Railroaders' Nostalgia > Chicago Short Line

Marty Bernard's CSL pictures http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,3695805 resurrect memories of handling CSL between Rock Island Jct. or 100th Street and Youngstown (Indiana Harbor). It was employee-owned. Actually, the executives were the employees. The president or vice president would turn up running the engine or the caboose. They were also virtually all Eastern European.

The day man at CR Tower was painfully slow. Dispatching the B&OCT, you'd talk like an auctioneer in self-defense for hours on end to keep everything moving. Then there was the day man at CR:

CR: CR

• Spatch: CR

PM 34

• Awright

PM...34 has en-gine...3...0...3...9......conductor...Jones J...o...n...e...s.....engineer...Smith...S...m...i...t...h......They were on duty at....eight...thirty...am........He has 43 cars.........He's ready to go now.

That's as opposed to

Ash Street: Ash Santa Fe for the C&O

• Spatch: Awright

526 Wojohowski and Wojohowski 3pm 52 cars crossing the plant now ready to pull in five.

(By the way, that was really a Santa Fe Condr and Engr...and they were not related except somewhere in the way distant past in Poland.)

I never worked the day job, but I had to learn it, and to learn how to handle trains like Frank Rhode, the day man, who had a seniority date in the 1920s. (http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,1527815,1527815#1527815) I can hear him now the first time I was in the chair and this guy came on the phone.

Now watch out for this guy. He'll put you to sleep every time, but then he'll have something important and you won't be ready.

I had never handled a Short Line before. The Short Line was at Rock Island Jct with a move to Youngstown. No 10 was by 79. This would be tight and the operator knew it, so:

CR: CRShortLine25and26SzespaniachandCzervonkevitch8amfifteenforYoungstownoklethimgo?

There was a reason that before being allowed to come into the office to start breaking in, that the student was required to learn the railroad and the trainsheet. To actually become a student, the prospective student had to be able to draw a track map of the B&OCT with switches, signals, road crossings, phone booths/boxes, and towers/switchtenders. We learned it by walking the whole railroad (in chunks, not all the same day), and spending time in every yard office, tower, and switchtender shanty (including the foreign line towers). There was no time to be tracing along the lines of the 10 foot trainsheet from the stations in the center or the edges to someplace in the middle to find out where to write an OS or cut out a train (show am or pm above the top station of the run and below the bottom station of the run). The prospective student also had to be able to recite the stations down, up, and either way from any station in the middle, describe after which stations there were double lines as a navigation aid. After enough practice, the student would be able to find any station by counting from one of the double lines (the image is not very good, but it is the one I have at the moment-the double lines don't show - 43 years later, 79th is 9 below the double line at 14th Street Jct., 75 is 8, 49 is 6, Brighton 5, Ash 3, 22nd 1, etc.). This was essential as the sheet was the only thing between the dispatcher and a disaster. We were required to write the call (engine, crew, on duty, cars) and cut out on the sheet before authorizing anything. If you didn't do that as second nature, you could do this: http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?18,2650213,2650213#msg-2650213.

Once allowed to sit in the chair, the student had to be ready to answer Where are your trains? at any time. You'd better not forget one or you'd hear from the guy you were learning from, in stern words, even if he was across the room, in the Chief's office, or out in the hallway and hadn't looked at the sheet in quite a while.

As quick as the operator was talking, I had the move cut out, the engines and cars, but not the crew. I looked at the clock, looked at No 10 at 79, figured again and:

• Get him going and come right back with the crew.

That was my introduction to the Chicago Short Line.

TAW

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Thank you, sir.  Your postings are most amazing!

Great stuff as always.  If it's possible to share a better resolution image of the trainsheet that would be of interest to me and probably others.

RRTom Wrote:
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> Great stuff as always.  If it's possible to share
> a better resolution image of the trainsheet that
> would be of interest to me and probably others.

They're in a storage unit, buried somewhere among boxes of mine run stuff.

When I can locate one, I'll post a set of images that represent a whole day. That will be a lot of them, so I might put it somewhere with a link here instead of posting a big bunch of images here.

TAW