What's in a name - Chessie style
Posted by Chessie Dispatcher
on 8/24/2019, 11:19 am
As employees are wont to do, we dispatchers in Saginaw often had nicknames for certain trains and stations. Around 1977 when the movement office of the former B&O took over in Baltimore, we went from the previous C&O numeric train designations to letters and numbers or just letters. The B&O people liked to give some freight trains passenger-style names. However, even though the names sounded fancy, the trains didn't move any faster! At one point the traffic was so heavy (believe it or not) that in addition to all the other manifests we were running, they added a couple more trains out of Walbridge. One was Wayne-Wixom 33 (WW33). We called it "World War 33." Later, it was re-designated WX (Wixom) 33. It handled mostly empty auto racks for Wixom (Lincoln), and returned as loaded auto racks as TT (Toledo Terminal) 32. About the same time they started running a Walb-Plym turn known as PLTA (Plymouth Turnaround). We nicknamed that one "Plahtuh." Two of the Walb-Det trains got souped up names as well: northbound was the Northland Flyer (NLFR) out of Cincinnati and the southbound was the Southland Flyer (SLFR). We called them the "Nliffer" and the "Sliffer." Of course, they both continued to "fly along" at around 45 MPH!! Our manifest Tol-Sag-Ludington train was LU75, but when inquiring as to the train's progress, our chief dispatcher would commonly ask, "Where's Lou?" The Sag-Mt Pleasant local was often referred to as K-14 which was the station number for Mt Pleasant. However, because the crews had a reputation of getting as much overtime as possible on that run, we sometimes referred to it as the K-9 Local because they were "dogging" it. Some station names also got the treatment. Walhalla was commonly referred to as "Hog Woller." One dispatcher liked to refer to Rose Center as "Rosie's Middle." McGrew was sometimes called "Magoo." One of the clerks at Wayne when reporting a pick up for Toledo would often refer to it as "Tood-a-lee-do." Wayne Jct was often referred to as "the iron curtain" because some PC (later CR) trains would block the diamond for over an hour while they did their work there. We almost always had several trains parked (some with crossings cut) between Romulus and Plymouth as a result. As you can see, as railroaders, a professional demeanor was maintained at all times! (Oh, but we dispatchers could be sticklers when it came to the Rule Book!)
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