Re: Crew Size
Posted by Chessie Dispatcher
on 7/8/2019, 10:06 pm, in reply to "
Re: Crew Size"
When I started on C&O in 1970 four-person crews were the standard with sometimes the addition of a fireman. By the time I started dispatching in 1976, the fireman position had basically become an engineer-in-training position. In non-signaled territory, the rear brakeman was also the flagman and had to protect the rear end of the train when necessary. On the PH, Bad Axe and Elmdale Subs we normally protected their rear end by train order so the flagman did not have to protect against following trains. In manual block territory, they only had to go back 1500 feet to flag since a following train would be running on a occupied block at "stop short of train ahead" speed. Otherwise, they had to go back about a mile to flag, leave torpedoes and fusee and then walk back half the distance toward their train with a flag in hand. Speaking of firemen: in the early 70's, Ohio law still required a fireman on all trains but Michigan did not. A fireman would ride all of our northbounds out of Walbridge and hop off at Erie and wait in the depot (before it burned down) to hop on the next southbound to Walbridge. When I worked at Carleton in the 70's, on the DT&I the rear brakeman was the only one in the caboose. The conductor rode in one of the trailing units on the head end. If you hung up train orders for them, you had to have three hoops -- one for the head end, one for the conductor and one for the caboose. We first got dispatcher radios in Saginaw around 1985-86 and then operations changed a lot with DTC (verbal block authority) in former train order territory, E.O.T. technology and the elimination of cabooses.
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