GeoCities.us » Route66 » Crossroads

Get your FREE home page!

<< Chapter 1 | Contents | Chapter 3 >>

CHAPTER 2
MY FIRST DEPOT

I rode to Newton in the caboose of a way freight in April of 1935 with a clean shirt in a paper sack and Harvey Mead's letter in my pocket. The chief dispatcher was a man named Carl Fetzer, and I was more afraid of him that morning than I have been of anything since, including two tornadoes and my own wedding.

He sat me down at a table with a sounder and a pad and had one of his men send me train orders, faster and faster, until I fell behind. Then he quizzed me on the book of rules, which I had been studying for a month with a flashlight under the covers. Then he sent me to the company doctor, who looked at my eyes and my ears and asked me to read colored lights across a dark room, because a man who couldn't tell red from green had no business near a train order signal. Late that afternoon Mr. Fetzer said I'd do, and I was hired as a telegrapher on the extra board. I was eighteen years old.

The extra board

Being on the extra board meant I had no job of my own. I went wherever somebody was sick or on vacation or had quit, for a night or a week or a month, all over the division. I slept in boarding houses and back rooms and once, for most of a week, on a cot in a freight room next to a crate of baby chicks. I learned more that first year than in all my years of school.

That was the spring of the dust storms. There were days the dust came over the horizon like a brown wall, and the lamps were lit at noon, and you'd put a wet rag over your nose to breathe. The dust got into the sounders and made them sticky, and I learned to clean the contacts with a strip of paper the way Harvey showed me. The trains ran anyway, slow, and we ran them on paper, which brings me to the main thing.

How train orders worked

Kenny says I need to explain this part plainly, because nobody under sixty has any idea. Here goes.

In those days, out on our part of the railroad, there were no signals telling a train when the track ahead was clear. The trains ran by the timetable and the rules, and whenever the dispatcher needed something different from the timetable, he wrote a train order. The dispatcher sat in the division office with a big sheet in front of him showing every train on his district and where it was, and he moved them around like checkers, by telegraph.

When he had an order for a station, he'd call it on the wire by its office call, two letters, over and over, until the operator answered. Then he'd tell the operator which kind of order, which direction it was for, and how many copies to make. The first thing the operator did was put the board against that direction, so no train could slip by without its orders. Then he copied the order on flimsies with a stylus and carbon paper, all the copies at once, and repeated it back to the dispatcher word for word. If it was right, the dispatcher gave him "complete" with the time and his initials, and the operator wrote that on the order. Until it said complete, it wasn't an order. An order read something like this, with the numbers made up:

No 47 Eng 3712 meet No 18 Eng 1451 at Quillan

which meant the westbound and the eastbound would meet at Quillan, and one of them would take the siding there to let the other one by. Short, and exactly worded. Every word on a train order was there for a reason, and a wrong one could put two trains on the same track headed for each other. I never forgot that. Not one night in forty years.

Nineteens and thirty-ones

There were two kinds of orders we used, the Form 19 and the Form 31.

A 19 was for orders that didn't take any rights away from a train, and it could be handed up on the fly, without the train stopping. You tied the order into a hoop, a long bamboo hoop with a clip on it, and you went out on the platform and stood close to the track, closer than your mother would like, and held it up high. The engineer leaned out of the cab and hooked his arm through it as the engine went by at thirty or forty miles an hour. You had a second hoop ready for the conductor or the brakeman on the caboose. They'd take the order off and pitch the hoop out down the line, and after the train was gone you'd walk out and hunt for it in the weeds. In the winter that was a long walk. Years later they came out with a forked stick with a string stretched across it, so the crew only grabbed the string and the order, and you kept your fork. That was a fine day for the operators' feet.

A 31 was for orders that took rights away from a train, and the train had to stop for it. The conductor came in and signed for it, and the engineer signed too, and I'd send their names to the dispatcher before he gave me complete. With a 31, everybody had read it with his own eyes and put his name on it. Nobody could say later that he never got it.

Quillan

In the fall of 1935 a regular job came up for bid, second trick operator at Quillan, four in the afternoon until midnight. Quillan was a junction town with a stockyard, two elevators, and a café across the tracks, and I bid on it and nobody with more whiskers than me wanted it. So it was mine. My first depot.

The agent there worked days and handled the tickets, the freight and the express. On second trick I handled the trains: copying orders, hooping them up, and OSing every train that went by, which means telling the dispatcher the time it passed. I copied messages and waybills, sold the occasional ticket to somebody catching the night train, and kept the stove going in the waiting room.

The depot was the town's telegraph office, too, and the hardest part of the job had nothing to do with trains. My second week, a telegram came in for a woman on the east side of town telling her that her son had been killed in an accident out in California. There was nobody to deliver it but me. I closed up for twenty minutes and walked it over to her house myself, and stood there while she read it. I delivered a good many of those over the years, and more of them in the war. I never got used to it.

There was a girl who worked at the café across the tracks, and about eight o'clock every night, when things were slow, she'd bring me a piece of pie and a cup of coffee and stay to watch the sounder. She said she liked the sound of it. Her name was Cleo, and I married her in 1938, and she still likes the sound of it, or says she does.

I was four years at Quillan. I'll tell you about the next ones in another chapter, but first Kenny wants the winter of '49.

Kenny's note: Grandma says the pie was cherry. Grandpa says it was apple. They've been arguing about it for sixty-two years. I'm staying out of it.

<< Chapter 1 | Contents | Chapter 3 >>

Posted September 28, 1997. [email protected]