O.K. , You got two or three locomotives in front, a couple in the middle , and maybe one or more pushin' on the rear,,,,,, How do you know what throttle settings to use in the days before M.U. connections? Maybe it don't affect the R.R. I try to operate but how'd it work? Bobby ------------------
If you have watched any of the videos that had sound and showed the double and more engines, you heard a lot of whistle blowing. A LOT of whistle blowing! There were different signals used by the various railroads. It has been so long I can not at this moment call to mind what they all were. You would think we would never forget that, but diesels killed the heart out of real railroading. I'll have to unpack a few boxes and see if I can find the old rule book, then I could copy off more than you could remember! Ha. For a Rotary Snow Plow, basically, you had like one toot was go, 2 toots, stop, one long toooot would be to back up fast, maybe 2 long ones for slow back. For double heading, the lead engineer was usually, not always, calling the shots. One I remember was 2 longs, wait a second or two, then 2 more, meant take up slack and ahead very slowly til slack got to the rearmost engine. You would listen for him to give a long blast that you were dragging him. Then there were different signals depending on how many engines you had. It got pretty dicey when there were 4 at the head end, three in the middle, and 4 more at the rear. And that wasn't the most at all. Starting from the front, each engineer had his own signal, so if the first engine wanted the train to slow gently because he was topping out and getting ready to go down a grade, then he wanted the rear most engine to keep pushing, but he wanted the other engines to start slacking off. As the cars started coming over the top they began coasting down on top of you. You have to be ready to control them, while you feel them give a little kick in the butt as each one catches up to you. You have to signal the center engines to slack off, so you toot out the call signal for all three to listen up guys, then you give the slack signal twice in a row. Each engine answers with his call signal if he heard you. Then you do the same for the rearmost engines. By now you are grey headed, haggard looking deep lines in your face with eyes the size of golf balls, because you either made it alright and are gently decending the grade with all under control; or as sometimes happens, you are screaming your little lungs out dashing headlong downhill toward Widow Maker's Curve with 10,000 tons of runnaway behind you, and your fireman has just jumped without so much as a good bye! He usually waved at the other engineer's to let them know he had decided to sit this one out. It was all just a combination of whistle sounds, quite simple, really. It was a little more exciting than boreing. But I really do like retirement!! ------------------ Watash #982
Yeah Bobby, it could get that way. There was a guy that was here awhile back that was actually in a wreck from a runnaway! He worked the wreck crane for awhile too. There were so many different signals, you only got used to the ones that applied to your particular job. It wasn't so fast paced back then either. Today its all done by radio in real time, but you don't have time to think. The diesel horns are not nearly as loud as the steam whistles were either. Up in the mountains you could hear a whistle 3 miles and it would echo off the canyon walls! They called them Wildcat Mountain Whistles because they were a high schreek instead of the lower ones you can hear today at the steam museums. ------------------ Watash #982
