Nostalgia & History > Hump Day - Do Not Hump

UP 906254 was serving as the "Office Car" for the Fairmont Tamper Train at Caliente (CA) on June 27, 1998.  The welded sides indicate that she's a former CA-8 or CA-9 class caboose.

mike woodruff
north platte ne



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/26 11:16 by swaool.

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"office car"

"Made in USA"

interesting markings

Given that the parameters of railroad operations are formed by sad experience, one must suppose that the "do not hump" admonition pasted on a caboose points to a specific incident whereby a hump crew mistook a caboose for say, a boxcar, with the subsequent result that interior furnishings, including stove, wound up in a disassembled heap at the impact end of the car. One certainly must question whether the crew who so egregiously misidentified the unfortunate caboose had the collective literacy to comprehend such a warning. 

This is the sad state of railroading in modern times. Mandatory drug and alcohol testing has forced rails into a modicum of sobriety to the extent that statistics would suggest that least most of any given crew is not seeing double. Thus at present, one must assign blame for such things as humping cabooses to bald stupidity, with laziness being the chief contributing factor. In former times, one ascribed the culprit for such to be alcohol. This was of significant consolation to me and my fellow rails, since we felt much better about our transgressions when accused of drunkenness, rather than stupidity, even if discipline for the latter was considerably less onerous.

EO
Wx4.org

I should note here that four decades ago, when I transferred from San Francisco to Dunsmuir, I loaded all of my family's worldly possessions into a boxcar prominently labeled "do not hump" on all four sides. The reader should not require an explanation about what happened on the way at Roseville. I should have asked for Hyrda-Cushion.
 

when a car is marked "do not hump", does that message show up on the switch list, manifest, etc?  I could certainly imagine a situation where a tired third trick hump operator is running a 100 car string over the hump, in the dark,, and not necessarily looking out the window at each car...

906254 is definitely not a CA-7 cab but is a CA-8 or possibly a CA-9. Easiest way to tell is CA-7s are riveted so Utah Rails info is wrong on that part, probably mixed up numbers somewhere as there are all three classes in the series.

x6924w Wrote:
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> 906254 is definitely not a CA-7 cab but is a CA-8
> or possibly a CA-9. Easiest way to tell is CA-7s
> are riveted so Utah Rails info is wrong on that
> part, probably mixed up numbers somewhere as there
> are all three classes in the series.

Good catch - the lack of rivets didn't even register; I just simply copied the info from the Utah Rails entry for UP 25463.  I will amend the caption accordingly.

thanks!

mike woodruff
north platte ne

Mike Pannell pics, he is restoring this caboose for the city of Cheyenne I believe, making a display downtown, with 2 passenger cars of an oregon or roseville wreck train, think he painting the caboose silver, it had in up mow service?  I'll forward this to him, the far end platform was bent, and everthing was it Humped?



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/26 14:30 by dan.

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Lackawanna484 Wrote:
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> when a car is marked "do not hump", does that
> message show up on the switch list, manifest,
> etc?  I could certainly imagine a situation where
> a tired third trick hump operator is running a 100
> car string over the hump, in the dark,, and not
> necessarily looking out the window at each car...

In my youth I ran the biggest electronic hump yard on the SOU - Inman Yard in Atlanta (65 class tracks - 16 receiving tracks) and I did it on the third trick when the superintendent and the assistant superintendents were gone. As to the "do not humps", the cars or equipment were noted as such on the hump lists. There were a couple of exceptions: 1. "no bill strangers" not on the hump list that got by the clerk manning the inbound TV cameras. 2. Cars that the mechanical supervisors verbally asked me not to hump. I reviewed every existing hump list when I came to work and as soon as a new or "advance" list was sent up to me through the pneumatic tube system.

I made the decision on what order to hump the tracks. I did individual job briefings with my three humping participants: hump conductor, retarder tower operator, and hump waybill clerk. This included any set out instructions for any "do not humps". The decision to set out equipment or safely "classify" it was mine, tempered by "I can do it" advise from the retarder operator. The decision to not set out was done by - 1. Time considerations. Even back then SOU was a heavily scheduled railroad - connections had to be made on time. Plus we were expected to hump 1000 cars per trick. If you do a ten minute "do not hump" set out, that equates to 50 cars not humped with time lost forever. Any delay to the Inman hump exceeding 2 minutes had to be reported in my morning report to the executive HQ in Washington, as well as any train I held out of the yard account no open track. Reason 2 : not enough power to backup the hump cut to do a set out. Sometimes the cut might be 175-180 cars and sometimes I might have only a cow and calf set instead of the usual three unit humpset.

The option was to cut and ease the "no humps" into an open track or cut or ease the "no humps" against the hump end of a nearly full track. Some interesting equipment we "classified" this way included: mid-train or rear of train radio slave units (DP's), run on the rear cars or towed locomotives, deadheading passenger cars - including a dining car full of glassware and china. Then you had to either close off that class track or ease subsequent cars into the track. Sometimes you had to ease a block of cars containing the "no humps" into a track to be switched later, but then I had to report those cars to Washington as "rehumps". Our moves succeeded because of the experienced guys at Inman Yard of that booming time.

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906254 will be restored in MOW green and be placed downtown in Cheyenne. The other two ex Roseville wreck train cars will be back in Pullman green

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