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An Almost Lost Technology
By Harry T. Cook
5/3/13
 | | Harry T. Cook |
"... yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, No matter where it's going." -- From "Travel" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
For reasons a curious psychiatrist would probably be able to dig out of my psyche, I became fascinated with trains and railroads before I could talk. Apparently I used strange-sounding terms one could not find in any dictionary for various pieces of that technology. That fascination persisted through my youth to the present day -- another interesting inquiry for the shrink. When our family moved from the Detroit area to a tiny northwestern lower Michigan village two weeks after V-J Day, our new house turned out to be no more than a hundred yards from the depot of what was then known as the Pere Marquette Railway -- a line that ran from Chicago on leased trackage as far as Porter, Indiana, thence on its own right-of-way north through the western part of the Lower Peninsula terminating in the abutting resort towns of Petoskey and Bay View. Even as late as 1945, there was brisk business along that line, both passenger and freight. I soon became an habitu� of the depot, making myself marginally useful to the kindly agent, Earl A. Pillman, by hustling baggage and delivering Western Union telegrams. The railroad station in a country town is now thought to be a vestige of an era long gone, its business made obsolete by newer forms of transportation for merchandise and people. When my eyes first fell on the village depot, I thought it ancient. It turned out only to be 37 years old at the time. It was larger than most railroad depots in towns 10 and 20 times the size. It had a potbellied stove, a rack of kerosene lanterns for signaling trains, and a shelf on which several telegraph sounders click-clacked incessantly. The station agent, by cutting into one of the three lines, could communicate instantly with a train dispatcher in a city 172 miles to the south. Another line could be used for sending messages to as many as 22 stations along a 226-mile right of way and receiving answers from them. The third line belonged to Western Union for relaying telegrams sent in Morse code from any place in the country. A person could telephone or walk into a Western Union office in any city or into a railroad station in any town from Maine to California and, with the aid of a telegrapher, send a message to any other town in which there was a station -- the sending and receiving time being less than two minutes, depending on the word length of the telegram. An operator in a city miles away tapped it out on a telegraph key, and it was transcribed by the receiving operator at the other end as it was being sent. It was immediately telephoned to the recipient or delivered personally to him or her by a messenger -- the way I earned my first dollar. As to the movement of trains, it was accomplished by a combination of expertise on the part of the train dispatcher, the various telegraph operators along the way and the men who actually operated the trains. Movement was governed by timetable schedules and written orders for delivery to train crews when and where necessary. The timetable decreed that regularly scheduled southbound trains (designated by even numbers) were superior to those with odd numbers of the same class (passenger or freight) going north, meaning that southbound trains could not be sidetracked for the passage of northbound trains, except by explicit orders. So-called extra trains -- that is, those without specific schedules -- had at all times to get themselves clear of the mainline and into a sidetrack well ahead of the scheduled passage of any superior train -- again, except if the dispatcher issued orders to the contrary. No train of any classification could leave its initial station without a piece of paper known as a "clearance," not unlike the airport control tower giving an aircraft the OK to leave the gate for take off. To keep traffic moving efficiently, the dispatcher dictated orders by telephone or sent them by telegraph to operators on duty at way stations. An order would be addressed to the conductor and engineer of a given train that was not scheduled to stop at that station. The operator would repeat the order from his written copy and, when told by the dispatcher that it was "complete" (that is to say, accurately repeated line for line), place a copies of the order in envelopes that were then sealed and attached to about a yard of string that was, in turn, attached to Y-shaped devices with the strings drawn across the space between the arms of the Y and held in place by clips. The operator already would have adjusted his semaphore signal to a 45-degree angle to tell the engineer to slow the train and to sound the whistle, alerting the crewmen at the rear of the train that both they and he were about to receive the order. The operator would go to trackside and hold up the Y. The head brakeman riding the engine (or its fireman) would hold out his arm parallel to the train and aim for the center of the Y, thus causing the string, with the order attached, to snap out of the clip and roll up his arm. The conductor or one of his brakemen near the rear of the train would follow the same procedure. The orders were opened immediately and