Re: "The Way It Was"
Yes, it definitely took a "village" to run the railroad back then. With no computers to log into, all information was passed person-to-person. Train crews finally got end-to-end radios on the Chessie in the late 70's. Before that, everything was done by hand signals. If the conductor wanted to stop the train at a certain point, he just pulled the air on the caboose! When I worked at Carleton, if the conductor had a message for the dispatcher, he wrote it on a C-fold paper towel, rubber banded it to a fusee for weight and dropped it onto the ballast in front of the tower. I got to experience the before and after without/with radios and computers, but the best experience was the "before" and we sure ran a lot of trains doing things the "old" way. Try to find carbon paper nowadays!! And you really had to bang hard on the typewriter keys to get through all of those carbons on a freight waybill! I kind of wish I'd have been working during the telegraph days, but at least I did get to experience it when I hung out at the AA/GTW depot in Ashley as a kid.
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