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50

They'd just switched the slaughterhouse and one of the workers on the platform had asked the engineer how many horsepower the locomotive had. Said the engineer to us, "I told him 28,000-- and the son of a bitch was too dumb to know the difference." This may have been the same engineer who commented to us that he'd just been down to the Beefhouse. He added, "We delivered a carload of hogs--only we call 'em brakemen and conductors. If this was a brakeman talkin' to yuh, he'd say a carload of ingineers."

There were various humorous or interesting incidents occuring from time to time which don't fit into any particular category. I'll cover a few: 

As we bore down on a spring switch which I didn't know was a spring type, the engineer noticed that I seemed disturbed and he said, "Don't worry about that one. Pelley'll throw that for us." Pelley was the president of the New Haven.

One evening an engineer motioned me over to him and told me very confidentially, "I'm going to tell you something but keep it under your hat. My nephew's attorney general for the General Electric Company. But keep it under your hat." I never did determine who his nephew was.

An engineer pointed out a very nervous-acting fireman in the cab of an adjacent steam locomotive which had just coupled on to a long passenger train. Said the engineer: "That fella hasn't fired for fifteen years--he's been on the motors. Wait till he gets into twenty tons of coal from here to Boston and back."

Of course, the railroad jargon was fascinating such as: 

Box      boxcar
Bag      baggage car
Gon      gondola car
Tank     tank car
Flat     flatcar
Reefer   refrigerator car
Hack     caboose
Jack     dwarf signal
Red eye  stop signal

It is my impression that my old adversary Freeman Hubbard, editor of Railroad Magazine, once published a dictionary of railroad terms in which were hundreds of them so the above sample is a rather pitiful sample. Even I could do better were I of a mind to really get down to work and dig seriously at it. But I don't see much point in it as long as it's readily available.