CONFESSIONS OF A KID WHO PLAYED WITH REAL TRAINS

I have a confession to make.

First, let me caution my readers that you should never, ever try this.  It’s dangerous and probably illegal.  But what did I know, a kid of maybe age ten, so fascinated with trains, that I did something this stupid?

I uncoupled a parked freight train on a siding. 

Yes, I crawled under a fence and went up to a stopped freight train maybe a half mile long, that I knew from experience would be parked there for a while.  I climbed up on the box car, turned wheels and pulled levers. I was having so much fun!

Then the train started up. 

I could hear the engine, far out of sight, blast its horn and slowly start tightening the slack between the railcars.  Jumping well off to the side I was amazed to see so much mass starting to move.  And then it happened.

As the cars tightened at their couplers I saw that one of those levers I had pulled had uncoupled the front of the train from the rear.  The last thing I remembered was a huge hose between the cars tightening and disconnecting with a loud “pop”.  More of a bang than a pop, but by that time I was running toward home.

The train seemed okay but as the front of the consist pulled, away the rear just sat there.  I assume that eventually, somewhere down the track they realized what had happened, maybe when the crew in the caboose (they still had them in those days) noticed they’d been left behind.

Pretty stupid thing to do, I’ll admit.  And dangerous too.  It took me weeks before I could even confess to my Mother what I’d done, and even then she thought it was just my imagination.  But it wasn’t.

But my ‘crime’ had given me a lesson about air brakes.  That hose, connecting each car to the next, was how the train’s brakes worked.

Brakemen at work

In the early days of railroading the brakemen literally were stationed atop the boxcars and, on signal from the locomotive crew blowing its whistle, they’d run across the cars tightening brake handles, hopefully stopping the entire train in time.

Then, in 1872 George Westinghouse (yes, the same guy who later brought us so many innovations in electricity) invented the automatic air brake.

All train cars’ brakes were connected to a hose-fed air pressure system controlled at the locomotive.  When the lines were pressurized, the brakes on all the cars would be released and the train could move along.  When it came time to stop, the pressure was slowly released and the brakes were automatically applied.

The system was also fail safe.  If the train started to derail (or was uncoupled by a naïve young rail fan), the pressure was cut and the brakes applied automatically just as I had witnessed. (I still wonder how the front of ‘my train’ kept moving after I’d popped the hose).

Westinghouse’s system worked so well that by 1900 air brakes were required on all trains.  And they’re still in use today.  That invention became WABTEC, the Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Company, merging in 2019 with GE Transportation which makes locomotives.  Today WABTEC is a $45 billion company.  A spinoff, WABCO, put the same technology into trucks.

Stopping a huge train or a truck with just the power of air.  Quite an invention.

But a final word of caution from a once-stupid kid who should have known better: never, ever play with trains. Not stopped ones. Not parked ones.  Not “just for a minute.” They can move without warning, and one wrong step can be fatal.  So please…stay off the tracks.