is a train order, called a flimsy. On the flimsy the station agent has written instructions for the train’s crew. Orders come to the station by telegraph. Sometimes they tell the crew that the train must make an unexpected stop at the next station. Sometimes they give information about other trains that have been delayed.

Bigger stations often have train order posts that stand beside the track, but small-town agents hoop the orders up by hand. Usually the agent has to walk along the track and pick up hoops that the crew toss down. But the one who gave the orders to Sam has a dog trained to chase hoops and bring them back!

Sam and the engineer and the brakeman read the orders to be sure nobody makes a mistake that might cause an accident. Back in the caboose the other brakeman and the conductor read their copy of the orders, too. Then the conductor goes to work at his desk again. The caboose is really his office. There he checks the papers that tell where every freight car in the train is supposed to go.

The brakeman pours himself a cup of coffee that’s been heating on the stove in the caboose. Then he climbs to his seat in the cupola—the little tower with windows through which he can watch the train. Squirrel cage is a nickname for the cupola. The caboose has the most nicknames of all. Crib, crum box, crummy, bounce, doghouse, parlor and monkey house are some of them.

Safety is everybody’s job on a train, and each man in the crew knows the rules. If the train makes an emergency stop, the men take care that no other train will bump into them. One brakeman runs out ahead and the other runs back along the track with signal flags to warn the other trains. At night they take along fusees, which look like giant firecrackers and burn with a bright red warning glow. Torpedoes are the best warning of all.

The brakeman fastens torpedoes to the track with little clamps. Then, if a locomotive runs over them, they explode with loud bangs that tell the engineer to stop before he runs into the stalled train ahead.

The first regular stop for Sam’s train is a station where the tender is filled with water. The long string of freight cars waits here on a siding while a fast passenger train goes by.

On the next part of Sam’s trip, the train has to climb some steep grades. One engine alone can’t do all the work, so a helper engine couples on just ahead of the caboose. On the days when Sam’s train is extra long and heavy, two helpers are needed.

Going downhill in the mountains is work, too—work for the brakes. In the old days, the brakeman had to run along the tops of freight cars and “club down.”

That means he used a long club called a sap, to turn the wheels that set the hand brakes on each car.

The catwalks or decks along the car roofs made a path for the brakemen. Sometimes they walked up and down inspecting the train. Then they said they were “deckorating.”

Fast freight cars, and slow ones, too, now have air brakes which are squeezed against the wheels by compressed air. Every car has an air hose that runs underneath it to the brake machinery. The hose from each car can be joined to the hose on the ones behind and in front, and finally to the locomotive’s hose. A pump in the locomotive compresses the air for the whole train. Now if the engineer wants to stop, he just moves a lever. A whoosh of air tightens the brakes on every car.

When the train goes down a long hill, the squeezing of the brakes can actually make the wheels get red hot. Some freight trains have to stop and let the wheels get cool. But the cars in Sam’s train have a sort of fan built into the brake machinery. The fan cools the wheels, and the redball freight goes right on down.

After a while, Sam takes a little scoop and tosses some sand into the firebox. He knows that the engine’s flues are likely to get clogged up with soot, and the sand will clean them out. Later on, sand does an even more important job. The train has run into a storm in the cold, high mountains. Slushy snow has frozen on the rails. Instead of pulling ahead, the engine’s wheels begin to slip round and round.

But the engineer fixes that easily. He squirts sand onto the slick track to make the wheels pull again. The sand comes from the dome, which is the hump you can see behind the stack on top of a locomotive. Pipes lead down from the dome on each side and aim the sand onto the track just in front of the driving wheels.

A locomotive’s sand is just as important as coal and water. Ice or rain or even the dampness in a tunnel can make slippery tracks. So the railroads keep supplies of fine dry sand to fill the domes. Sam always checks to see if he has enough sand when the tender takes on coal.

The huge coal towers in big freight yards can fill several tenders at once. Often, while the loading goes on, ashes from the locomotive’s firebox get cleaned out at the same time. There is a dump pit under the tracks, with little cars that run on their own rails. After a little car is filled with ashes, it can be pushed away and unloaded at the ash heap.

When Sam pulls into the next big freight yard, his part of the run is finished. After a while he will board another engine and take another freight train back to his home station. He has a regular schedule for work. That doesn’t seem strange these days, but Sam’s grandfather would have thought it was something miraculous.

In the old days, grandfather never knew what time he’d have to leave for work. Sometimes, when he was just ready to blow out the kerosene lamp and go to bed, there would be a knock at the door. On the dark porch stood a boy, still panting from a bicycle ride up the street. He was the railroad call boy, and he’d come to say that an engineer was needed right away. Grandfather had been assigned to the job. So he pulled on his clothes and went off, no matter how sleepy he was.

