These two black sheep are railroad workers riding to work in Texas. They really do have jobs at stock pens, helping the men load other sheep into the livestock cars that carry them to market. If you have ever tried to drive sheep along, you know that they get confused and contrary. They will scatter in every direction except the right one. But, if they have a leader to show them the way, they will follow quietly behind him.
So railroaders and stockyard workers often teach certain sheep to lead others up the ramp and into the stock car. When the last one is in, the lead sheep runs out, and the door slams shut. Black sheep are best for the job because they stand out from the usual white ones, and they don’t get sent off to market by mistake.
Perhaps you wonder how it is possible to teach sheep to do this kind of job. The answer is that they get a treat every time they finish loading a car. Some pets like sugar or a carrot, but these two were fondest of a big piece of chewing tobacco.
Stock cars for sheep and pigs have two decks. Cars for cattle and horses and mules have only one. And poultry cars have several. The slits in livestock cars let in plenty of fresh air and keep the animals cool. Since pigs are likely to suffer from heat on a trip, they often get a soaking bath before they go into the cars.
There is a rule that animals must not travel more than a day and a half cooped up in a car. So trains stop at resting pens along the way to let the animals out for exercise and food and water. After a few hours they are loaded again. Meantime the cars have had fresh clean sand or straw spread around on the floor. Some very fast stock trains zoom along at such high speed that they reach the market before the animals need to stop and rest.
Veterinaries and inspectors often work at stock stations, looking out for animals that are sick. Caretakers for poultry and animals usually go along in the caboose.
Railroaders call a tank car a can. It really is an enormous can with different kinds of lining for hauling different liquids. Milk tanks have glass or steel linings. Tanks for certain chemicals are lined with rubber or aluminum or lead.
Altogether there are more than two hundred types of tank car, and here are some of the things that travel in them: fuel oil, gasoline, and asphalt; molasses and sugar syrup; turpentine and alcohol; lard, corn oil and fish oil for vitamins.
Some tank cars have heating coils that warm up lard or molasses and keep it from getting too stiff to flow out easily. Most tank cars have a dome on top. If they didn’t, they might burst open at the seams when the liquid inside them begins toexpand in hot weather. Instead, the liquid bulges up into the dome, and no harm is done.
Wine tank cars have four compartments for carrying different kinds of wine.
Milk tank cars are built with two compartments that tip slightly toward the center so that every bit of milk will flow out. Each compartment is rather like a thermos bottle, with special wrapping around it to keep the milk from getting warm and sour. And the tanks are always filled brim full so the milk won’t slosh around and churn up a batch of butter on the road. Can you guess why milk tanks don’t need domes? Remember the milk must stay cool. Even when the sun is hot outside, the cool milk doesn’t expand, so no dome is needed to keep the tank from bursting.
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. First a switch engine pushes the car of coal onto a platform underneath a tower. Grippers hold the car tight while it is jerked up, tilted over on its side, dumped, then let down again empty. The whole job takes only a minute or a minute and a half. The empty car rolls away downhill while a full one is being switched into place.
Another kind of dumper, the one you can see in the picture, looks rather like a barrel that can roll from side to side. 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.
Other things besides coal are often carried in hoppers and gondolas. Ore travels from mines to mills in hoppers. Gondolas haul lumber.
Things such as sugar and chemicals are sometimes carried in covered hopper cars. Of course, these hoppers have tight lids and special linings, and they’re kept very clean, so you won’t find coal dust mixed with your candy.
Early every summer the railroads put a lot of boxcars in the bank. That means they switch the cars off onto sidings all through the wheat-growing part of the country. Then, when the wheat is harvested and ready to be shipped to market, the cars can be drawn out of the bank, filled up with grain, and hauled away.
The wheat gets ripe in the south first. When harvest is finished there, the cars move along. All through the summer the grain cars work their way farther north.
Special grain doors have to be fitted in tight, just behind the regular sliding doors of the boxcars, to keepthe wheat from leaking out. The grain doors go almost all the way to the top, but not quite. In a minute you’ll see why.
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.
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.
There is only about a two-foot space between the top of the grain and the roof of the car. So grain samplers have to be skinny men who can creep about easily.
Besides the ordinary cars that do ordinary jobs, railroads have some cars that have been made for special purposes.
