Story Notes: Buttons · 2:28pm Sep 12th, 2021
For someone who’s had a lifelong interest in trains, I sure haven’t posted all that many stories about ponies and trains, have I?
Really no excuse for it, but better late than never.
We’ve met Spuds before, in Interview with a Cab Driver and The Wagon Repair Mare. For those of you who are meeting him for the first time, he’s based on the IRL Studs Terkel, who made a career of interviewing ordinary people doing ordinary jobs, and what’s more ordinary than a railroad job?
Sure, some of us think of being an engineer, but most of us wouldn’t give a thought to the brakeman or one of the many runners on the ground in the yards that break up and make up the trains.
It’s dangerous work. There’s a lot of moving parts, and it only takes one mistake to have a really bad day. Deadlines and shortcuts are common, some of them winked at by management and some of them strictly forbidden but done anyway in the interests of saving time. Especially in the early days, injuries—or worse—were very common. Sometimes as a result new rules would be promulgated . . . the rules of the road are written in blood.
Just think about Casey Jones. He’s both a folk hero and a cautionary tale. He was an engineer on a passenger train that was running late, and he did everything he could to make up time, to get it back on schedule. He had a powerful locomotive at his command, and he’d already made up most of his lost time when his luck ran out and he found a stopped freight on his line.
His skill, it’s said, enabled him to slow the train enough that he was the only fatality in the collision.
Trains do best on flat ground. Hills present problems for them; what was enough horsepower when it was flat isn’t when it’s hilly.
Railroads do their best to avoid steep grades, but of course just because it would be more efficient for there to not be hills in the way doesn’t magically make them disappear. There are some engineering solutions, including the impractical (but they did it anyway) building of a 12-mile causeway across the Great Salt Lake in Utah to avoid terrain.
If building the Lucin Cutoff isn’t in the budget, you can have helper engines for the upgrade. Those can couple on the front to help pull or the rear to push. Back in the day, each locomotive had to have a full crew, and they’d communicate by whistle signals. These days, two-way radios and remote-controlled locomotives can be used.
While this doesn’t relate directly to the story, the downgrade has its own issues, and sometimes extra locomotives are used for braking. This famously went wrong in the Cajon Pass runaway, where the four locomotives on the front and the two extras (with crew) on the rear weren’t enough to slow the train on the downgrade.
I could probably write a whole blog post on the subject of getting trains over hills, and likely as not I’d learn things I didn’t know in the process of researching it.
Like many professions, railroading has its own slang. Y’all know from my mechanic blog posts that I toss out technical terms left and right, and they’re sometimes manufacture-specific and sometimes SAE-specific and sometimes just what we call things where I work. Some of them have made it into popular culture (such as “milk run”), and some of them are at least well-known (such as “crummy”), and some of them you probably have to be in the industry to come across (such as “bug-slinger”). Some of them transitioned from horse days, such as “hostler.”
Some of them are obsolete by modern standards; there was a time when stoking the fire in a locomotive was a skilled trade, but it isn’t any more. Likewise, the brakeman has gone the way of the caboose in the US.
I don’t know for actual fact if railroaders pick up nicknames these days, but I bet they do. I’ve gotten one or two from skilled trades over the years, either for something I did well, or something I did badly.
I found a list of railroad slang which is unlikely to be complete, but is a good starting point.
Mixed trains were ones that carried both passengers and freight. There were routes that weren’t busy enough to justify a dedicated passenger train, or where for other reasons you might want to move some passengers but not that many, and often not in comfort. Usually the older, obsolete passenger cars were used on those routes.
Likewise, a combine, or combination car, was half passenger car and half cargo-carrying space. Usually it was a baggage car on one end and had some seats on the other.
A RPO, or Rail(road) Post Office was a mail car which had clerks who would receive and distribute mail as the train went along its route. Most often they were on passenger trains, and many of them had special arrangements to pick up and drop off mail sacks on the fly. Dropping off the mail was easy, a clerk would toss it out the door as the train went by the station. Picking it up was more complicated; they had a special pole it was tied to and a catching hook on the car that would grab the sack.
Obviously, if the train stopped at a station, they’d load and unload the mail in a more conventional manner.
Here’s the part some of y’all might want to skip over, since it deals with an injury. I’ll spoiler it for y’all, and leave the image as a link you can click, rather than put it in the blog post itself.
