Mary Elting

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To see what CTC does, you’ll first have to imagine a stretch of railroad way out in the country, thirty miles from any station. There’s just one main track, with sidings where trains running in opposite directions can pass each other. Each engineer has his train orders, so he knows whether he’s supposed to go onto the siding or continue straight through. But unexpected things can always happen. If a train is late, it may not get to the siding on time. ”

“ Most loaded freight cars weigh between forty and eighty tons.
Sometimes a factory wants to ship a very tall machine by freight. So the railroad has it loaded onto an underslung flat car that looks as if it had had a bite taken out of its middle. It’s called a depressed center car.
But still the machine may stick up too high to go through underpasses. Then a special department gets to work figuring out what to do. Men who know every mile of track work out a route that has no low underpasses. This sometimes means that the machine will make a dozen detours before it is delivered. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When a car is loaded, a man crawls in on top of the grain and hunches himself along with elbows and toes. He is the grain sampler who works for the companies that buy the wheat. Every once in a while he pokes a gadget down into the grain and brings up a sample from various parts of the car. These samples are enough to tell him whether the whole car is fair, good, or excellent wheat. ”

“ 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{33} 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. ”

“ Not every freight yard has a hump or car retarders or radio telephones. Only the biggest ones have all these{31} 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If you look back at the picture on page 19, you will see how one railroad solved the problem. The rails are laid so that they spiral upward, making a loop. When a very long train travels along the loop, it’s like a huge snake coiled around over its own tail!
Unless it’s absolutely necessary, the builders try not to make curves. Trains run faster along rails that are straight as well as flat. Every bend means that the engineer has to slow down a little. ”

“ A whole train made up of nothing but cars loaded with coal is called a black snake. Since rain and snow won’t hurt coal, it travels in cars without tops. One kind of coal car has sloping ends like the one on this page. It is called a hopper car. You load the coal in at the top, but you unload it by opening trapdoors in the bottom which let the coal drop into chutes.
Coal also travels in gondolas, which are just square-ended bins on wheels. They have to be unloaded by hand or by a dumping machine. It is hard to believe how fast some of these machines work. ”

“ Trains cannot bump into each other when CTC is at work. It is a wonderful system of electric wires that run along the tracks, all the way to an office building in a railroad town. The wires end in a long board that’s dotted with lights and small levers. Now when train wheels travel over the rails, the wires carry electric messages to that long board. Lights flash on and tell the man who watches the board exactly where the train is. If he wants it to go onto a siding, he pushes a lever. Electric switches miles away guide the train’s wheels off the main track. ”

“ 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{40} Mountains. One siding where the men stop to eat is so long that there has to be a restaurant at each end! ”

“ 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.{29}
Something does rise up like fingers from the sides of the track. ”

“ After the farmers thresh their wheat, they take it to an elevator, which is an enormous storage tower close to the railroad tracks. Then, a chute from the elevator loads the wheat into the cars through the space at the top of the grain doors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Instead of climbing far up and then coming down in long, slow curves, the train can run quickly straight through.
Tunnels are hard to dig. They often have to be blasted out of solid rock. So the builders don’t make them any bigger than they have to. Of course, there’s not room for a man to stand up on top of a freight car{61} as it goes through a tunnel. To protect brakemen who might forget, there is a device called a tell-tale close to the mouth of a tunnel. It is simply a fringe of cords hanging down from a tall bar across the track. ”

“ It, too, tips the car over on its side so the coal can run out into a chute. Then the machine swings back and lets the car drift downhill.
Locomotives and shops use almost a fourth of all the coal the railroads haul. It takes much less coal now to run an engine than it used to take, because engineers and scientists have thought up ways to make locomotives better and better. They figure things so closely they can even tell how much it costs to blow an engine’s whistle—three toots for a penny. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
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Sam, on the left side of the cab, watches the track ahead. ”

“ Car after car drifts down the hump and stops just where it should. When one freight train has been unscrambled,{30} 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. ”

“ 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{44} 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. ”

“ Roller-bearings are usually put on the freight cars that need to run at passenger train speed. Greenball{45} 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. ”

“ 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.
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The huge coal towers in big freight yards can fill several tenders at once. ”

“ All over the country men built new railroads as fast as they could. Each new company built as it pleased, and trains owned by one company didn’t run over another’s tracks. Of course, that meant you had to change trains often—wherever one railroad line stopped and another began. There were no railroad bridges over rivers, either. ”

“ A streamliner is really a sort of hotel on wheels. The{67} observation car is like a lobby, with big soft chairs and sofas, tables full of magazines, a radio and desks for writing letters. At one end is a telephone booth where you can call up anyone you want to. This telephone works by radio. The radio operator on the train connects you with a regular telephone operator who completes the call over ordinary phone wires. ”