Thank you, Rupert. That was good. It reminds me of the time I got a little hasty with my 'start' at West Moorcroft and got a drawbar. On coal trains, drawbars were almost always on the 'wrong end', account that's where the rotary's were. The rotary drawbars usually broke before a knuckle would. I'm sure it was an 'old break' :>) One of the Gillette Trainmasters was out on his 'rounds' and heard it on the radio. So he drove over to help. He and the head man dragged the chain back to the BO car. It was only a few cars back, and the TM was going to show my Brakeman how to properly 'chain up' a car so we could pull it up a couple hundred yards to the House track switch to set it out. Of course, my head man knew perfectly well how to do it, but he deferred to Authority and watched. I started pulling, and shortly we were in Emergency again. We
always cut in the air and set a light handbrake on a BO car so that it wouldn't wander off if things went bad. Seems like the TM had wrapped the chain around the front axle of the car instead of the drawbar pocket, and sawed it in two :>)
Mike Decker