A medical car is really a small traveling hospital. It goes along with construction crews when they have a big job to do far from a station. A trained nurse has her office in the car. She can take care of small injuries or give first aid until a doctor arrives.
One special car looks like a load of big sausages. It is really a sort of boxcar frame into which long, heavy pipes have been fitted so that they wind back and forth. The pipes carry a load of helium gas. Helium is used in balloons and blimps, because it is very light and itcan’t catch fire. Even when this car is fully loaded with all the gas that can be squeezed into the pipes, it weighs only a ton more than an empty car. 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.
Circus cars are sometimes just flat cars which carry the animals’ cages. But some of them are specially builtlike stables, with stalls and a storage place for food. Fancy race horses ride in padded stable cars, too.
A pickle car is made of six separate wooden tanks. Men at the pickle works fill them with cucumbers and brine. Then the car delivers them at the factory to be bottled.
Have you ever wondered why some railroad bridges across rivers are so very high, while automobile bridges are quite low? The trains look a little scary, rushing along way up in the air. But there’s a good reason why they do it, and those tall trestles are so wonderfully planned and built that they are very safe.
Trains can’t climb hills nearly as well as automobiles can. The slopes that trains go up must be very gentle ones. Even a little bit of up-and-down grade slows a train a great deal. So the men who build railroads try to make the tracks run along as nearly level as possible. Next time you see a high bridge across a river, look at the rest of the country around. You’ll see that the river cuts deep down between two hills. The bridge is built on tall stilts that make a level path for the train from one hilltop to the other.
When trains have to go up or down a very long hill, the builders have a problem. They must slope the
tracks very gradually. In mountains this means that the tracks zig-zag back and forth, with long, wide curves between the zigs and the zags. If you look back at the picture onpage 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.
And so there are two reasons why railroads often have tunnels right through mountains. 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 caras 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. The cords touch the careless brakeman and warn him to get down right away before he’s scraped off and hurt.
If you started in the morning, it would take you till night just to name the inventions that have made railroading more safe than it was a hundred years ago. Some of them are simple things like a tell-tale. Others, such as air brakes, are complicated. The most wonderful invention of all took hundreds of scientists a longtime to work out. It’s called Centralized Traffic Control, or CTC.
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. Then there will be danger of a collision.
That’s where CTC comes in. 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. At the same time, signal lights tell the engineer to stop.
What’s more, CTC has extra safety machinery, just in case the man at the board makes a mistake. If he pushes levers that might make two trains bump into each other, stop signals go on all along the line. All trains come to a halt until the mistake is corrected.
In the old days, trains that ran through western ranch country were often late. The crew who had ordersto pull onto a siding knew they might have to wait a long time. So they could just take a walk to the nearest house, wake the rancher and settle down for a visit. If their host was in a good humor, he’d build a fire and cook them a meal. Then, when they heard the whistle of the approaching train, they’d start back in plenty of time to signal as it passed their siding. Railroaders have fun talking about those early times, but they’d really rather have the safety of Centralized Traffic Control.
CTC helps to keep passenger trains moving safely into big cities, too. The man at the board—he’s called the dispatcher—decides which track each train should use. He pushes the levers. Electric switches move. Signals flash to the engineer, and lights on the board show every train moving along.
Maybe you think the conductor of a passenger train is only the man who takes tickets and says “All Aboard.” But he really is the boss of the whole train. Even the engineer must follow his signals. That’s why they call the conductor the Captain.
The brakeman is the conductor’s helper. Together they collect tickets or fares and help passengers on and off at stations.
On the slick, fast trains called streamliners the conductor has quite a job to do. Many of the passengers are making long trips, so they have complicated tickets that allow them to stop at several places and then come home again. The conductor has to check the tickets and make sure they are right.
For short trips, conductors and brakemen take care of everything. But a streamliner needs a lot of other people who do special jobs.
The first one you’re likely to meet is the stewardess. She makes passengers comfortable. She answers questions and points out things that are particularly interesting to look at through the window.
At night the stewardess brings pillows to coach passengersand helps them tilt their seats back. In some cars, each seat has a leg-rest that pulls out, making a sort of couch for anyone who wants a nap.
