Word: brakemen
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...Choo. Several other railroad unions had the same kind of origin as the Firemen. Working on the railroad was a hazardous way of making a living in the 19th century. Many a fireman was scarred by a boiler explosion, many a yardman was mashed between cars. So often did brakemen fall from atop moving cars that one in three would be injured or killed in the course of a year. Understandably, insurance companies were reluctant to insure railroaders. In the railroad workers' need for insurance the first rail unions had their beginnings, as fraternal insurance societies. The unions still...
Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen (20,000). Named the Conductors' Brotherhood at its founding in 1868, the union added Brakemen to its handle only a decade ago. The current president is Louis J. Wagner, 66, who got started in railroading in his teens as a station agent's helper. In addition to taking tickets, conductors act as straw bosses while the train is on the road. They are supposed to see that other crewmen are on the job, and that the train moves smoothly enough to avoid discomfort to passengers or damage to freight. Brakemen used...
Right the First Time. The pioneers of nondestructive testing were the rail road brakemen, who used to tell if a steel car wheel was cracked by whacking it with a hammer to see if it rang true. United Air Lines technicians use basically the same principle today when they bombard jet turbine blades with electronically generated sound to see if the blades resonate at a frequency that indicates there is no danger of breakage. Westinghouse uses ultrasonics -super high-frequency sound waves - to probe right through big forgings in the rotors of its giant $2 million turbine generators and detect...
...Filed a federal suit, charging that the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway conspired to assign Negro "train porters'' to the same work done by white "brakemen" at higher pay-at the same time denying them union membership...
...ducked perhaps the hottest issue involved in the railroads' financial difficulties: union featherbedding. After reporting that conductors, brakemen, engineers, firemen, et al. in 1958 worked on the average only 57% of the hours for which they were paid, against 64% in 1947, the commission lamely concluded that "railroad work-rules and certain full-crew laws may unjustifiably involve uneconomic use of labor," said that a further "comprehensive review of labor-management relations is required...