We probably all know about getting stitches for various lacerations. Hold the skin together to let it heal, but the thing is that thread’s really fine and can easily cut through or pull through flesh.
One way of dealing with that in equines is to use buttons to spread the load over a larger area. Not any kind of special buttons, mind you, just whatever the vet happens to have handy.
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To wax slightly philosophical, in modern medicine, and if it’s possible given the circumstances, thought is given to scarring. When it’s not possible, though, ‘fix it’ takes priority over ‘make it look neat.’ I’ve got one of those repairs, and I suppose if I was vain enough I could spend a bunch of money with a good plastic surgeon who might be able to make it better, but it works well enough and as Keanu Reeves famously said, “Chicks dig scars.”
Heck, depending on the occupation, they could be a badge of honor.
A seamster is a male seamstress.
Back in the day, barbers often doubled as dentists; in terms of tools and skills (especially in a remote area) there’s not a huge technical difference between fixing damaged clothes and damaged ponies.
Back in Ye Olde Days, before Timken Roller Bearings were invented, railcars had journal boxes which were filled with cloth and lube. Making sure that they were lubed was important; if they weren’t, the axle ends would overheat and fail and then you had a heck of a wreck. Or it would set fire to the rail car (which were often wood back in Ye Olde Times) and that was a good signal to the rail crew that they had a problem.
Even in modern times, their history lives on; axle heat detection equipment is commonly referred to as ‘hotbox detectors’, even though journal boxes have long been outlawed from interchange service.
They stuck out far enough that they could catch an unwary pony who was too close to a moving car.
We all know that spinny thing striped red and blue as a sign of "this is a barber" and don't usually make the connection that those are the main colors of blood, but that connection is very much not a coincidence.
My father had both his appendix and a kidney removed, sometime in the 50s. (Different time, not together.) They left such badass scars on him that as a kid, I couldn't wait to need surgery.
5581048 The wife had her spleen taken out when she was about 8 or so. It looks like they practically cut her in half. My girls had to have the same thing when they were about 8-9 (spherocytosis), and the doctor did it laparoscopically. You can barely see the scars.
Yea for modern med.
*sighs in cargo*
Interesting story notes.
That's a long list of railroad slang!
I remember the Cajon Pass derailment and subsequent gas pipeline explosion. I remember reading much later that it was because the hopper cars were recorded as being half full when they were actually completely full. With that much weight on that steep of a grade, there was no way the crew could have done anything. Once they rolled with that composition, the wreck was unavoidable. So there's a good lesson: Accurate paperwork is important.
My favorite way of dealing with a steep grade is a spiral track like the Tehachapi Loop!
Huh, now there's an artwork I never expected to see on Fimfic.
Been using it as my desktop wallpaper for years now.
Interesting blog, though. A good read.
5581088
Suddenly Mickey Mouse got a bit more tragic
So what's the ponified name of the Westinghouse air brake? Incidentally, I've seen a newer jeep that had a WABCO vacuum pump.
Speaking of old slang, how about 'grease monkey'? Back in ye olden times when factories and workshops had lineshafts up on the ceiling driving all the machinery with leather belts, somebody had to keep all the lineshaft bearings lubricated. Being so high up, the guy with the grease had to climb up on things... like a monkey.
5581225
Might I suggest "Westinghorse"?
Or, more precisely, what was enough traction now isn't. I've read that even an engine with 12 driving wheels might have a total area actually touching the tracks of about 2 silver dollars. Combined with an utter lack of a transmission, and with it the ability to switch to 2nd or 3rd gear, and suddenly a 2.5% grade -that's right, a ride of 2.5 feet for every 100-is considered fairly steep, and more than 4 is never done
There's also the age-old tradition of going through the mountain instead of over it.
I just remembered that you weren't actually the author of that did about a GG1 and Celestia. The two of you have similarly wonderful writing styles.
Thank you for writing, both this and the story before--
"We’ve met Spuds before, in Interview with a Cab Driver and The Wagon Repair Mare."
...Stories before, apparently, of which I've now read two of three.
...Well, I'm already terribly behind schedule... but I did enjoy the other two... ...Argh. Right, queued up for after this blog post!