The place where Sam leaves his train is called a division point. Other men will take over all the cars of redball freight and speed them on another division of their trip. Let’s see who these different railroaders are and what they do.

UNSCRAMBLING THE TRAINS

Sixty freight cars have come roaring together over the mountains behind Sam’s engine. But now the cars have to be separated. Some of them are going to Baltimore. Some will turn north to Chicago. Others are bound south. Freight cars for twenty different cities are coupled together in one train, and somebody must unscramble them.

Suppose you have a lot of colored beads on a string and you want to separate them into greens and reds and blues. The easiest way is to get three cups and let the beads drop off one by one, each into its own cup with the others of the same color.

That’s just what railroaders do with a freight train. Instead of cups, of course, they have a lot of separate tracks, all branching off a main track. On one branch track, they collect the cars that go to Baltimore; on another, the cars for Chicago; on another, the cars headed south. This system of tracks is a classification yard.

In order to turn the cars from one track to another, there must be a lot of switches. A switch is made up of movable pieces of rail that guide the cars’ wheels. Look at the picture and you will see how a switch guides a car either along the main track or onto a branch track that curves off to the right.

Some of the most wonderful inventions in the world have been put to work in the big freight classification yards. First the regular engine leaves the train and a special switch engine couples on. The engineer of the switch engine has a radio telephone in the cab, so he can listen to orders from the towerman who unscrambles the train.

The towerman sits in a tower beside the track at the top of a little hill called the hump. The main track goes over the hump and down. Then it divides into several branch tracks. If you uncouple a car just at the top of the hump, it will roll down the slope by itself.

To make the car go onto the right branch, the towerman works an electric switch. He just pushes little handles on the board in front of him, and electric machinery moves the switches in the tracks.

On the desk beside him, the towerman has a list that tells him where each car in the train is and what city it is headed for. He knows which branch tracks should be used—track number 4 for cars going to Baltimore, track 6 for Chicago cars.

Slowly the switch engine pushes the train toward the hump. On the way the cars pass over a big hole underneath the track. In the hole sits a man in a chair that can be tipped and turned. And all around are bright lights that shine on the undersides of cars as they pass. This is the inspection pit. The man in the chair tilts this way and that, watching through a shatterproof glass hood to see if anything is broken or loose on the under side of the cars. When he spots a car that needs repairing, he talks with the towerman by radio telephone. And the towerman switches the car off to a repair track.

(Not all yards have radio telephone. In the ones that don’t, the inspector pushes a button and squirts whitewash onto a car to mark it for repair.)

Now the cars come close to the hump. A brakeman uncouples the first one. Slowly it starts downhill. Then it gathers speed—faster, faster. If it hits another car there will be a crash. But, like magic, something seems to grab at the wheels and slow them down.

Something does rise up like fingers from the sides of the track. It is the car retarder which squeezes against the wheels and keeps the car from rolling along too fast.

The retarder works by electricity. The towerman just presses a button or a handle in the tower, and far down the track the retarder machinery goes to work. Before railroads had this machinery, brakemen went over the hump with the cars, working fast and hard to put the hand brakes on at just the right time. Brakemen who did this were called hump riders.

Once in a while a hump rider still goes with a car of very fragile freight that might be broken if it banged into another car the least bit too hard.

Car after car drifts down the hump and stops just where it should. When one freight train has been unscrambled, another rolls up beneath the tower, and its cars, too, are shuffled. In just a few hours half a dozen trains have been broken up and made into new ones.

Some yards have extra inspectors who stand on top of a building and look down at the cars from above. They can see broken parts that the man in the inspection pit might miss. In other yards, a man is stationed beside the track that leads up to the hump. In his hands, he holds something that looks like a gun. It is—an oil gun. As each car passes, he takes aim and fires a stream of oil straight into the car’s journal box. (You’ll read about the journal box on page 42.)

Not every freight yard has a hump or car retarders or radio telephones. Only the biggest ones have all these things. In many yards the switch engine pushes the whole train first onto one track and then onto another, dropping a car each time.

There are several kinds of switch engine, built especially for their jobs. But switching is often done with very old engines that aren’t fast enough for regular runs any more. Railroad men call an old wheezy engine a teakettle. An ordinary switch engine is a bobtail or a yard goat.

If the yard doesn’t have switches that work by electricity, switchmen work them by hand. A switchman is sometimes called a cherry picker, because of the red lights on the switches. Another nickname for him is snake. That’s because he used to wear a union button with a big snaky S on it. Many railroaders belong to unions called Brotherhoods. Part of the safety of their work was brought about by the unions which helped to get laws passed and rules established to make railroading as free from danger as possible.

In the old days, one great danger came from the big, heavy gadget called a link-and-pin that joined the cars together. The switchman or the brakeman had to reach in and fasten it when a train was being made up. If the cars began to move while he was at work, he might get his fingers cut off.