The stewardess usually gives extra attention to children. She may read them stories in the playroom at the end of one car, or give them crayons and coloring books, or play records for them. She even has a supply of diapers for small babies and a refrigerator to keep their milk cool.
A streamliner is really a sort of hotel on wheels. Theobservation 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.
If you need a haircut, you can visit a barbershop on the train. Porters will press your clothes and shine your shoes for you. You can buy ice cream sodas at the snack bar. A businessman who wants to do some work can ask the train’s stenographer to type out letters for him. And no matter how disagreeable the weather is outside, a streamliner is comfortable for it is air-conditioned.
Most fun of all are the streamliners that have double-decker cars called Vista-Domes and Astra-Domes. The dome sticks up above the car like an oversized caboose cupola. Like the freight brakeman, you can sit in the upper deck, look out through the windows in the dome and see everything around you. Daytimes there may be mountains. At night, you can lean back in the adjustable seat and watch the stars.
Streamliners go very fast, but not too fast for safety. Beside the track are signs that tell the engineer what the speed limits are. For extra safety, the locomotive may have a powerful headlight that sends out its beam like a searchlight. The beam travels across the sky in a figure-eight movement far ahead. People on highwayssee it and are warned to stop at grade crossings in plenty of time.
The galley is the kitchen in the dining car. It has to be worked like those puzzles that won’t come out right unless you move the pieces in just the proper order back and forth into one tiny little space. When you see all the food being loaded into the diner for one trip, you can’t believe there’s any space left over for cooking.
But everything has been planned ahead of time so that it all fits inside the car. The cooks and the waiters have all gone to school where they learned how to prepare and serve food for dozens of people without getting the small galley cluttered up and out of order. Many diners have mechanical dishwashers.
People eat so much on diners that railroads buy bananas by the boatload, meat and butter and coffee by the carload. One road has its own potato farm and turkey ranch.
A table for two people in a diner is called a deuce. One for four people is a large. When a waiter has customers sitting at all his tables, he says that he is flattened out. And if he makes a mistake or gets nervous, the others say he has gone up a tree.
It is fun to eat on a train, but the railroads themselves are very serious about food. They have experts who plan special menus to please boys and girls. They figure out new ways of serving food so that it looks and tastes like Thanksgiving all year round. One road even asked scientists to grow fancy roses for the dining tables and to invent a chemical that could be mixed with water to keep the roses fresh!
Sleeping cars are called Pullman cars, because they are built and owned by the Pullman Company. For a long time, one sleeping car was just about like every other. It had two rows of double seats and an aisle going down the middle. At night, the porter changed each pair of seats into a lower berth, and he pulled an upper berth down from its storage-place in the wall. Then he made the beds and hung green curtains from the ceiling to the floor all along the aisle.
People who slept in upper berths climbed up and down a ladder. A button in each berth flashed on a light to call the porter. A little hammock hung against the wall. In it, you put your clothes and small packages. Your shoes went on the floor beneath the berths, sothe porter could shine them while you slept. At the ends of the car were dressing-rooms and toilets.
Many Pullman cars are still built like that. And it’s still fun to climb the ladder to the upper berth. But more and more people are travelling in different kinds of sleeping cars. One kind is called a duplex. It has peculiar looking checkerboard windows outside. Inside are little private rooms, some on the lower level, some on the top level, with stairs leading to a corridor along the side. The rooms have sofa seats for daytime. At night, when you pull a handle in the wall, out slides a bed all made up and ready to be slept in.
Another kind of sleeping car, called a roomette, has a row of small rooms all on one level. Each room hasits folding bed. There’s also a washbowl, toilet and clothes closet. An air-conditioner switch will make the room warmer or cooler, and you can even turn on a radio.
Roomettes are big enough for only one person. But several kinds of Pullman car rooms have beds for two or three people. Some are called drawing rooms. Others are called compartments. They have arm chairs as well as sofas. And connecting double bedrooms can be turned into a traveling home for a whole family.
Snow trains carry people who want to go skiing. They leave early Sunday morning, wait all day on a siding at a station near a good skiing place, and come back in the evening.
You can’t always be sure ahead of time exactly where the train will stop. The snow may melt fast on one mountainside, so the railroad has to send the snow train to another place where the skiing is still good.