By the way, an I-thought interesting related video I saw a while ago, if anyone here's interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rx57jVGfso
"there was a time when stoking the fire in a locomotive was a skilled trade"
Reminding me of another video, in fact:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVIr66K_rUA
And thank you for the blog post with its interesting information and nice pony pictures. :)
And trains! :D
Ok but do ponies use knuckle couplers or the older chain and buffer style?
5581009
I knew it was for blood.
I think I knew that before Sweeny Todd, but I can’t say for sure.
5581048
No one in my immediate family has cool scars I ever aspired to. I do have some cool scars of my own, though.
5581088
One of my friends got her appendix taken out laparoscopically, and another one has the good old-fashioned ‘let’s get a whole hand in there’ scar.
Even with modern med, there’s sometimes a difference between planned surgeries and quick repairs when needed. And sometimes a limit with what can be done, at least in trauma. Although plastic surgery keeps getting better and better, or so I’ve heard.
5581119
5581143
Thank you!
It is, and I can’t help but feel there’s a lot more that didn’t make the list. Surely there’s some railroad-specific slang.
In fact, I’ve heard that railroads often don’t change the names of tracks, so you’ll have tracks named for long-gone industries or I suppose in some days long-gone towns when it comes to control points/waypoints.
5581172
Yeah, the yardmaster (I think) just guessed at how much the cars would weigh, and I think he was off by 40.000 pounds per car. He assumed that the weights would be corrected when the cars were loaded, but they weren’t.
I don’t remember the exact conclusions in the NTSB report—it didn’t help that not all the brakes on all the locomotives were fully-operational, but I think that even if they had been, they wouldn’t have been able to stop.
Skimming through the accident report, the NTSB concluded if the engineer had kept the speed below 15mph (which he was not required to do) he could have stopped the train with the locomotives and brakes he had. Here’s a link to the report if anyone wants to read it.
That’s not the only one like that, but loops are pretty rare since most places where you’ve got a significant grade, you don’t have the real estate to build a loop. I want to say that there’s one in Europe that’s a looping viaduct to gain elevation.
5581180
Which one, out of curiosity?
Thank you!
5581222
The six-million dollar mouse. . . .
5581225
So what's the ponified name of the Westinghouse air brake?
Yeah, I’m gonna agree with 5581245 on that.
Huh. . . .well, I guess if you know a thing or two about air pumps and vacuum pumps, why not put them on cars, too? Now all we need is for Leslie to start selling car horns.
That’s a good job for a pegasus, I think.
I’ll be honest, I’d never considered having to lube lineshafts, and I don’t know why it never occured to me that would be a thing that needed to be done. I bet a lot of factories didn’t even turn off the shafts for lubing, just send some dude up there and hope for the best.
5581256
I don’t think it’s exclusively traction, although that surely is a factor. Especially in the steam locomotive days, a lot of them didn’t have great tractive effort at low speeds . . . I think that some mountainous railroads quickly adapted to diesels since even with fewer horsepower they were better at getting trains over mountains.
Overall, though, it’s a whole collection of different factors (weather can make a difference, as well as curves).
That’s true, although that’s often the high-budget choice and that comes with its own problems/engineering challenges. When I was a kid, Grand Trunk ran some of their trains under the St. Mary’s river, but not everything would fit so they still had carfloat operations as well. And on occasion a train got stuck and they had to send more locomotives to pull it out . . . and it was still cheaper to do that than bore a newer, bigger tunnel (although they eventually did).
5581258
That’s true, that wasn’t me. That was jz1.
His other story also has trains.
5581311
Huzzah! Hopefully you enjoy it!
That one’s on my watch-it-later list (where it has been for years, sadly)
That one I have seen!
On a totally different (well, not that different), Obvious Plant’s The Exciting of Trains is . . . well, it’s something.
“Our own United States of America, comprised of 49 magnificent states.
“And also New Jersey.”
You’re welcome!
5581321
AFAIK, we’ve never seen buffers in canon, so I’d have to say they don’t do chain and buffer. Fun fact, here in America we didn’t care about passenger comfort or cargo survival, so we did link and pin which is kinda the same idea but with more slack action.
I think the ponies probably started with some sort of drawbar-style coupling (like link and pin) and have since transitioned to something safer. They may have used chain and buffer or something like that for passenger cars, since at least one episode implies that they expect a cake shipped by train to arrive intact, something you cannot expect on an American railroad.
