Robert Monath

Interview of Robert Monath for the Elizabeth V. and George F. Gardner Digital Library Memory Bank a part of the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Monath discusses his family's history and connections working on various Railroads in Central Pennsylvania as well his own time as a fireman and engineer for Penn Central, Amtrak, Conrail, and finally Norfolk Southern.

The following is a machine generated transcript and should not be directly cited from:

Today is May 22nd, 2023. My name is Blair Williams, and I'm here at the Cumberland County Historical Society with Robert Monath. So thank you, Robert or Bob, for coming. And the first question I'd like to ask is sort of, how did your family first come to the area? -

In the 1830s, Monath came from Hesse-Darmstadt in Germany on a steamship to Baltimore, and then came up the Cumberland Valley and settled in Chambersburg. –

Okay. So I know one of the reasons we're here today is really to talk about the railroad. And I know in particular, your great-uncle George Monath was, was he the first person in your family to work on the railroad? -

He's the first that I know of. And he hired in 1861 in Chambersburg as a fireman. And his first assigned engine as a fireman, I know was the Nicholas Biddle. In 1862, the Confederates came up and tore up the railroad. And I don't know where he was working at that point, but I know in 1865, he relocated to Harrisburg. And it says in the articles that he hauled troops back and forth to the battlefields for the Union. He had assigned engines of the Nicholas Biddle utility And the Mountaineer and the Bridgeport. That's the ones I know of. –

 Now, most of your knowledge of George, is any of that sort of, was that passed down to you through family or was it a lot of research that you uncovered some of these stories? -

Well, I knew he was an engineer and I had photos of him at home with regards to his history. I did the research. –

Oh, good. Well, yeah, because some of that research you shared with me earlier, and it was kind of interesting because apparently even after the war was done, he was still being shot at. –

Yeah, oh, I know one time in Mechanicsburg, he was hauling people back from a convention and they tried to derail his train in a cut east of Mechanicsburg. And they didn't have air brakes back then, but he didn't get going pretty far, fast from the station, so he whistled for brakes and he stopped in time to avoid a calamity. - Yeah. - Yeah, and he did report of him being shot at at times. –

Now, how different were the engines that he was working on compared to some of the engines that we're familiar with today? -

Well, he always worked on steam, and in the early days they were wood burners and they didn't transition the coal to later in the 18th century, I mean 19th century. Air brakes didn't come around until the late 1870s, so when they wanted to make a stop, they would whistle to the crews and they would tie the handbrakes on in each individual car. Or if it was in freight, they would tie them on the boxcars, gondolas, whatever you had, and walk across the top of the train to do it. In winter, it was rough. - Yeah. - It was very rough. - Yeah. –

Well, then I also know that he was one of the longest-serving Cumberland Valley Railroad employees. –

Oh, yeah. - And he was a bit worried, he said he only missed one day. - Right. - That was towards the end of his tenure there. But he also seems to have been relatively important because they put him in charge of hauling goods across the bridge there. - Yeah. - The Susquehanna. - Yeah. He was on the number eight Bridgeport shifter. And what that would do was when he went to work, they would gather the cars together along the Cumberland Valley and then take them over to Harrisburg. And then at Harrisburg, they would make their train up for the return trip and deliver the goods down the valley. Their engine house was around 17th Street in Camp Hill. - Okay.

So, yeah, so I didn't know. So, actually, that was a question.

So, what did it mean when it said he was in charge of that shifting engine? Is that some way you just described, or was that a different type of... –

Well, they were 0-6-0s, which means there are just six driving reels, no pony truck up front, no trailing truck in the rear. Mostly that's what he had was 0-6-0s. - Okay. - And then prior to that in utilities, you had a real cornucopia of designed engines in the early days of steam. But the heavy haulers came out later, and they were six-wheel drivers, basically, 0-6-0s, and they would haul some heavy stuff out of Harrisburg up to the valley. And it was an uphill grade on the Cumberland Valley Bridge because the original bridge came into Harrisburg at street level. And then to get on the other side of the valley, you had a little bit of a climb. I remember one incident. Well, this is after George Pass. One of his brakemen who worked the valley shifter would take command of a northern central railway passenger car that originated out of Marysville would come down the river, and it would shove up to Lemoyne, and he would get on it, and they would drop the car full of people all the way over to Harrisburg Station, and he'd just be there at the handbrake working the brake. That's pretty wild. Yeah. So, yeah.

We were discussing it in a little bit, too, before we started recording, that in that Bridgeport area, he, I guess because of that sort of uphill grade, it almost did collide with another engine.