A snow train has a baggage car that is fixed up like a storewhere you can buy or rent any kind of skiing equipment. It also has a diner where you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner or have hot soup when you get cold.
For long trips to deep-snow country, you start Saturday night in a sleeping car and get back early Monday morning.
At the head end, a streamlined train has several cars that are different from passenger cars. One of them is built for the people who work on the train. It has berths where they sleep, shower rooms, lockers for clothes. The stewardess and the conductor may have offices there, too. (The men in the engine crew, of course, don’t stay with the train. They change at division points.)
Some trains take a Railway Post Office car along at the head end. It does the work of a small post office. Regular mail clerks in the car sort letters and cancel the stamps. They toss out bags of mail at stations where the train doesn’t stop. At the same time, a long metal arm attached to the car reaches out and picks up mailbags that hang from hoops beside the track.
The men who work in the Post Office car havelearned to be very accurate and fast. They need to know the names and locations of hundreds of towns and cities, so they can toss each letter into exactly the right sorting bag.
The Railway Express car carries packages of all kinds. It has refrigerated boxes for small quantities of things like fresh flowers and fish.
The idea for express cars started long ago, before the government’s regular post office system had been worked out well. In those days, people often wanted to send valuable packages or letters in a hurry, but they had no way to do it. So some young men, who were known to be very honest, took on the job. Sometimes they carried parcels or letters in locked bags—sometimes in their own tall stovepipe hats! Graduallythey got so much business that they had to hire a whole car from the railroad. They were the grandfathers of the Railway Express that now owns hundreds of cars.
In springtime, the express man often travels with noisy cargo. That is the season when chicken farmers begin sending baby chicks in boxes all over the country.
Pet animals usually ride in the baggage car, along with suitcases, trunks and bicycles. All kinds of pets travel on trains. You check them, just the way you check a suitcase, and the baggageman takes care of them. He is used to dogs and cats and birds, but once a baggageman had to mind a huge sea cow all the way from New York to St. Louis.
Sometimes dogs get so fond of trains that they spend their whole lives riding with friendly engineers or baggagemen. Cooks and waiters in the diner save scraps for them to eat.
The most famous traveller of all was a Scotch terrier named Owney. During his long life he covered more than 150,000miles, riding in Railway Post Office cars. The men put tags on his collar showing where he had been. Finally he collected so many tags that he had to have a harness to hold them. When he died, the Post Office Department had him stuffed and put in its museum.
When your grandmother was a little girl, fast trains ran from coast to coast and slower ones climbed to towns high in the mountains. Super-highways for automobiles and trucks were something that only a few people even imagined then. So—if freight and passengers were going very far, they had to travel by train. Mountains gave the railroads a lot of trouble, because it was hard to dig wide roadbeds along the steep, rockyhillsides or to push them through tunnels in solid stone.
One answer to the problem was to make the tracks not so wide and the tunnels not so high and the trains not so big! These railroads were called narrow gauge. (Gauge means the distance between the tracks.) The trains looked like toys, but they carried on their jobs perfectly well. A narrow-gauge engine and cars could whip easily around sharp curves, hugging the side of the cliff. The pint-sized locomotives pulled heavy loads. Elegant ladies and gentlemen used to travel in the tiny cars which were just as fancy as the big streamliners are now—maybe even fancier.
When good highways and huge trailer trucks came along, most of the narrow gauge railroads stopped running.A truck and trailer cost a lot less to operate than even a toy-like locomotive and freight cars. But in a few places you can still see the little giants at work. For instance, there is the Edaville Railroad which runs through the cranberry bogs in Massachusetts.
The narrow gauge Edaville trains haul boxes into the bogs where pickers fill them with berries. Then the loaded cars take the berries out to a cleaning and sorting shed for shipment to canneries and stores.
On many trips the Edaville trains carry passengers, too, for people love to ride behind the old-time engines. The man who owns the railroad lets everyone travel free, but if you want a souvenir ticket, you can buy it for a nickel!
The section crews are the men who lay new railroad tracks and keep the old ones repaired. Railroaders call them gandy dancers, and the boss of the crew is the king snipe.
In the old days, all the section work was done with hand tools. Men lifted the heavy rails with tongs. They chipped out the notches in the wooden ties for the rails to rest in. They hammered down the spikes that held the rails. The crew rode to work on a handcar, pumping a lever up and down to make the wheels turn.
