We have not discussed use of Morse Code on the Q to my recollection; anyone
know where on the system was the last use of same? I'm guessing it was post-BN
as I recall a Trains article identifying an ex-GN or SOO line in No. Dakota
still using Morse in the "80's. When I hired on C&NW in "78 three stations
still used Morse; consecutive stops from Marchalltown east on the 'main'.
These were 3 senior Agt/operators who insisted the Signal gang keep their wire
operational. When they ret'd, that ended Morse on the Northwestern.
9allefgedly there were some rare opccasiopns
I learned a semblance of American Morse as a Scout and intensive knowledge of
International Morse while in the Air Force; those of you who are old Ham's
learned some as well.
Any stories out there relating to Morse on the Q? I have a RPPC showing a Q
work train with one car clearly marked 'Telegraph Dept'. Dates from 1920's. I
think some old equipment bklts also differentiate between Telegraph Dept and
Signal Dept. Also Western Union had their own work trains that traveled any &
all RR's well into the 60's (even later?)
Gerald
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A LOST LANGUAGE", by LeRoy Palmer. An Article appearing in the June,
1940 issue of "Railroad Magazine", pages 89-92.
As months and years drift by, the number of us old-time telegraphers
in rail service who know the train wire language is dwindling, like the "thin
blue line" and the "thin gray line" of Civil War veterans.On
practically all the main-line dispatching circuits the telephone has
displaced the telegraph. Only the oldest ops can remember the days
when the average train dispatcher had a "copier", a fast pen operator
who wrote all orders in the order book as the dispatcher issued them
and checked as each was repeated.
In this era of telephone dispatching, the work is, of course, done
much more quickly. Orders are now repeated in one-fourth the time that
was required for even the "gilt-edge" Morse man, although the time and
all station names are spelled out, while train and engine numbers are
repeated on the telephone. The veteran brass pounder has to admit it,
even though he misses the vanishing language. Formerly I could be busy at my
desk, or even reading the newspaper, and still hear the train wire with its
"OS" reports of trains passing over the district, and thus I kept posted on
everything approaching my station. Now I hear nothing unless I sit with the
telephone receiver hung over my head. They took some of the romance and
fascination away from railroading when they installed telephones on the train
wire.
The twelve-hour night shift men were excellent "spotters". That is, they were
adept at catching much-needed sleep when opportunity offered and they trained
themselves to wake for their call. The old Morse dispatchers knew that Bill or
Joe was "in the hay" when they got no answer on the first call and they would
slowly repeat "RC RC RC DS" or "ZA ZA ZA DS," or whatever the call was, the
repeated chatter bringing the Op to life. This was customary and was well
understood.
One of the first things the op learned was to arouse from deep slumber for his
call.
I remember the first job I ever worked, night operator for the Milwaukee Road
at Burlington, Wis., in 1901. I'd been on the job only a few nights when. One
morning just before daylight, I got mighty sleepy and stretched out on the
freight desk, with an "Official Guide" making a soft pillow for my head, and
was soon sleeping soundly. I dreamed I was walking along a street, and as I
passed a store I heard a telegraph instrument tapping out "BU BU BU BY" which
was my office call. I thought, "Gosh! I'd better go in there and answer that.
It's my call!" The next thing I knew, I was tumbling off that desk onto my feet
as I realized that the Beliot dispatcher was hammering out slowly "BU BU BU BU
DS."
I dove for the telegraph desk.
I have had this same dream, or one very much like it, many times since on
similar occasions. Other old-time ops report having had identical experience.
Seldom would we get deep enough in the hay to fail to recognize the familiar
sounder call. There's not much excuse for lightening slingers to drowse on an
eight-hour shift nowadays, but should a man working the late night, or third,
trick in the heat of Summer, slip off to dreamland between trains, the
telephone bell is, perhaps, not the equal of the old repeated Morse call to
arouse him from slumber.
Perhaps you have sat in some wayside depot waiting-room and listened to the
clatter of the instruments in the telegraph office and wished you could
understand what was passing over the wire. But missing now from the chorus of
clicking sounders is the loudest one of all, the sounder of the train
dispatcher's wire. What you would hear now, if you could read them, would be
the message wire and the commercial wire, carrying private telegrams. Gone is
the hottest and fastest of them all, the sounder with the mysterious
abbreviations and language of its own, which every student aspired to read.
When a student could read the train wire his education was complete; he was a
full-fledged op.
In 1900 I was an apprentice at the CMStP&P depot in Elkhorn, Wis. George Hayes
was the daylight operator there. In addition to his regular duties, he had the
job of teaching two students, Bill Jones and myself. Both of us were green farm
hands. I don't know how dumb I was as a ham, but I do remember that Mr. Hayes
was in despair over Bill. We both did learn, however. I became a boomer op, and
the last I heard of Bill Jordan he was the chief dispatcher for some Western
pike.
I was given night work with the night man, a short, fat little Irish fellow
named Eddie uinane. Eddie was a prince. He used to send to me faithfully an
hour or so every night when he wasn't too busy, but he was a rotten sender. The
boys along the line had a hard time reading him. But I got accustomed to the
funny twists he put on his Morse, and I had no trouble. Later on, when I was
working along the line on the extra board, if some op had to copy Eddie and I
was around he'd make me sit in and take Eddie's dots and dashes.
