Railroaders. Encyclopedia Of American Folklore

Workers of the nation’s railroads possessing rich occupational folk traditions and a
pervasive occupational identity. Railroading inspired songs, tales, poems, legends, and
also stories by nonrailroaders, as well as railroad-related place names.
Among the folk genres railroaders shared were personalexperience narratives,
nicknames, slang, stories of railroad characters, esoteric codes and attitudes, worksongs
and chants, union lore, poems, jokes, initiation pranks, tricks, food and lodging lore,
stories of drinking, of gambling, and of womanizing, cautionary tales, and occupational
techniques passed on by word and example (to supplement, or subvert, the industry’s
tradition of extensive written rules).
Railroading, which reached its last peak in the 1940s, developed several occupational
crafts, foremost in folklore being the locomotive engineers. These men saw themselves as
the most important workers, while other railroaders envied and resented their arrogance
and their place in the popular mind. Discussions abounded about whether the conductor
or the engineer was the most important person on a train. An engineer might be called a
“hoghead” or defined as “a fireman with his brains baked out,” while a conductor might
be referred to as “the big ox” or defined as “a man, with or without brains, displaying
pencils.”
Other crafts on the moving trains were those practiced by the fireman and the
brakeman. The conductor was in charge of the train and its contents but not the engine.
Engineers often talked of “hauling” a certain conductor. Firemen worked on the engine
and kept coal in the firebox to heat the steam to drive the engine; they worked for the
engineer and were promoted to engineer. Among the slang names for them were
“bakehead” and “clinker mechanic.” Their stories concern having to deal with the
engineer and having to shovel prodigious amounts of coal, perhaps because of a heavy
train or because of the amount of steam wasted by an unskillful engineer.
Brakemen did the track switching, the coupling of cars, and the braking of individual
cars. They were promoted to conductors. In early days, brakemen had to climb along the
tops of cars and set and release hand brakes, a dangerous activity, especially in bad
weather. Stories tell of brakemen being killed or having fingers or limbs amputated in
accidents. When a brakeman hired out, the trainmaster would reputedly ask to see his
hands. If he had a finger or two missing, the trainmaster knew he was experienced.
Brakemen were often drifters in the early days and were called “boomers.” Railroaders
tell stories about such men either because they were interesting to talk to, were notorious
drinkers, gamblers, and womanizers, or were unscrupulous characters. A few railroaders
handled trains in the yard, putting trains together. Many boomers were hired during peak
seasons to work in the yard.
Railroad lore also concerned telegraphers, dispatchers, signalmen, machine shop or
roundhouse workers, section hands (track-repair workers), and passenger-train chefs and
porters. Telegraphers, or operators, manned the stations along the road. They received
messages by telegraph or telephone, including train orders instructing various trains as to when they were to take to a side track to let another train pass. They were called “brass
pounders” or “lightning slingers.” One of their jobs was handing up written train orders
on a forked stick or hoop to passing trains, a dangerous and harrowing task. Stories about
telegraphers deal with men who could send and receive messages by American Morse
code very rapidly, and about their mistakes, sometimes resulting in train disasters.
Telegraphers sometimes became train dispatchers, whose job was (and is) to control
train traffic efficiently without causing train collisions. Dispatcher errors could result in
train wrecks, and legends persist of dispatchers who committed suicide, knowing that two
trains were soon to collide and there was no way to stop them in time (they had no radio
contact in the past). Women often worked as telegraphers and dispatchers, the only crafts
in which they were allowed until recent decades.
Section crews, sometimes called “gandy dancers,” are known in folklore for the work
chants that they used to line track by hand. One man would sing out a two-line rhyme
followed by such words as, “Hey, boys, won’t you line ‘em [push, push]/Hey, boys,
won’t you line ‘em [push, push],” as a way of keeping everyone moving in unison. The
folk singer Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) recorded some of these chants.
The Black men who worked on Pullman sleepers developed a lore of their own,
including “George” stories (a porter was often called by that name), stories about
treatment by passengers and conductors, about long hours of work at low pay, about labor
organizing (they had their own union), and about activities in the civil rights movement.
Jack Santino reported that porters generally had good relationships with their wealthy,
elite passengers, although they did encounter some abuse (Santino 1989). Their main
source of abuse came from tyrant, racist conductors under whom they were forced to
work; their jobs could be in jeopardy if they gave the conductor the least amount of
trouble. Much of their lore deals with maintaining personal dignity and solidarity while
suffering from racist stereotyping. In the civil rights movement, porters carried messages
from city to city and served as a conduit among Black organizers and Black communities.
Folk ballads deal with train wrecks, usually centered on the engineer. The legendary
engineer John Luther “Casey” Jones inspired several folk ballads and blues because of
the 1900 train wreck in which he died. Beside “Casey Jones,” “The Wreck of the Old 97”
is the best-known wreck ballad. Another legendary figure is John Henry, who was
involved in the building of railroad tunnel and the digging out of rock manually by drill
and hammer in competition with a steam drill. In modern legendry, Jan Harold Brunvand
collected versions of a story, “The Baby Train,” in which the whistling of an early
morning train at a crossing awakens sleeping couples. Since they cannot go back to sleep
and it is too early to get up, the couples end up having sex, thus increasing the incidence
of births in that vicinity.
Railroaders tell stories of characters they met whose adventures are akin to localcharacter anecdotes told in communities. They mention dirty men who seldom washed
themselves or their work clothes, and eccentrics, such as a man who wore his overcoat in
winter and summer. A legendary character on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in Ohio
was an engineer named “Peg” Clary, who had a wooden leg below the knee as a result of
a railroad accident. One of his tricks was to complain of his leg and then stab it with a
knife in front of a stranger for the effect it would have.
Nicknames are a prevalent form of folklore among railroaders. Sometimes it was a
man’s physical or behavioral characteristic that yielded names like “Baloney Nose,”
“Bounce,” or “the Whispering Hope.” Often the name came from the work, including an
error made by the man: “Silo Bill” because he mistook a silo for a water tower, “Hobby
Horse” because he spotted a carload of hobby horses at the stock chute, or “Bone
Crusher” because he was a rough handler.
Place names often relate to railroading. Helper, Utah, was so named because that was
the point at which helper engines were attached. Chicago Junction, Ohio, started as a
railroad town; later they changed its name to Willard, in honor of Daniel Willard, a
president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. When the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad
built a remote track, they named the starting point Dotsero, for “dot zero” on the map.
Terry L.Long
References
Botkin, B.A., and Alvin F.Harlow, eds. 1953. A Treasury of Railroad Folklore. New York: Crown.
Cohen, Norm. 1981. Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folk Song. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Gamst, Frederick C. 1980. The Hoghead: An Industrial Ethnology of the Locomotive Engineer.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Long, Terry L. 1992. Occupational and Individual Identity among Ohio Railroad Workers of the
Steam Era. Western Folklore 51:219–236.
Santino, Jack. 1989. Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.

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