Part 3

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 highways see it and are warned to stop at grade crossings in plenty of time.

EATING

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

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, so the 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 has its 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.

SPECIAL TRAINS

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 store where 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

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 have learned 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! Gradually they 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 150,000 miles, 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.

NARROW GAUGE TRAINS

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, rocky hillsides 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!

ALONG THE TRACKS

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 the notches. 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 all the 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 works by 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.

OLD-TIME TRAVEL

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-shaped cowcatchers 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. Engines began 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.

RAILROADING TALK

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.

INDEX

ashcat, 10

Astra-Dome, 68

backshop, 33-37

bad-order car, 33

baggage car, 78

bakehead, 10

ballast, 83

banjo, 10

barn, 10

Big Liz, 83

Big Wamp, 39

bobtail, 31

boxcars, 54-55

brakeman, 10, 20, 28, 65

brakes, 20

bridges, 58

Brotherhoods, 32

CTC, 62-64

caboose, 13, 16, 17

call boy, 22

car knocker, 34

car retarder, 29

car tinker, 34

cattle cars, 49

Centralized Traffic Control, 62-64

cherry picker, 31

circus cars, 57

classification yard, 25-29

“club down,” 18

compartment, 74

conductor, 65

couplings, 32

cowcatcher, 86

crum box, 17

crummy, 17

cupola, 17

“deckorating,” 20

depressed center car, 57

detector car, 84-85

diamond pusher, 10

Diesel locomotive, 38-40

diner, 69-70

dispatcher, 64

division point, 24

dog, 16, 78

doghouse, 17

dome, 21

drag, 13

duplex, 73

Edaville Railroad, 81

engineer, 9, 12-15, 21, 43, 87

fireman, 9-22

flimsy, 16

fusee, 18

galley, 70

gandy dancer, 82

gondolas, 52-53

grain cars, 54-55

greenball, 44-47

hand signals, 32-33

head end, 76

head-end crew, 13

helper engine, 18

“highball,” 11

hog, 10

hogger, 10

hoop, 14, 16

hoppers, 52-54

hot box, 42-44

hotshot, 13

hump, 26-28

hump rider, 29

icing machine, 45

inspection pit, 28

inspector, 29, 33, 34

Iron Horse, 10

journal box, 30, 42-44

king snipe, 82

link-and-pin, 32

livestock cars, 48-49

locomotives, 33-41

Mikado, 41

narrow-gauge trains, 79-81

old-fashioned trains, 86-89

“op,” 9

Owney, 78-79

Pacific, 41

parlor, 17

peddler car, 47

pig-pen, 10

pigs, 49

porter, 67

Pullman cars, 72-74

quilling, 87

radio telephone, 28, 43, 67

Railway Express car, 77-78

Railway Post Office car, 76-77

redball, 13

reefer, 44-47

refrigerator cars, 44-47

roller bearings, 44

roomette, 73

roundhouse, 10

running inspection, 43

sand, 20-21

sap, 20

section crew, 82-83

shack, 10

sheep, 48

signal flags, 18

signal lights, 14

slip-track, 37

snake, 31

snow plow, 85

snow train, 75

special cars, 56-58

squirrel cage, 17

station agent, 14-16

stewardess, 65

stinker, 43

stock cars, 48-49

stoker, 12

streamliner, 65-74

switch engine, 26, 28, 31

switch, 25

switchman, 31

tallow pot, 10

tank cars, 50-51

teakettle, 31

tell-tale, 61

torpedoes, 18

towerman, 26-28

track-pan, 38

trestles, 58

train order, 16

tunnels, 60

Vista-Dome, 68

waste, 42

yard goat, 31

Many railroading people helped to make this book. Here are some to whom the author and the artist want to give special thanks: Margaret Gossett; Inez M. DeVille of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; the late Lee Lyles of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway; C. J. Corliss and A. C. Browning of the Association of American Railroads; K. C. Ingram of the Southern Pacific Railroad; Eugene DuBois of the Pennsylvania Railroad; the staff in the President’s office, Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen; Frank J. Newell of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad; J. R. Sullivan of the New York Central Railroad; Howard A. Moulton of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad; and finally to Harry Hall of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, through whose good offices the artist and his children spent a memorable day on the Edaville Railroad.

* * * * *

$1.50

TRAINS AT WORK

_By_ Mary Elting

_Illustrated by_ David Lyle Millard

Tank cars, hoppers and gondolas; steam locomotives and Diesels; engineers, brakemen and signalmen; diners and Pullmans and ski trains--all are part of the story of TRAINS AT WORK.

The language of railroading is full of its own special words for things, and the author uses and explains such expressions as “club down,” “putting her in the hole,” “highball” and “hotshot.”

How do freight trains get assembled? How are trains routed over the tracks so that they can move safely in a steady flow? What is it like in a roundhouse? What are the different jobs railroad men do? Mary Elting tells the story of TRAINS AT WORK in the real, human terms of the men who run them. And David Lyle Millard, an ardent railroad fan as well as an artist, shows you in his colorful pictures, just what it all looks like.

You will find this book an exciting companion to TRUCKS AT WORK, SHIPS AT WORK, MACHINES AT WORK.

Garden City Books Garden City, New York

* * * * *

SHIPS AT WORK

_By_ Mary Elting

_Illustrated by_ Manning deV. Lee

Here is the colorful, exciting life of the sea--the men, the ships they sail, the work they do, the cargoes they carry to the far corners of the world--all vividly presented.

Freighters, tankers, ferries, tugs, and the many unusual ships that do highly specialized jobs are shown in action. The work, the sailor’s language, the kind of life a seaman lives, the use of recent inventions (such as radar) all contribute to this fascinating picture of SHIPS AT WORK. The newest and proudest of ocean liners, the “United States,” is pictured and described as well as the humblest dugouts and sailing vessels of ancient times.

The illustrator, famous for his marine paintings, has combined beauty with clear, sharp detail. His many full-color pictures in this book give added interest to your seafaring knowledge.

Garden City Books Garden City, New York