Ulrich- What part of European Canada are you from -eh? [(-D]
For the best description of the link n pin, brake club brakemen days that I know of see “Railroadman” by Chauncey Del French. Might find a used copy on Amazon.
Mac McCulloch
I have been following this thread for a while but I didn’t get a chance until now to address two points.
About the repeated delays for implementing automatic couplers. In Canada, the final drop dead date for “link & pin” couplers wasn’t until 1916, during WWI.
As to the theft issue, railroaders being adaptive sorts, began to utilize the links and pins for many other uses. A number years ago there were commercials for a type of tool hanging kit for people’s garages made by Rubbermaid, I think. Every time I saw those ads I thought of our freight shed at Irricana. Because they were unheated, they only had partial interior walls. Six or eight inch boards with alternating opens spaces of the same width, nailed to the vertical studs. Someone had drilled numerous holes in these boards and every one was filled with a black enamel handled pin! All of the spare lanterns and other necessary RR equipment was hung on those pins. Also many of our personal items were hung there as well. I can still picture my baby stroller hung at the top of the wall out of the way of the more regularly used items.
There were also some links, hung on pins, that were to be used as spares, should they have been required. Dad said that if he had known he was going to be the last station agent to live there, he would have taken a lot of items not on the inventory lists, including those pins. There was also a primitive moveable kitchen sink, counter, and cupboard thing, that was used as a desk in my bedroom. The hole where the sink would have been had been covered over with a piece of Masonite. One of the most literal hair raising experiences I have ever had on the internet was when I saw the drawings for
Turn of the Century railroading -
Interesting film indeed.
Great film. Thanks. OSHA would have a fit seeing men working on the track as the train was approaching. And they didn’t seem in any hurry to get out of the way.
That doesn’t look right to me. I think the film maker took a bit of artistic license to add a little drama to his work.
All those men standing that close together would be konking each other over the head with the back-swings of their hammers. And no self respecting section foreman is going to let a train over a newly laid rail unless he gives it a once over by himself. In each of the scenes where this occurs the men almost move back in lockstep.
Bruce
Thanks, Balt. I especially enjoyed the Horseshoe Curve.
John
Wonderful film Balt! Thanks for posting! I especially liked the first few minutes showing the Pennsy’s crossover of the Jersey Central at Elizabeth NJ. That Pennsy trackage still survives as Amtraks Northeast Corridor. Not sure about the CNJ trackage, though.
The CNJ trackage is today New Jersey Transit’s Raritan Valley Line. However, it does not pass the CNJ station at Elizabeth; rather it is routed to the NEC on the Aldene connection.
There might have been some theatrics incorporated in the film, but from accounts I have read, I suspect that cutting it close like that was fairly standard practice in those days. One 1800s era account from the Lehigh Valley RR describes a working track gang aware of an approaching milk train coming upgrade on the track they were working on.
The noise and tumult of the hard working milk train obscured the approach of a “Lightning Express” train coming down the grade fast on an adjacent track. When the captain blew the whistle to get clear, about 20-30 men watching the milk train stepped backwards in lockstep to clear the milk train; and stepped right into the path of the express train. Many were killed and injured.
I recall seeing one of those ‘100 years ago’ snipets in Railway Age several years ago, with the industry congratulating itself that only 1500 or so employees had been killed in the prior year. Safety at the turn of the 19th Century to the 20th and today is a word that has two different realities.
I’ve seen it written that switchmen in link-and-pin days were easy to spot due to the digits they were missing.
I recall seeing a video which included a steam engine change on a passenger train. There were people going “in between” before the train came to a stop.
One wrong step…
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Wisconsin Death Trip
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200081.Wisconsin_Death_Trip
It has been years since I have picked up a copy of this book. A different time is a different place. Death was less a stranger and less denied.
If your town was an active railroad center in the 19th century, go to your local library. Go through the old newspaper files. Note the number of railroad related deaths.
Brakemen
We had this in our English AP/creative writing class my senior year. There’s something creepy about it. Sure, they had all sorts of scholarly stuff at the beginning about the research and the general temperament of living in that place in those days. But it strikes me just the same as those ‘scholarly’ introductions from psych people that ‘legitimize’ reprints of, say, Victorian pornography or “The Adventures of Jonathan Corncob”…
One thing for sure: when you died on the railroad, people could usually tell!
Thanks John, I was wondering about that!
Wayne
Much more history and technical info on Janney\AAR couplers at
obts.wikia.com/RailCar_Couplers#AARx_Couplers
Link doesn’t want to heat up.
For those that don’t know, this is from the OpenBVE Train Simulator community. Link is hot; it just renders on the page as if it weren’t…
For what it may be worth: I tried making the link live with the convention. From a PC running Firefox on Windows 10 with latest upgrades, the link did not render in red, and using the [url=][/url] convention with text, wouldn’t render clickable at all. This is very strange, and indicates to me that either the origin board or Kalmbach may have some sort of optional flag against hotlinking in force for some content.
Not hot on my browser. Trying this: