I was acting conductor for the 3rd time in my career in 1969 and was in a Bbay window caboose for the trip from grafton,WV to Cumberland, Maryland. anyway there was a rookie engineer (again ) and an experienced brakeman up front with me and the other brakeman in the back. anyway I checked the guages and reported ok< then all of a sudden WHAM WHAM WHAM the 130 car coal train took up slack and the caboose moved about 8 feet in about a blink of an Eye, I was thrown out the back door and hit porch railing. it hurt an I had a few brused ribs and a sore shoulder but I held it out to cumberland. TIP: never tell a rookie okay until you really mean it.
ouch that musta hurt. I have some family who worked on the B&O. one orked the B&O line over sand patch. his name in R.L."shorty" Long. you may know him??? KEEP THOSE STORIES COMING!! and BTW welcome to "the board.
Glad you posted about the Caboose TK. This story would really be of interest to others, maybe you can post stories like this in Tales From the Cab, where we are trying to collect them all together. I posted one sorta like yours that happened to me when I first started out in steam days. Thanks to a grizzled old conductor, I'm still almost alive today!
A&A... yes it REALLy hurt I couldn't breath well for about 1/2 hour. Watash... hey did you work for the railroad? what road? still working on it?
TK, I worked for the D.K.&S. in Arkansas, short line, then worked roundhouse crew at ElReno, Okla., then same thing with Abilene Southern in Texas. I'm retired now and building an HO layout. Did you retire from the Chessie? I surfed around for Art for you, but I guess he went back into radio, he is a Ham you remember? Art has become bitter because of being dissabled, and the way the Railroad treated him, so he is pretty hair-triggered. He doesn't take what he consideres criticism very well, so be understanding with him if you find him. Tell him I still can out pull his Brutus! (He will know what I mean!HA!) He will laugh about that!
heck, he's always been bitter. I'm retireref rom CSX (1993) I don['t have a Ham(but I ate on last night it really doesn't matter about getting me hooked again on him
Watash .. do you know anything about the Caddo & Choctaw RR that was located in west central Arkansas? The steam loco that I operate during the summer months was built for the Caddo & Choctaw Lumber Company. I have been trying to get info on that line for years!
No, Bill, I even asked Gregg if he had anything in his register on it. He said a lot of the time when a company had an office in one town and another in the other town, and owned a railroad, they would just name it for the two towns. It would not carry passengers or general freight, just the logs, or rock or something private, so not considered a regular railroad I suppose. That is sorta what happened to the DK&S, although now the UP owns what used to be the DK&S and just uses part of it as a training setup for rail car maintainence.
