[CBQ] Re: Grandma & Grandpa at Milledgeville,IL

["Winton" <wyhog@yahoo.com>]

> Back to Grandma and Grandpa. They never took the book of rules but they sure 
> complied with the rule about watching passing trains.

On the CB&Q's Deadwood line near Custer there was an older woman who would come 
out of her kitchen door every day as we passed and wave. The only train on the 
branch was this 2nd Class way freight which of course had a Timetable schedule. 
If you were more than a few minutes late she would point at her watch and shake 
her finger at us. 

The train was ran on a TT schedule as 2nd Class so that the 1880 steam train 
could work the main against us as an Extra and also so the DS could run Extras 
from Edgemont to the ballast pit at Lien without contacting us or giving us 
orders about the Extra.

When I worked on the Penn Central there was an old fella who lived near the 
track and had an old operating semaphore in his back yard. He usually left it 
at Approach and he gave the trains a roll-by. If everything was OK he'd flip a 
switch in his house and the semaphore would move to Clear for the conductor to 
see. I heard that a couple of times he saw hotboxes or dragging equipment and 
turned the semaphore to Stop. The conductors thought enough of him that they 
actually stopped the trains and inspected them if his signal was red.

Back to Milledgeville, even tho my territory was in Wyoming and Montana I 
recall my first "trip" on the BN's first simulator at K.C. went on the route 
through Milledgeville. I think we had to stop there. IIRC they were trying to 
catch unwary engineers with the slack runout that occurred if you stopped 
bunched and then released the air. I wonder if G'ma and G'pa were in the video 
of that simulator? 

AK



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