All cars now have automatic couplings which clasp together and hold tight when one car bumps another. To uncouple, the switchman works a handle that keeps his fingers safely out of the way.

A railroad yard is a noisy place. Usually the engineer can’t possibly talk with a switchman down the track, no matter how loud he shouts. So railroaders have worked out a whole sign language in which they can talk to each other from a distance. The pictures tell what some of these special signals mean.

After a new freight train has been made up at the classification yard, a car inspector puts a blue flag on the engine and another on the caboose. Then he checks up carefully on the whole train to make sure everything is in good working order. An old nickname for inspector is car toad, because he often squats down to look for broken parts. While he is at work, the blue flags are a warning that the train must not be disturbed. If the inspector finds a car that needs repairs, he reports that it is a “bad order car.”

THE BACKSHOP

Locomotives get their regular inspection in the roundhouse. Small repair jobs are done there. But if there’s something seriously wrong, off the engine goes to the backshop for a complete overhauling.

The backshop for locomotive repairs has rails on the floor—and rails up in the air, too. An engine chuffs in on its own tracks and stops. When it has cooled down, an overhead crane travels on its rails high above the floor. It swoops down, picks up the body of the locomotive and carries the whole thing away, leaving the wheels behind.

Now a dozen men swarm over the engine’s body, and before long it looks like an old piece of junk. Some parts get thrown away. But many of them just need cleaning or mending. As the hundreds of parts come off, they are marked with the engine’s number. Then they scatter all over the shop to be inspected and cleaned or fixed and tested.

Meantime, other workers take charge of the wheels. In the old days, they had one particular way of testing a wheel. They gave it a good sharp rap with a hammer. If the metal rang out clear and bell-like, it was supposed to be all right. Inspectors in railroad yards went about tapping car wheels, too. And that’s how repairmen and inspectors got their nicknames—car-knocker, car-whacker, car-tinker, car-tink, car-tonk. Wheel experts in the backshop now have scientific tests to make sure

that wheels are in good condition. Sometimes they even do X-ray tests, looking for cracks hidden deep inside the metal!

When you walk around a big railroad shop, everything seems noisy and helter-skelter. Noisy it is. Wheels screech, hammers pound, fires roar. But the work is really planned out in a very orderly way. And nothing goes to waste. When big machine parts get worn down, they can often be shaved and smoothed and made over into smaller parts for a different purpose.

Even the shavings have their uses. A machine with a magnet in it sorts the tiny bits of metal. The iron bits stick to the magnet and other kinds drop through into containers. Later, each kind of metal is melted down to make new parts. Iron dust from one engine’s axle may turn up later in one of the thousands of new car wheels that railroads keep in huge yards.

All of this fixing and testing and making over takes a lot of time. A locomotive may spend a month or more in the shop. But at last it is all put together again, complete with a new coat of paint. Now it goes out for a test on the slip-track. This is a greased track where the engine’s wheels whirl round as if it were going at top speed while it is really almost standing still. If everything works all right, its old number is put in place, and an almost new locomotive is ready to highball again.

LOCOMOTIVES

More than forty different kinds of locomotive work for the railroads. Some of them haul freight, and some are passenger train engines. Some are steam locomotives, some are not.

Steam locomotives all need water to make the steam that makes the wheels turn. But they don’t all get it in the same way. One kind never has to stop and wait for its tender to be filled. Instead it has a scoop that dips down as the engine passes over a long track-pan of water set between the rails. With no time lost, the scoop sucks up water into the tank. The men say, “She’s jerked a drink.” In winter, the track-pans are heated to keep the water from freezing.

Two kinds of locomotive don’t even need water. Electric engines use electric current instead of steam to turn the wheels. They get the current from wires along the tracks. Diesel-electrics are more complicated. They have oil-burning engines that make electric current right in the locomotive, and this current runs motors that turn the wheels.

There are several engines inside a Diesel-electric locomotive. If one of them gets out of order during the trip, the others keep on delivering power while the one is repaired. The engineer and the fireman sit in the cab at the very front of a Diesel-electric. They can watch the track through front windows.

The cab is at the front of the engine shown on this page, too, but it is a steam locomotive. It burns oil instead of coal, so the cab doesn’t have to be right next to the tender. The men call it the Big Wamp. It hauls tremendously long freight trains across the Rocky Mountains. One siding where the men stop to eat is so long that there has to be a restaurant at each end!

Many railroads are buying more and more Diesels as their steam locomotives wear out. The Santa Fe Railroad’s Diesel at the top of the page is called a 6000 because it has six thousand horsepower.

The New York, New Haven & Hartford uses electric locomotives because it can get power for them easily. The one above is called the EP-4 because it is the fourth model of electric passenger engine the road has used.

