Word: switchmen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...train, no oldster among the 63 newsmen (a record number) could recall any other campaign so deliberately pitched in low key. At Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station the only concession to ceremony was a small and ancient green carpet on the platform. Not more than 25 onlookers, mostly idle switchmen, watched Tom Dewey and his wife clamber aboard the rear platform...
Across the land last week, for six warm days & nights, a troop train rumbled. It was an old train, with no fancy name. To the engineers and switchmen, it was No. 7452-C. The men on board dubbed it the "Home Again Special," and wrote the new name in chalk on the sides of the old Pullman cars. In another war there might have been brass bands at every stop. But in this pageantry-less, slogan-less war, the train just rumbled on toward New York, through the big towns and the whistle-stops...
...Rolling Cars. That the crisis was not worse was due almost entirely to the railroads, which in the last months had performed superhuman tasks. All through the fall and winter the men in the cabs of locomotives, in the lonely switchmen's shacks, in the dispatchers' offices had labored and sweated with the job of keeping the long lines of tank cars rolling. They had rolled so well that rail deliveries to the East were boosted almost 50,000 barrels a day. Even then, deliveries were some 200,000 barrels a day below needs...
Brotherhood president, tough, New Dealish Alexander Fell Whitney, first worked out this plan in Chicago where he put several thousand laid-off yardmen to work on railroads desperately short of switchmen. ODT figures that next year the railroads will need 450,000 new employes to handle increased traffic, replace those gone to war. Whitney's plan would help cut this number...
...resounding strike call read like a timetable. At 6 a.m. on Dec. 7 the five railway brotherhoods (engineers, firemen, conductors, trainmen, switchmen) would walk out on the Santa Fe, Rock Island, New York Central, Denver & Rio Grande, Katy, Pennsylvania, Southern Pacific, 44 other lines. Next day they would quit on the Chesapeake & Ohio, Chicago & North Western, the Gulf Coast lines, 40 others. By the third day, on 156 roads that carry passengers, food, coal, machinery and mail from New England to California, from Florida to Washington, not a wheel would turn...