Word: switchman
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...recent months, the board has rebuked railroads for an accident rate that has jumped 71% in six years. Applying to a railroad accident the sophisticated techniques used to determine the causes of plane crashes-an obvious but hitherto unheard-of innovation -it has found the "probable cause" (a switchman's error) of a collision in New York City last year. After the foundering of a 60-year-old freighter on Lake Huron in 1966 (28 died), it ordered the Coast Guard to intensify inspection of older ships plying the Great Lakes. Even a proposal to widen the breadth...
...last fall, Railroad Switchman Lyman Mintkenbaugh of Castro Valley, Calif., got a call from his brother James, 46, an Arlington, Va., real estate salesman who had recently come West and moved into a mountain retreat at Arnold, Calif...
Switchmen's Union of North America (18,000). Boss of the Switchmen's Union, founded in 1906, is Neil P. Speirs, 50, a business administration major at the University of Idaho who left a white-collar job to become a switchman during the Great Depression because the pay was better. Switchmen are essentially brakemen who work in railyards rather than on the road, taking over from road crews as the trains pull into the yards. In recent decades, automatic switching controls have taken over much of the switchmen's former work, so that, like firemen and brakemen...
Reduced to bare essentials, his books turn out to have hardly any plot at all. Speculations About Jakob, to be published here in March, offers fragmentary views of the life of an East German railroad switchman. The Third Book About Achim tells how and why the third book about Achim could not be written. Crossing to the East, a West German writer named Karsch begins collecting material for a biography on a much-written-about East German bicycle racer named Achim. What interests Karsch in Achim's life, however, does not have enough socialist uplift for the East German...
...effort to fill in the outlines of individual emotion only hinted at by the author, soon begins to speculate on small and large moral questions. Sample problem for a border guard: A man is escaping. I must shoot. But should I shoot to kill? Sample problem for a railroad switchman: It is 1956. Hungary is in revolt. The Russians are rushing in troops by train. I can delay them by not shunting off local traffic. How long? Four hours? Six hours? Is it worth...