Now there are motor cars instead of handcars, and wonderful machines help with the work. A rail-laying crane lifts the rails and swings them into place on the ties. An adzer with whirling knife-blades cuts thenotches. The spikes still have to be started into their holes by hand, but then a mechanical hammer that runs by compressed air finishes the pounding job.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that there seem to be a lot of cinders along railroad tracks. But they didn’t come from the engines. They were put there on purpose. Railroads also use chipped stone or gravel or even squashed-up oyster shells under the tracks and ties.
All of these things are called ballast, and they make a good firm bed for the rails. When it rains or snows, the loose pebbly ballast lets the water run off quickly, so that the ties will dry out and keep from rotting.
Grass and weeds don’t grow very well in ballast, but when they do a motor car with a chemical spray comes along and kills them off. When lots of rubbish has collected, a cleaning machine goes to work. The machine is called the Big Liz. It moves down the track, scooping up ballast and sifting out allthe dust and junk. Then it squirts the cleaned ballast out again, leaving a clean roadbed behind.
Section crews often have portable telephones or walkie-talkies that save a lot of time. If they need materials, they call up the office and put in the order right away. And if the job takes longer than they expected, they phone a warning to the nearest station where trains can wait until it’s safe to go ahead.
How does the section crew know when it is necessary to put in a new rail? In the old days, they got orders from an inspector who walked or rode slowly along in an inspection car, looking for cracks or breaks. That’s still the way it is done in many places. But some railroads have a machine-detective that finds cracks so small a man couldn’t even see them.
The machine rides in a detector car, and it worksby electricity with tubes something like radio tubes. The men who run it simply look at wavy lines drawn on paper by pens that are part of the machine. Whenever the car passes over a cracked rail, the pens make a different kind of line. And right away the section crew is asked to put a new rail in. Summer and winter, the detector cars creep along, making sure that tracks are safe.
In winter, of course, the tracks must be kept clear. If there’s just an ordinary snowfall, a powerful locomotive can run through it with no trouble. But when drifts get deep and heavy, the snow plow must go to work.
The man who first invented railroad snow plows got the idea from watching a windmill. He saw how the windmill blades tossed snow around as it fell. Why couldn’t blades at the front of an engine cut into drifts and toss the snow off to one side? Of course they could. Railroads began using powerful rotary plows. The whirling blades chewed the drifts away. Even in lower country, there’s often plenty of work for the snow eaters to do.
The very first passenger cars were really stagecoaches with railroad wheels, and that’s why we still use the name coach. Some old-time passenger cars had two decks. All the cars were fastened together with chains, so they banged and whacked each other when the train started or stopped. Sparks from the woodburning locomotive flew back and set clothes on fire. Rails were only thin strips of iron nailed to wood. Sometimes the strips broke loose and jabbed right up through a car.
In the beginning, an engine had no closed-in cab for the engineer and fireman. They didn’t want to be closed in. It was safer to stand outside so they could jump off quickly in case of accident. Cows on the track often caused trouble. Then a man named Isaac Dripps invented a cowcatcher made of sharp spears. But farmers complained that it killed too many animals, so scoop-shapedcowcatchers were installed. The name for a cowcatcher now is pilot.
The first headlight was a wood fire built on a small flat car pushed ahead of the engine. Later, whale-oil and kerosene lamps showed the way at night.
Engineers were once allowed to invent and tinker with their own whistles, and they worked out fancy ways of blowing them. This was called quilling. People along the tracks could tell who the engineer was by listening to the sound of his whistle. Some great quillers could even blow a sort of tune.
One engineer fixed his whistle so that people thought it was magic. Every time he blew it, the kerosene lights in the station went out! What happened was this: The whistle made vibrations in the air that were just right for putting out the lamps. But they did the same thing to signal lights, and so the engineer had to change his tune.
The first sleeping cars had rows of hard double-decker and even triple-decker bunks, with a stove at each end. Passengers brought their own blankets and pillows, and their own candles to see by. Nobody really slept much.
Trains were uncomfortable—even dangerous. But people needed them, and they were excited about them, too. 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. So you got off and took a ferry across.
