Author: Jim Pearson

It took an upset like this to visualize and explain “Blind Drivers.”  In December 1927 the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy narrow gauge Engine #537  rolled off the rails into the snow in the Black Hills.

The pointer focuses on the middle two driving axles, both of which contain blind drivers, wheels without flanges.  In the early days all drive wheels were mounted rigid to the frame. With four axles in a row, the flanges would not negotiate the tightest curves in the rail, causing derailments, not to mention adverse wear and tear.  The flanged front and rear axles provide enough stability to keep the locomotive on the rails in normal operation. It’s the weight on the drivers, not the flanges that provide the tractive force to move a train.

Advances in locomotive design included lateral motion devices on the drive wheels.  #537 was retrieved, taken to Denver, rebuilt with some modern appliances, returned to duty, and performing better than ever.

Thinking back to my Lionel trainset of the 40s, the middle set of drivers also were blind.

 Credits:  Pix courtesy of Roger O’Keefe  as seen in Railroads of the Black Hills, by Mildred Fielder    

In light of our February program on Hueletts, Gary Ostlund had a timely entry for the PennyRail… (ed)

There were 77 Huletts in use on the Great Lakes. Not just the 4 PRR units at Cleveland.  The NYCRR owned 8 at Ashtabula, Joint ownership with the B&O for 2 at Toledo and didn’t own but had total use of the 1 at Buffalo.  The picture is NYCRR advertising.  – submitted by Gary Ostlund

Telltales, are another piece of railroad infrastructure no longer seen along the right-of-way.    In the days before air-brakes, hand brakes on each car stopped the train.   On a whistle command from the engine, brakemen would scamper from the head end and the caboose, going car-to-car winding down the brakes. Imagine running and jumping aboard a moving train in a wind driven rain or snow storm.

 It wasn’t unusual for a train to reach its destination with fewer brakemen than the beginning of the trip.  With men on top of a moving train, an immediate problem was warning them of tunnels or other overhead obstructions. Telltales like those diagrammed provided a degree of safety and warning, in that the closely spaced knotted ropes would slap them in the face, sometimes taking a hat along with it.  A narrow wooden walkway ran the length of the car.  In those early days most cars were box cars and flat cars. After the 1869 invention of air-brakes by George Westinghouse, crewmen no longer needed to expose themselves to such danger while underway. 

The walkways and ladders accessing them were retained, however, as it provided a platform for brakemen and switchmen to pass signals to the engineer in switching moves.  With the advent of steel boxcars and covered hopper cars, the walkway was a non-skid grid, and over time hand-held radios became the norm.

           As trains got longer, faster, and had an expanding variety of rolling stock, moving from car to car was no longer practical or necessary, and rooftop walkways and ladders have disappeared. Tank cars, tri-level automobile transporters and piggy-back equipment, not to mention OSHA helped change the game.  Rolling stock now must be completely stopped while personnel board or offload.

 Submitted by Gary Ostlund

Credits:   Schematic – Union Pacific RR, Artwork – artist unknown, book: Age of Steam by Lucius Beebe & Charles Clegg   

Cloquet, Minn., 2-8-0 No. 16 on log hauler Duluth & Northeastern – 1962 – Gary & Justine Ostlund

Credits:   Photo by the late Wade Stevenson.  Stevenson was a long-time employee in the Milwaukee’s roundhouse in Othello, Washington.  A prolific photographer, he travelled far and wide capturing rail history throughout the west.  He didn’t drive or own a car, rather, traveled by railroad employee pass or public transportation. I met him at a Milwaukee railfan meet in Kent, Washington and we discussed getting together and motor-homing in eastern Washington.  He passed away before we had that opportunity.

Avoiding sparks and popping circuit breakers is what this all about.  The crane is part of a Milwaukee Road wreck-train, hard at work in north central Montana.  The crane came to the rescue from Harlowton, located at the eastern end of their 440-mile electrified operation through the Belt, Rocky and Bitterroot Mountain ranges.

So, what is that “boxy” contraption at the end of the boom..?  That wooden assembly extends a bit beyond the end of the crane boom, so if the boom should brush against the Milwaukee’s 3,000-volt overhead catenary, there will be no sparks. The location of this incident was not electrified, but this crane is called to perform throughout the Rocky Mountain Division, electrified or not.  “Safety First” meant you must be prepared.  Other cranes in the electrified areas had a similar arrangement.

Wrecks occurring on the electrified lines sometimes wiped-out power poles and wiring.  When they did it provided some precarious situations. A major derailment near Superior, Montana destroyed an otherwise undamaged full-length Superdome car because a downed hot wire made contact with spilled diesel fuel. Many times, the circuit breakers would automatically cut the power from the sub-stations. Those operators knew immediately of any mishaps and would cut the power if there was potential for forest or range fires.

 The Northern Pacific Railway, that had no electrified lines, placed a similar wooden device on their Missoula based wrecker crane. Why would they do that, you ask?  Because the NP and Milwaukee lines ran side-by-side, almost like double track, for many miles in Montana. So, if the NP had to call out it’s crane to do any kind of work on its line, it had protection as if those wires were their own.

Credits:  story from The Milwaukee Railroader magazine 4^th Quarter2020.  Photo by Max Makich, age-13 with his Brownie camera

(Note: With all that glass overhead, those full-length Superdome cars had a diesel-powered 16-ton air-conditioning unit.) – Submitted by Gary Ostlund