I’ve seen posts about poling but I still don’t understand what it is? Is it pushing cars into sidings with a pole without the locomotive going into the siding itself?
The pole, which was usually banded with metal to help strenghthen it, was placed in the poling sockets [round depressions on the ends of cars, locos and tenders] to move cars on parallel tracks . In some older photos the pole can be seen usually hanging under the tender. This practice was out-lawed some time ago because of the dangers involved. I did see it done when I was a kid.
Thanks Rogruth. That’s what I thought it was but it seemed kind of dangerous and lazy.Why not just follow the car in with the loco?
Think of it this way,
You have left a car on the main, and tucked into a siding to pick up a few more cars, but the brakes on the car you left on the main were not tied well, and the car rolled back and fouled the switch…now how do you get your locomotive out of the siding?
You pole the car on the main ahead of you to get it across the switch.
Same thing in yards.
Sometimes the car would stop in a curve off the switching lead, at an angle you couldn’t couple up to it…you pole it ahead.
The practice was outlawed, as noted, because it was horribly dangerous. There are just too many things which can go wrong. Pole can break (then you have two flying javelins); pole can slip (that’s better – only one flying javelin); you can lose control of the car on the siding… when you’re placing the pole you can slip under that engine. And so on. And on…
Poling also allowed a switcher to move cars on three parallel tracks in a yard - the track the switcher was on, and the track on either side. Safety issues notwithstanding, this might be a desireable feature, although if it was truly a valuable practice, we’d probably now be seeing switchers with swing-out coupler arms that would reach an adjacent track…
And never mind the two javelins if a pole broke - think about all of those splinters flying
Thanks for the info, guys. I had seen a post about this on one of the forums and was just wondering what was the reasons for poling and how it was done. Thanks again for a learning experience.
Toward the end of its practice, poling had devolved into a rather obscure, but still dangerous technique, mostly used for getting out of some kind of a switching jackpot. However, in the pioneering era, poling was a total concept applied to full time classification yard switching. Arriving trains to be switched were left standing where they arrived, and broken up by a switch engine poling from an adjacent track. This approach reduced the burden of the switch engine because there was no need to move the whole string of cars in order to kick off the individual single cars or smaller cuts. These singles and small cuts were simply plucked off the end of the standing string by the poling engine.
John White describes this clever practice in his book, “The American Railroad Freight Car.” He explains that the Pennsylvania RR further refined the concept by the creation of pole cars, which would be pushed by the locomotive. The cars had poles mounted on a pivot point on each front corner, and the angle of the poles could be adjusted by levers, so they could hit the pocket of the car to be poled. Mr. White says that the Pennsy would break up a standing cut of cars by the use of two engine/pole car sets, working from both sides of the cars, alternating with each other in poling the cars off
Red Rooster:
If you will go to the search option at the bottom of the threads page once you open a topic, enter either" poling" or “poling and pushing” you can access some of the more recent threads and responses to your question…Plenty of comments on this arcane, and now outlawed practice.