I model an era where the brakemen rode up top. When I did Hogwart’s I actually put them on top of the rolling stock. Here’s old Brakie teaching Harry Potter the ropes.
But while it is kinda cool to have brakemen riding up top the trains when you are rail-fanning. It looks kinda dumb for them to be sitting atop a box car in front of an industry or in a yard.
Anyone model brakemen?
This little fellow is always ready to hop down to pull a cut lever, or to catch some flimsies on the fly… This image was on the home page of my website…
Lee
I did this guy, but I was thinking on top of the trains.
Dang guy is so strong he bent the wheel.
Man, look at the size of that coupler. Now that is super-prototypical.
I thought there would be more opinions out there. To be prototypical you need a brakeman up top when you model. But if you do, the car looks dumb in the yard.
How can you be prototypical without looking dumb?
Are you trying to pick a fight! [:D]
I would go without the brake man.
Magnus
I’ve got it… For that era, photography required long exposures and glass plates! The brakemen don’t show up in the photos because they’re walking around and the camera doesn’t pick them up!
Lee
I have some videos from 1914 that show the brakemen.
It seems to me the obvious solution is to make him removable. Just how to do so would be the trick. One idea that springs to mind is to place a thin wire in the foot of the figure and drill an (hopefully) inconspicuous hole in the roof walk of the boxcar that the wire will go down into. I would make the part of the wire that protrudes from the foot quite long, possibly as long as the boxcar is tall, so that the figure is held securely in place. When the car is in the yard you simply remove the brakeman.
There were a lot of those that were not photographs but lithographs, a different method altogether.
If anyone has a copy of “The Age of Steam” by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, take a look at page 131, 159, and 255. The sketch on page 159 is particularly bone chilling and immediately comes to mind when ever this topic comes up.
I am particularly interested in modeling the actions of these brakemen because it is a critical part of the the history of a section of the original SP Klamath Falls division that I am modeling. I Quote from “SP Shasta Division” by John Signor page 135 regarding the Weed logger: “Westbound, to help with the descent from Grass Lake, additional empties- usually old stock cars-were often used for braking power.”
Peter Smith, Memphis
While the brakemen would be on top when operating hand brakes, they could also ride in the locomotive cab and caboose at other times. You wouldn’t have to have one on top to be prototypical.
If your brakemen insist on riding up high, I would go along with trying to make them removable. Either that or tell people that the guy on top at the industry isn’t Joe the brakeman, but his twin brother Fred who works for the industry and is getting a bit of fresh air.
Jeff
That is the sketch from Beebe’'s book that I was referring to as bone chilling.
Peter Smith, Memphis
you could glue a metal sheet to the inside or the car roof and a magnet in the brakemans butt
This brings up a question about brakemen in the olden days that I have seen posed, but not well answered:
I understand the situation is ugly even when you have a train of boxcars (‘housecars’ - the usual movie/tv interpertation BTW when showing brakemen in action, e.g. ‘Wild West Tech: Trains’), but what happens when you have hopper cars (or better yet, gondolas filled with coal or other minerals, or flat cars w/ weird loads & tarps billowing out in the wind) interspersed in the train - or maybe a solid train of hoppers/gondolas. I understand that the brakemen didn’t set every single car’s brake when stopping the train, but instead set a certain percentage (until, I guess enough cars braking the train stopped, in concert with the locomotive braking effort) - so, did they divide up the train into sections, one section per brakeman, and did they make an effort by ordering cars in the train to prevent a situation where the brakeman finishes setting one boxcar brake, runs to the next car only to find a low level gondola filled with gravel between him and the next boxcar to brake ('cause climbing down the ladder, jumping into the gravel and slogging through it just to get to the next car’s ladder sounds like a pretty slow & ugly process).
Another question, if you pick up extra cars for braking like I intend to do (Like the SP use to do on the Weed logger), where would they place them in the train?
Peter Smith, Memphis
I believe most often the trains were stopped when hand brakes were applied and released to many cars for long grades. Not that there weren’t times brakemen had to hop from car-to-car while the train was moving, but it does not seem to have been an everyday occurrence. If the brakeman were on the roofs of the cars it was usually to pass signals during relatively low-speed switching, I believe.
Having figures sitting on top of boxcars while the trains sit in the yard seems very unrealistic. What better way to be caught gold-bricking? I think the brakemen looking for a break would find a place to do so away from the watchful eye of the yardmaster or foreman.
On the other hand, switching a local or yard job as if there are brakemen on the ground and accounting for their positions and actions can be interesting and a lot of fun. Some folks use scale figues, but it’s easy to simulate just with post-it tabs or tent cards. I mentioned doing this during an op session in my latest blog entry.
Byron
My son would think it was cool to walk the engineer, conductor and the brakemen around the yard and to the trains. That means we’d have to get a people card system in place.
–Your paaapers pleeze!
–Man, I only gotta pipe.
I like the magnetic butt idea. but it might have to be magnetic feet.
The pictures I’ve seen have the brakemen standing on top with what looks like a rope and they are leaning back a bit. But I’ve not seen pictures of them riding on gondolas or logging cars.
Mouse, not necessarily for your son to see, but “The Emperor of the North” is about a brakeman (Trying to “bump off” hobos) in the 1930’s. In the flic, he goes from box, stock, flat, and gons. How would you model this? Beats me!![%-)]
There are other applications for that statement… Some politicians come to mind.
I’d model “Brakie” like this…
Oh wait, I thought you meant the poster “Brakie”.
My Bad…[:)]