He began as brakeman on a freight. There were two, possibly three, of these men to the train, under command of the conductor, back there in the caboose, and they were supposed to distribute themselves pretty equally over the top of the train. The forward brakeman would work from the cab backward, the rear brakeman from the caboose (he also probably calls it a “hack”), forward, the remaining man when a third was assigned to the train, having the middle. It was thought and confidently predicted that with the universal use of the air-brake to freight equipment the days of clambering over the tops of the cars to man the brakes were over. Brakemen twenty years ago were dreaming of the day when they might sit in a cab or caboose and have the difficult work of slacking or the stopping of a 1,500-ton train accomplished, through the genius of mechanism, by a hand-turn of the engineer upon an air-brake throttle. But what looked so well in theory has not worked quite so well in practice. The railroads have found the wear and tear on the air-brake equipment, particularly with the steep grade lines and heavy equipment, a tremendous expense. For the sake of that and for the sake of still greater safety—following the railroad rule to use each possible safety measure, one upon the other—the brakemen are still compelled to keep to the top of the cars.
“When the train comes to a water station the fireman gets out and fills the tank”
A freight-crew and its “hack”
A view through the span of a modern truss bridge
gives an idea of its strength and solidity
The New York Central is adopting the
new form of “upper quadrant” signal
On a pleasant day this is a task that can give the average brakeman a sort of supreme contempt for the man whose work houses him within four walls. If the road lies through a lovely country, if it pierces mountain ranges, or follows the twisting course of a broad river, he may feel a contempt, too, for the passenger who observes the lovely scenes only through the narrow confines of a car window. To him there is a broad horizon, and he would be a poor sort of man indeed if he did not rise to the inspiration of this environment.