5581664
Never heard of the link and pin ones. Just always the knuckle couplers or Jenny couplers. But I'm very aware of how the railroads here are with moving stuff. Not people though. Only passenger train I've ever seen was on a trip in west Virginia.
5581669
Link and pin was the predecessor (and there were other styles, IIRC), basically a metal link held in place by pins, and they typically looked like this:
i.ebayimg.com/images/g/RYgAAOxyq5NRB1m1/s-l640.jpg
(this is a model coupler, so how it attaches to the railcar might not be prototypical, but the coupler, link, and pin are . . . )
We really need to invest in passenger railroads in the US, but we probably won’t. I’ve been on nice, smooth, fast passenger trains in Europe and also on Amtrak which gets you there, sometimes on time.
(to be fair, the ‘worst’ train I’ve been on [in terms of age, speed, and trackage] was in rural France; I think they laid rails over an old Roman goat path and went with it.)
5581647
Neat! Thanks for the link to the report.
I've seen pictures of the European viaduct loop (very cool) and I've heard of ones that are entirely underground. I kind of suspect that the line from Ponyville to Canterlot has to include something like that
5581648
The one with the pony by the window at the very top.
I still remember laughing at the artist sneaking memes into the WiPs of it years ago.
5581662
:)
I did, yes; thanks!
(I also commented on the story notes page for it, if FIMFiction didn't tell you.)
Ah, sorry about that.
:)
...Uh. Yep. Yep, that was something, alright. :D
:)
Also, on another note, I came across this earlier, and it occurred to me to wonder if there might not be some potential inspiration for an Admiral Biscuit story in there. So I thought I'd mention it, in case there was, or just in case you found it interesting. :)
(I don't recall if you've written on that sort of machinery before, sorry.)
If you're interested, here are a couple of Railroad lingo dictionaries that might prove useful. I found them helpful when trying to make heads or tails of what Button was saying.
http://www.catskillarchive.com/rrextra/glossry1.Html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_North_American_railway_terms
5581708
You’re welcome!
It’s a magical ponyland, so who knows? Maybe some of it is cog railway, or maybe it just makes continuous spirals around the mountain until you get to the top.
In all seriousness, while humans have overcome all sorts of unusual geographical challenges to get trains from point A to B, the animators didn’t bother with any of that, so I think it’s open to the author how they get the trains up. Assuming that they can hire digging creatures (such as the Diamond Dogs) a series of spiral tunnels might be the most practical solution for the ponies, TBH. Or maybe some magic-based solution.
5581786
That’s a good one, I really like it.
I’ve never watched an artist do WIP (at least for fanart, I’ve seen it for modelmaking). That would be interesting, and I ought to check an artist who does that out sometime.
5582178
That does interest me. I know some of the operations of those machines, I know how heavy a wastebasket full of the type is (we had one in the theatre, don’t know why), and I know what some kinds of ink smell like, I used to live a couple doors down from a printing shop. Dunno what kind of machines they ran.
I did cover typewriters in Field Notes from Equestria, but I’ve never written anything specific about various kinds of printing presses, I don’t think, although they have been mentioned in passing in a couple of my stories.
5582588
The Catskill Archive link is a good one, I actually used it a lot when writing the story. I hadn’t found the Wikipedia one, which also looks useful.
5592487
When I was in school I remember hearing some of my teachers acting as if Wikipedia was the devil incarnate or something. If I was writing a Doctoral dissertation or a Scientific study for one of the top-tier science journals I would probably be quite careful with it, but for generic "looking something up" or as a starting point I find it to be a useful tool.
5592490
Yeah, it’s not the end-all-be-all of research, but when I want to learn something about a subject I know practically nothing about, Wikipedia’s a great first resource and than I can find out what things are called, what techniques are used, and so on. Depending on what I’m doing, sometimes that’s enough, and sometimes I need to go to more specific sources with the information I learned from Wikipedia.
5592486
Neat, and I'm glad it was indeed of interest to you. :)
Ah. I don't recall at the moment how many of those I may have seen, sorry.
Soooo many stories...
5594394
No worries!
Even I can’t always remember all of them
5594744
Thanks. :)
Ah, heh, you do have rather a lot. :D
Oh, hm. 199, actually; next one looks to be #200!
5595225
Next one is 200! Want a sneak preview?
5595802
Oh, interesting; I wonder what all that's about. :)