Me and my friend were looking at the LSRM’s locomotives and noticed some indentations in the area near the grabirons and thought there used to be ditchlights there but he informed me that those loco’s did not have ditchlights until the LSRM put them on. What was poling and how did it work?
Poling was a method of moving a car on an adjacent track or positioned so an engine couldn’t couple into it. It was very dangerous.
If you look closely at the corners of steam era engines and cars you will notice small indentations on the corners. They are called poling pockets. On the tenders of switch engines and local engines you may see a 8-10 ft long pole, 4-6 in in diameter hanging from hooks. That’s the pole.
The crew removes the pole from the tender and manually positions it so one end is in the poling pocket of the car to be moved and the other tend is in the poling pocket of the engine. This entails holding the pole in position and inching the locomotive up against the pole until it engages both pockets. Then the locomotive shoves the car wherever it goes on the track. If there is any slack the pole will fall out of place, if there is too much pressure the pole would shatter.
Sometimes major yards would have a poling car that looked like a transfer caboose (short frame with a small shack on it and had 4 poles attached to the sides like derrick so they could be swung out to engage the poling pockets. Slightly safer.
the practice died out in the 50’s or 60’s and modern engines and cars don’t even have poling pockets anymore.
Dave H.
And your one fired son of a gun if you get caught doing it today!
Ed
Freight cars used to have poling pockets at the corners of the end sills also.
I’m certain of this, remember from the days when I used model railroad and that was an improtant detail.
I never saw them on passenger equipment, however.
All freight and switcher steam locomotives used to carry a pole. It was usually between the two tender trucks just below the side sill on one side of the tender.
Many years ago on the Espee in Salem, OR I remember our local switcher making a shove with a pole that shattered. There were big spinters flying everwhere. They crew was experienced enough to know they should keep themselves and me far away from the pole just in case something like this happened while making a move.
And that’s if you’re lucky. There was a good article in TRAINS a few years back concerning the extreme hazards of poling. The odds of somebody getting killed during such a maneuver were quite high.
I’m pretty sure that poling was a thing of the past (at least commonly) well before the 1950s and 1960s. Freight cars built during the middle and late 1940s no longer had poling pockets on the corners. However, I do remember seeing poles on some GTW locomotives in the mid-1960s, and remember one instance where a failed drop switch required the use of a stout piece of lumber (in lieu of the pole) to return the cars to a point where they could try again.
I think the AAR standard 40-foot box car was built into the late 40’s and had poling pockets.
Our SD-20s (rebuilt SD24s, built in 1959) have poling pockets on them.
How long were the poles?
My memory was that they were about two feet taller than the average person, about eioght feet tall. But some may have been longer.
I remember watching train crews use poling to make some odd reverse switching moves in the mid 60’s. They’d pole a car out of a blind facing siding so they could couple the cars behind the loco. The next blind siding up was on a grade, so they could just roll the cars out and use the handbrake to stop (another highly dodgy practice I might add)
In one of the books of RR photos by O. Winston Link are some shots he took on a remote Norfolk & Western branch line in the 1950’s of the train crew “poling the gon” during a switching move.