New York Central Railroad engineer receiving orders on the fly, westbound, in Kendallville. 1937 Phillip Pepple Photo.
Roger, Great shot! I hope you won't mind me piggybacking a Frisco picture onto your post. Southeastern Junction, St. Louis, Missouri in 1941 (William K. Barham). From the collection of Don Wirth.
Great shots of one of the real iconic events back in steam days! Thanks for posting them. Crews must have had sure hands to grab those orders.
How exactly did that work? Did the crew hook their arm through the loop, then remove the paperwork and drop the loop beside the track?
Yup. Exactly. As fast as they could. Unless they didn't like you. Then it could end up a ways down the track, in a ditch, in the brambles, etc. Woe be to the train crew member who was the one catching the hoop, and got sloppy. Instead of stabbing it with a balled up fist, catching a stray finger on the wood. OUCH.
Can anyone confirm that my "JK" order, above, was the same "JK" as at Kendallville? Railroads of size often had redundant place names. As I saw "Schneider" mentioned, I was doing some searching and discovered that it's about 140 miles from Kendallville. That's a bit of a long reach for such an order to be issued.
So my order was copied at JK Kendallville? The way that sign is cut off, I am not 100% certain it even says "JK".
Not a great shot, but this was taken at Opelika, AL in May 1985 just after orders were hooped up to this Birmingham-bound freight.
Your order is from JK tower on the South Bend to Ladd Branch of the NYC Western Div. commonly called the Kankakee line (3K). It was where the 3K crews picked up their running orders and threw off their bid to the operator at JK. JK was a x-ing for the world famous NJI&I RR. The tower at Kendallville was UK the U is partly blocked in the photo. Grew up in the area and worked on the section as a kid in the 50's on both the Toledo and Western Div. before working as a brakeman on the west end.
So I'm wondering, how fast is the train moving? I've seen a few seconds of video with mail exchanges and that was pretty quick.
