The Story of the Brakeman

This song was inspired by the following excerpt from "The Train Whistle's Echo" by Phyllis Zanner Copyright 1981, Zanel Publications

"Almost on an exalted par with the engineer, in the eyes of boys by the side of the tracks, was the brakeman, who lived a dangerous life skipping across the tops of lurching cars, hand-setting brakes, ducking for tunnels, and sometimes flagging from the last car to protect his train from a rapidly following express train.

Before George Westinghouse invented air brakes, the only way to stop the train was for the engineer to signal the brakeman, who leaped from car to car, turning iron cranks that looked like steering wheels, sometimes under the most hazardous conditions of blizzard, swerving mountain descent, or slippery ice.

The brakeman also coupled and uncoupled cars, and for this job he needed exceptional courage and unusual luck. 'Judge the speed of the car coming toward you, ' instructed the manual, 'lift the link so it will enter the pocket of the draw bar. Get hands and fingers out of the way, you may need them sometime.' It was taken quite as a matter of course that brakeman would be maimed or killed. A slip of the foot at the wrong moment and his foot was under the wheel. A car started rolling unexpectedly and his ribs were crushed. In 1881 alone, 30,000 brakeman across the nation lost their hands or their lives.

And yet, even after air brakes and the automatic coupler were proven effective, it took railroads twenty years to adopt them. And then only under forces of federal law."

- herb

Credits:

Herb Moore - guitar, voice

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