read aloud so that every crew member was advised of the dispatcher's instruction -- in a typical case to take siding at the next opportunity to clear the main track for an approaching or following train, either of which would have received copies of the same order so that their crews would know for sure that the track ahead would be clear for them. Once the operator had Y-ed up the orders to the crew, he would return to his trackside office to inform the dispatcher by phone or telegraph that the train had passed and the orders delivered. The dispatcher then instructed the operator to set his semaphore signal horizontally (it would also display a red light at night) to hold any following train for at least 15 minutes. The signal would be left thus displayed until word came from the station on up or down the line that the first train had passed it. Only twice in the nearly 100-year history of that 226.2 mile line were there collisions -- once because an entire crew had not paid attention to the schedule of an opposing train. The other was caused by the misreading of a train order that might have been worded more clearly. Nothing was wrong with the technology, as primitive as it may appear to have been. Trains today are run mostly by computerized signals with little or no human communication between the person operating the engine and anyone along the way. From time to time due to human error, the older system failed. But the newer computerized technology also fails, sometimes catastrophically, and human error remains a wild card. True: The older technology required more human beings to operate it, but it meant that work was furnished to more people -- a good thing, to be sure. Moreover, being a telegraph operator required quick reflexes plus memorization of the 44-character Morse code, cultivation of the ability to hear it and transcribe it instantly and without error, and having to know by heart the schedule of trains that would arrive, leave or pass the station during his trick (as a shift was then called on the railroad). All the while, the operator was required to sell tickets to passengers and to check their baggage. He needed to be able to drop everything to respond to the dispatcher's call or the telegraphed signal from a Western Union operator in a city far away to copy a train order or telegram and to arrange for their delivery. The operator was also in charge of receiving packages and other matter to be shipped via the Railway Express Agency -- and to see to its safe loading on the proper car near the front of a passenger train. For all that, the station operator had to be good at mental math, up on ticket prices and freight rates. He had to know about connecting trains at junctions near and far and to be adept at securing reservations on them for passengers. Men -- and only a few women in those days -- learned that trade and perfected it over the years. Mr. Pillman, the agent and operator at the station in my little town, had hired out on his 16th birthday (April 6, 1905) and retired on September 15, 1954 -- 49 years and six months later. He spent the last 27 years of his working life happily running the same depot to which he first reported for work when it was but 19 years old and he 38. He was beloved of all who knew and worked with him. He was justifiably proud of what he had learned and perfected down all those years. Mr. Pillman received and delivered train orders with the same kind of attentive efficiency that a scrub nurse would give to passing the required instruments to a surgeon. He knew that the life and well-being of passengers and crews were at stake. His station accounts when audited invariably got an A+. Simply by hanging out for a few years at the depot and watching Mr. Pillman in action, I came to appreciate what it meant to be skilled in that particular work now considered obsolete. The trade Mr. Pillman plied for half a century helped connect the country in a way nothing before had or since has as virtually every hamlet, village, town and city had one or more railroad stations. Trains sped the U.S. mail to and fro with great dispatch. You could hand up a letter to a railway mail clerk when the down-bound evening train stopped at the depot. Your letter might be addressed to an acquaintance in the next town or to someone in a city 300 and more miles distant. Each would have his letter before breakfast the next day. No longer, unless you pay FedEx well more than the cost of first-class postage, which was then 3 cents. You could board the Pullman car of that same evening train, snuggle down between freshly laundered muslin sheets in your lower berth made comfortable by the attentive porter, and wake up next morning in Chicago or Detroit ready for the new day. No airport hassle. No $2 charge for a pillow or $5 for a blanket. The ride was smooth because you were never separated from terra firma by more than a few inches' worth of cross ties and rail at a time when rights-of-way were meticulously maintained. You may not think of it now as a "technology." It was, though, ripe and ready for its day. It may be making a comeback as a recent Brookings Institution study reports: "Passenger trains are rebounding across much of the country and proving a boon to economic development . . . American passenger rail is in the midst of a renaissance." Ms. Millay, the versifier, would be pleased. | 