All the others in these pictures are steam locomotives, but the T-1 is a special kind. Its name means that it is the first of a type called a turbine locomotive. An ordinary engine lets out its used-up steam in puffs, as if it were panting. A turbine doesn’t, and so it never makes the familiar chuff-chuff noise.

The name on each of the other steam locomotives shows that it belongs to a type that has a particular arrangement of wheels. All Pacific-type engines have four small wheels in front, then six big ones, then two small ones in back. Mikados have two small, eight big, then two small ones. The way to write these wheel arrangements is 4-6-2 and 2-8-2. If an engine is called a 2-6-0, that means it doesn’t have any small wheels at the back. A 2-8-8-2 has two sets of big wheels and two sets of small ones. And 0-8-8-0 means there are no small wheels at all.

HOT BOXES

Have you ever been on a train that stopped suddenly between stations? Perhaps one of the cars had a hot box. Here is how it happened:

Car axles must be kept well greased if they are going to move smoothly. They are fixed so that each end of the axle turns in a bed of oily stringy stuff called waste. The container that holds this bed of oily waste is the journal box, and there’s one for every wheel on a car.

Inspectors always check journal boxes carefully, but it sometimes happens that the oil gets used up while the car is moving. The unoiled axle grows hotter and hotter until the waste begins to smoke and burn. Then the car has a hot box, which railroaders also call a stinker. Hot boxes can be dangerous. If an axle goes too long without grease, it may break off and cause a bad accident.

When the train goes around a curve, the engineer or the fireman looks back for smoking journal boxes. The brakeman in the caboose keeps an eye out for them, too. On many new height trains the conductor or the brakeman can call immediately by radio telephone and tell the engineer to stop for a stinker. But on older trains, the conductor can only pull the emergency air-brake, which stops the whole train fast.

Although a hot box is dangerous, it’s easy to remedy. The box only needs to be re-packed with fresh oil-soaked waste.

Everybody who works on a railroad watches for smoking journal boxes. Suppose a freight train has stopped on a siding to let a fast passenger train go by. The head freight brakeman stands beside the track. If he sees a hot box on the fast train—or any loose, dragging part—he signals to the passenger engineer.

When railroad workers give a good look at a running train, they say that they’ve made a running inspection. Telegraph operators and station agents come out on the platform and make running inspections whenever trains go by.

The newest, fastest cars on both passenger and freight trains get fewer hot boxes than old ones. Their axles have roller bearings to help them turn smoothly, and the oil in their journal boxes is supposed to last for a long time. Still, an inspector may forget to check the oil, or it may leak out.

There’s no waste packed around roller bearings. So, how is anyone going to tell when one of the new cars gets a hot box? Some railroads have solved the problem with bombs! Into every journal box go two little gadgets that explode when an unoiled axle begins to heat up. One bomb lets out a big puff of smoke that can easily be seen. The other spills a nasty smelling gas that is sure to make passengers complain, in case the conductor doesn’t notice it himself.

GREENBALL FREIGHT

Roller-bearings are usually put on the freight cars that need to run at passenger train speed. Greenball freight always travels fast. A greenball train carries fruits and vegetables in refrigerator cars, which are also called reefers or riffs.

At each end of a reefer are containers called bunkers. These hold ice to keep the food cool while it travels. At ordinary stations, men load ice into the bunkers by hand. But a big loading station has a giant icing machine to do the job. It rides along on its own rails, poking its great arms out and pouring tons of ice into the cars.

Suppose you are sending carloads of spinach to market. The icing machine also blows fine-chopped ice, which looks like snow, on top of the spinach to keep it fresh. But suppose you have a lot of peaches that must go from the orchard to a big city hundreds of miles away. First, the reefers have to be pre-cooled. Onto the loading platforms roll machines with big canvas funnels that fit tightly over the reefers’ doors. These are blowers that force cold air into the cars. Now the crates of fruit can be loaded quickly, and the doors sealed shut.

When fruit trains from California go across the high mountains in winter, there is danger that the reefers may get too cold. So the men lower charcoal stoves into the bunkers for the mountain trip. Then the bunkers are filled with ice when they get down into warmer country again.

Some fruits, such as bananas, have to be inspected on the road to make sure they are not spoiling. The inspectors are called messengers.

Reefers also carry meat and fish, butter, eggs, cheese and even fresh flowers.

When a reefer’s cargo is bound for a big town or city, it goes straight through, with as few stops as possible. But there are many small towns that couldn’t use up a whole carload of butter or meat before it spoiled. So the railroads have peddler cars to supply these towns with small quantities of food. The cars stop at station after station, just the way a peddler would. The storekeepers get only what they need, then the car moves on.

TO MARKET, TO MARKET