Meanwhile, I put in about six months with Eddie, showing up when he did at six
p.m. and quitting at one a.m. I was beginning to get discouraged. I could read
words off the Western Union commercial wire pretty well, but I couldn't get
used to those "cut" words used by the dispatchers, even though I listened
faithfully, trying to separate the characters and make sense of them.
I'll never forget that winter night when I opened the waiting room door,
hustled over to the huge coal stove to thaw out, and heard the big train-wire
sounder in the office rattling away. I listened a moment, when -- just like
that-- I could read the language! Boy, was I tickled! What previously had been
a jumble of sounds was now clear to me. When Eddie came in a few minutes later,
I had the joyous news for him that I could read the train wire, and he seemed
as pleased as I was.
After that, I was more anxious than ever to perfect myself. One day George
Hayes said to me: "Kid, I'm going to give you a note to W.H. Melchoir, the
chief train dispatcher at Beliot, and send you over to take your examination.
Eddie says you have your block rules learned okay and you can read the train
wire. They need operators and you are good enough to start out."
Next day I rode the morning local passenger train to Beliot. Mr. Melchoir
examined me and sent me to Burlington to work that very night. There was no
physical or standard rules examination at that time, but you had to know the
block rules. You had to know how to ask the man east of you for a "47" before
you let an eastbound train into the block, etc. A "block" was the stretch of
track between your office and his, and "47" meant "Will hold all westbound
trains until your train arrives."
Because the Morse train dispatcher had to work fast in order to keep his trains
moving, there came into use so many abbreviations that if, as you sat in the
wayside station waiting-room listening to the sounders, you could have to read
every letter that was passing over the train wire, you still would have been
unable to know what was going on, unless you understood the code. You might
have heard the dispatcher and the op converse as follows: "Sa wn x w cmg ma hv
9 r tm." snaps the dispatcher. {Say when extra west train is coming. I may have
orders for them.}
"Art tnk c tr smk no," returns the op. "Es hr ty cm ty in ste nw."
{All right. I think I see their smoke now. Yes, here they come. They are in
sight now.}
"U gt nytng r em." asks the DS. {Have you got anything for them?}
"Es abt 15 m wk," replies the operator. {Yes, about 15 minutes work.}
"OK 31 cy 3 r em & let me kw hw mch wk ty gt at DR b4 c clr em ma hv
to chg tt meet wi 42 No 7s ab 20 m1 I'll hnd hm sm ti on tm at DR."
{Okay. Make 3 copies on a 31 order for them and let me know how much
work they've got at Darienbefore you clear them. May have to change that meet
with number 42. Number 7 is about twenty minutes late. I'll hand him some time
on them at Darien.}
Hour after hour, with occasional periods of rest, twenty-four hours a day, the
sounder rattled on, Few words were spelled out in train movement conversation,
as this language -- the "cut" language of the old Morse train wire -- clicked
over the line.
All railroad offices with telephone dispatcher's wire equipment have a
Morse circuit to fall back on in case of trouble on the phone wire. The young
operators dread this. If they happen to be working with an old Morse
dispatcher, they are in hot water trying to read his abbreviated instructions.
To a veteran, however, it's the old familiar code.
Morse men admit that the telephone, like the typewriter, makes for greater
efficiency. It standardizes operations, saves time and work, and diminishes the
hazards of the iron trail. But we of the old school miss the romance of the
earlier days of rugged individualism when you reached for a brass key instead
of a black telephone receiver, and were proud of the bold, rapid, flowing
strokes with which you wrote your train orders by hand.
And if a tobacco-chewing boomer op were suddenly yanked out of the dim past and
put to work on a teletype machine, his consternation would be equalled only by
his profanity. Teletypes are doing their bit to make
Morse a dead language. So far, you'll find 'em on only a few of the big roads.
The latest pike to install this system is the Erie, which is now using teletype
machines for their consist and passing report systems.
As every rail knows the consist of a freight train includes all of its
car numbers, listed in order, beginning at the head end. For each carload are
shown contents, tons, destination, route (including other roads, if any such
are needed to take the car to its destination), and sometimes the name of the
consignee. Ventilation, refrigeration, or heating instructions are shown for
perishable freight, and when livestock was last fed and rested.
All this information, in the case of the Erie, is transmitted by teletype to
the company's general offices at Chicago, Cleveland, and New York, and to the
district office at Jersey City, NJ, immediately after hotshot freights have
left the yards. There, centralized tracking bureaus use the information to
answer quickly all shipper and receiver inquiries about the movement of cars --
inquiries that in days gone by were answered with the aid of Morse conversation.
A friend on the Erie tells me that when his company adopted teletypes for its
consist and passing report systems, last March, it converted 845 miles of
telegraph wire to printer circuits, making a total of 2,320 miles of these
circuits now in operation on the Erie. Of this total, he says, 2,075 miles are
equipped with duplex apparatus over which messages or consists can be sent in
both directions at the same time.
Morse experts concede that the telephone, the typewriter and the teletype
seldom fail and, as I pointed out, do the work more easily and more rapidly.
Few train dispatchers and ops would go back to the obsolete system if they
could. But now and then you'll run across a mellow old boomer who sighs for the
snappy Morse dialogue on the dispatcher's wire that is fast becoming a lost
language.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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