Railroaders' Nostalgia > Is that what it means??

A recent post on TO reminded me of some years ago when I worked as a trainmaster in the high tower in Santa Fe's Barstow hump yard. One of the trainmaster's duties was to try and keep cars flowing over the hump continually. Since we humped trains at up to 2.4 miles per hour, a 100 car train would take about 50 minutes to hump. We tried to have another hump engine ready to bring the next cut to the hump as soon as the last car of the previous cut was rolling off the crest. Inevitably, things didn't go that smoothly. Usually every train had a few cars that should or could not be humped, such as high wide loads of heavy equipment, or tank cars of LPG. If a car was not to be humped, the hump cut had to stop, wait for the switch to line for the "no hump" set out track, and then push in to the spur, stop, secure the no hump car, uncouple, and pull back 10 car lengths, and wait for the computer to reset.
I always told my humpmasters that they could stop, and then "eyeball" some no hump loads such as tractors and heavy equipment, and if the route to the desired track in the bowl was wide open (i.e., no cars close to fouling the designated track, let those cars go and manually watch and work the retarders if needed to control the speed. This saved a lot of time, and quickly got the cars to the right track, and actually reduced damage because of slack action in setting out the cars on a long train. Remember, the hump engine might be a mile away on the other end of the train, and when the hump cut stopped, the slack ran out, WHAM!, and then ran in when the engine pulled the cut back in position to begin humping again WHAM!.
Now we didn't do that too often, but I always thought it was worth doing when permitted. One day, a group of visitors, escorted by some higher ranking Santa Fe personnel were in the tower watching the humping process. A Santa Fe official many ranks above me pointed out three loads of brand new Caterpillar dozers and front-end loaders to the guests, and explained how we were so careful in handling these high value loads. As he commented on this, one, two, all three loads went right on over the hump and into the correct tracks for their destinations without incident. The humpmaster, from his perch about 500 feet away in the hump tower, commented on the intercom "Whoo! Sure looks good Norm - them tractors rolling down the hill!"
The only incident was when the Superintendent, after the departure of the guests, vigorous;y corrected me on what "NO HUMP" meant! He admitted it was probably better to do as we did, but he was critical of the timing!

Norm

Norman Orfall
Helendale, CA
TIOGA PASS, a private railcar



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/26/18 14:23 by aronco.

 Norm, such distinctions between hump & "no" were lost to us over on the SP... apparently. When SP kicked me over to engine service from train service, I used a company supplied boxcar to move all of my worldly goods from San Jose to Dunsmuir. I was aware that this probably would involve a routing through Roseville, so I used "do not hump" placards furnished to me by a routing clerk on ALL  FOUR SIDES of the boxcar. It should be obvious what happened. When I opened the car door following the trip, absolutely EVERYTHING was piled in a heap at one end of the car. Much to my relief, however, the only irreparable damage was to a piece of furniture that my wife loved, but I absolutely hated. Thanks SP! For reasons unknown, I tore off one of the placards and stuck it in the back window of our pickup. My wife, already burned once, soon demanded that I remove the sign after receiving several wolf whistles. Thanks SP!

Ed Gibson

Still happens like this today at Queensgate. I worked as Hump Yardmaster from 2012-2016. When things came up like army tanks, shftable loads, etc, I'd look over my shoulder and ask, "let them go or?". 99 out of 100 times, they'd go sailing on into the bowl.

Joe

So that's what happened to the Motorola tv set.

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