One by one, men made inventions for trains, so that traveling became safer and more comfortable. Enginesbegan to burn coal instead of wood. A piece of wire screen in the smokestack stopped the flying sparks, although cinders came through—and they still do to this very day. Coaches and sleepers had softer seats, but they were still noisy for a long time because they had wooden bodies that creaked while the wheels clattered along.
Thirsty travelers at first had to buy drinks from the water boy who walked back and forth through the train. Later, cars had a tank of water and one glass for everyone to use. The glass sat in a rack, and it had a round bottom so that it wouldn’t be of much use to a passenger who was tempted to steal it.
Lots of things about trains were different in the old days, but one thing was the same. They were just as much fun to ride in then as they are now.
Here are more of the slang words that railroaders have made up:
BALLING THE JACK—this is what they say when they mean a train is going very fast. Highballing means the same thing.
BOOMER—a railroad worker who moves from place to place without sticking very long at any one job. There are still a few boomers, but in the old days there were thousands.
BUCKLE THE BALONIES—this means fasten together the air brake hoses which run underneath all the cars.
CHASE THE RED—this is what the flagman says he does when he goes back with a red flag or lantern to protect a stalled train.
CRACKER BOX—a Diesel streamliner. Glowworm means the same thing.
CRADLE—a gondola or hopper car.
DOODLEBUG—a little railroad motor car that the section crew uses.
DOPE—the oily waste that is packed in journal boxes.
GARDEN—a freight yard.
GIVE HER THE GRIT—squirt sand onto a slippery track.
GREASE THE PIG—oil the engine.
HIGH IRON—the track that makes up the main line of a railroad, not switching track or station track.
PULL THE CALF’S TAIL—jerk the cord that blows the whistle.
RATTLER—a freight train.
SHOO-FLY—a track that is used only until regular track can be laid or repaired.
STRING OF VARNISH—a passenger train. High wheeler is another nickname.
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i-i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,v,y,w.
ashcat,10Astra-Dome,68backshop,33-37bad-order car,33baggage car,78bakehead,10ballast,83banjo,10barn,10Big Liz,83Big Wamp,39bobtail,31boxcars,54-55brakeman,10,20,28,65brakes,20bridges,58Brotherhoods,32CTC,62-64caboose,13,16,17call boy,22car knocker,34car retarder,29car tinker,34cattle cars,49Centralized Traffic Control,62-64cherry picker,31circus cars,57classification yard,25-29“club down,”18compartment,74conductor,65couplings,32cowcatcher,86crum box,17crummy,17cupola,17“deckorating,”20depressed center car,57detector car,84-85diamond pusher,10Diesel locomotive,38-40diner,69-70dispatcher,64division point,24dog,16,78doghouse,17dome,21drag,13duplex,73Edaville Railroad,81engineer,9,12-15,21,43,87fireman,9-22flimsy,16fusee,18galley,70gandy dancer,82gondolas,52-53grain cars,54-55greenball,44-47hand signals,32-33head end,76head-end crew,13helper engine,18“highball,”11hog,10hogger,10hoop,14,16hoppers,52-54hot box,42-44hotshot,13hump,26-28hump rider,29icing machine,45inspection pit,28inspector,29,33,34Iron Horse,10journal box,30,42-44king snipe,82link-and-pin,32livestock cars,48-49locomotives,33-41Mikado,41narrow-gauge trains,79-81old-fashioned trains,86-89“op,”9Owney,78-79Pacific,41parlor,17peddler car,47pig-pen,10pigs,49porter,67Pullman cars,72-74quilling,87radio telephone,28,43,67Railway Express car,77-78Railway Post Office car,76-77redball,13reefer,44-47refrigerator cars,44-47roller bearings,44roomette,73roundhouse,10running inspection,43sand,20-21sap,20section crew,82-83shack,10sheep,48signal flags,18signal lights,14slip-track,37snake,31snow plow,85snow train,75special cars,56-58squirrel cage,17station agent,14-16stewardess,65stinker,43stock cars,48-49stoker,12streamliner,65-74switch engine,26,28,31switch,25switchman,31tallow pot,10tank cars,50-51teakettle,31tell-tale,61torpedoes,18towerman,26-28track-pan,38trestles,58train order,16tunnels,60Vista-Dome,68waste,42yard goat,31