Bulletin Article - May 2004

WORKING THE RAILROAD
by Norm Stuessy

I used to lie awake on hot summer nights in my Ashland attic bedroom and listen for trains. The tracks of the Pennsylvania Reading Seashore Line ran parallel to the front of our house, not more than a hundred yards away. Summer Sunday nights in particular were memorable because of the many excursion trains coming back to Camden from Atlantic City. The year was 1945 and automobiles had not yet completely replaced trains for many seashore weekenders.

The engineer would always blow the whistle: two short blasts, a pause and then another short blast followed by a long one as the train approached the Evesham Avenue crossing at speeds of up to eighty miles per hour. I could tell from the sound of the whistle what kind of steam engine was pulling the train. The big K-4 Pacific locomotives had a sort of nasal wailing sound, while the smaller E-6 Atlantic locomotives had a more emphatic, throatier sound. The engineers seemed to have their own signature style for blowing the required grade crossing warnings, especially in the way they let the final note gradually fade out. An old railroad engineer who lived in the neighborhood claimed he could identify the engineer just by listening to the way he blew the whistle.

Whenever I heard one of these Sunday night excursion trains coming, I would kneel on my bed with my elbows resting on the open sill and watch the train go by. I liked to look at the orange glow in the engine's fire box and then the dim yellow illumination coming from the windows of the passenger cars. I always counted the cars. During the summer vacation season there were frequently twelve or thirteen cars, all crammed with probably sleeping people returning from their day at the shore.

My Dad used the railroad to commute to his job at the Camden Trust Company where he was a teller. There were four commuter trains every weekday morning that ran westward. After Ashland station they made subsequent stops at Woodcrest, Haddonfield, West Haddonfield, Cuthbert (Westmont), Collingswood and Camden, much the same way the high speed line trains do today, using exactly the same right of way. On weekday evenings there were four eastbound commuter trains, all but one of which went on to stops at towns and villages beyond Ashland with names like Osage, Kirkwood, Lindenwold, Berlin, Atco, Chesilhurst, Waterford, Winslow Junction and Hammonton. At the time, I memorized all the stops between Camden and Hammonton, and could call them out the same way the train conductor did as these local trains pulled out of Camden.

The commuter trains of my childhood did not run on elevated tracks as the high speed line does today; they ran at street level. Back then, every town located on the railroad had its own grade crossing protected by flashing red lights and crossing gates that came down automatically when a train was approaching. In addition, some larger towns also had a crossing watchman and Ashland was one of these.

Our crossing watchman was named "Frenchie." At least that's what he told me and the other kids to call him. He was a short-statured older man who spoke with a thick French accent. Like many crossing watchmen, he had been injured in a former railroad job which had somehow disabled him. When he wasn't swinging a lantern during the train's passing, he sat in a little shanty by the tracks and watched for the flashing red lights that signaled the next approaching train. Frenchie worked a long day and sometimes fell asleep. It was something to see him come charging out of his shanty when the train's whistle woke him at the last minute.

Frenchie cooked his dinner at lunch time on a small pot belly coal stove which also provided warmth in the winter months. He always used a small tan enameled pot to cook his meal. When Frenchie was running low on coal for his stove, he would simply ask the fireman on one of the eastbound commuter trains to drop off a few shovel's full. The combined aromas of Frenchie's dinner cooking and the burning of soft coal were unique and memorable.

I was infatuated with railroading when we lived in Ashland. I used to take the mail from our post office to the early morning train. I would haul the bags on postmaster "Cap" Miller's old express wagon from the post office to the Ashland station and then position myself where the railroad mail car on the end of the train usually stopped. It was my job to throw the mail bags up to the railway mail clerk who stood at the open door of the mail car. At Christmas time, I really had to hustle because there were usually several bags and the train did not stop long. I loved the job because it made me feel that I was part of railroading. During my freshman year in high school, I naively aspired to become a railway clerk.

The most noteworthy phenomenon that happened every weekday in my railroad world was the turn-around of the evening Ashland local. The train was unique in that Ashland was the last stop, following which the train deadheaded back to Camden. The process by which it did this was fascinating. As soon as all the Ashland passengers, usually including my Dad, alighted, the train backed into a siding. Here it waited until an eastbound train roared through. Then the engine was uncoupled from the cars, came back onto the eastbound tracks, backed around the train and re-entered the siding from the back end in order to recouple onto the train. Then the train came out of the siding and proceeded on to the mainline crossover. There it waited until the conductor called a dispatcher on a trackside telephone for permission to move the train onto the westbound tracks. Once the train crew was back on board, the train made its way back to Camden with the engine on the head end, tender first. I used to love to watch this maneuver from the beginning to the end. When the crossover was being made, I stood beside the dispatcher telephone to hear the conductor get his orders, then watched as the train steamed off into the night. I would get home just in time for dinner. I did this almost every weekday and the train crews got used to seeing me.

One evening, the crossover had just been completed and the conductor had swung aboard the last car. As the train pulled out, he shouted back to me. "Hey, I'm not sure I locked the switch on the other side. Would you go check it?"

I yelled back that I would. After the train disappeared in the distance, I went to the other side and checked the switch padlock. It had been left open. I quickly secured the lock and started home, feeling more a part of railroading than ever before.

Just as I got to our street, I could hear the whistle of an approaching eastbound train. Then a sickening wave of panic swept over me. I had locked the switch as directed, but without first checking the position of the switch. If the switch was still in the position used when the train came out of the siding, the oncoming train on the mainline tracks would be derailed. There was nothing I could do. Even if I could get there in time, the padlock was locked and I would not be able to change the position of the switch. The express's whistle got louder as the speeding train approached.

Then it was over. The train passed through with a roar that gradually faded in the distance. The switch I had locked had been in the right position. My sense of relief was almost overwhelming and I offered up some heartfelt prayers of thanks on the spot.

Later, I came to realize that if the switch had indeed been in the wrong position, an automatic block signal would have halted the oncoming train while it was passing through Woodcrest. That train conductor who had trusted me would have been in an awful lot of trouble. I wonder, as I think back on this episode today: why did that conductor trust me? How could he have known that I wasn't a mischievous boy who might have deliberately thrown the switch the wrong way before locking it, just to see what would happen? And did he have some very anxious moments later that evening?