A caboose. A caboose. A caboose. The rear end of a train. Might have been the next car next to it, too. What happened then was a bridge, a northern central train came out of York and was going west up the river. It cleared the tower at Lemoyne, which was then known as Bridgeport, and stopped. When that happened, the tower gave the signal, the lever men on the ground, the switch men on the ground, permission to line for George's train, and they put up the white target and given him what was called a high ball, which was a flag or a light at night to proceed. So off he goes, and he's coming along in a pretty good clip, because it's downhill. Yeah. And the northern central train drifts back onto the right-of-way on his diamond. And so all his crew bails off. He reverses the engine. He pulls a lever, a call a reverser, gets the engine going backwards, and rides it in like Casey Jones, and stoved in the engine a little bit, and definitely shook up the guy who was riding the caboose. Yeah. I don't think he could finish the run on the northern central train. And then he could back off, and the engine had to go to the shops.

Was that -- I guess the communication at that point would have been relatively rudimentary in terms of -- especially I don't imagine they were communicating directly from the train.

 That's why they had the visual signals. But was that something that was more common then than it is today? Well, I think it had more accidents back then prior to the implementation of the telegraph and the block signal system, where the trains were managed by a mile or two mile blocks and controlled the towers with telegraph communication between the towers and the dispatcher. Back then they operated by the watch. [laughs] Huh. You had so many minutes to get to here. If you didn't, you had to do this. Okay. Take the siding or whatever, you know, but it was all done by time. Back in the -- that was the late 1870s. I don't know if the telegraph system was in on the valley yet or not. Quite possible.

Yeah. Well, I -- again, I just imagine yet, but even if they -- so there's -- at that point, there may have been even telegraphs between towers, but not necessarily as an engineer on the actual engine. You didn't have access to that.

No. You were governed by signal indication. Yeah. Yeah. You know, if you got the signal at the tower, you went. If you didn't get the signal, you didn't go. [laughs]

Yeah. Yeah. Now, how many people would have been working on an engine or a complete train at that point?

 Say a freight train, I would think you could have an engineer a fireman, and back in those days, I don't know how -- when the differential became between conductor and brakeman, but I know early on, they were all called conductors, and you could have one head conductor and then seven other conductors, and their job would be to tie the brakes on. Yeah. When you're -- when they whistle for brakes, when the engineer whistled for brakes, and when he whistled for the release of two. Yeah. Yeah. So they would either be in the caboose or near the engine, and when the time came to put the brakes on, he whistled, they'd go over the top from the engine and come over the top from the caboose and start winding the stem winders, they called them, and we were on long stems. Then air brakes came into the -- in the 1870s with George Westinghouse, and originally some of the -- you would have air brakes on maybe a couple of cars behind the engine, and the rest would be -- you'd have to wind them on if need be.

So George is kind of the first known relative of yours that is working on the railroad.

Right.

And you said he's a great-great-uncle.

Right.

So did his brother end up also working on the railroad, or --

His brother, which would have been my great-great-grandfather, Samuel, was associated with the railroad as a contractor. Okay. He built -- let me give you a little history on him. At 15, he was 15 when Chambersburg was torched by Jubal Early, and he ran away from home and joined the cavalry out at Camp Curtin across the Susquehanna. Yep. Then he went up to boot camp in training for just a little bit in Scranton, and then was down to -- was what's the Company L, the 21st Pennsylvania -- went down to Virginia and was in the campaigns around Petersburg and was in the Battle of Petersburg -- well, first, yeah, Petersburg, then Five Forks, Sailors Creek, and he ended up at -- where they had to surrender at the courthouse. Appomattox. And also Appomattox Station. He was involved in that skirmish -- or battle at Appomattox Station, which seized the Confederates' supplies in their boxcars, kind of tied a knot there. And after that, he came back to Chambersburg, apprenticed with a company -- two names that I forget -- and then ended up being the major contractor for rebuilding the residences at Chambersburg, because that money didn't show up for quite a while for the people to get their homes rebuilt. And his connection with the railroad was he built the station at Kernstown. Okay. He built that. Whether he ever worked for the railroad or not, I don't know, prior to that. Then he had children who ended up -- Yeah. -- with a great-grandfather. My great-grandfather was hired on the Cumberland Valley as a carpenter, and I don't know if he ended up being a foreman there or not, but he transferred to Enola when Enola was built in the early 1900s. And he was a supervisor at the Plaining Foreman, supervisor foreman at the Plaining Mill, and also a supervisor at -- he ended up being a supervisor at Lucknow, which was a yard west of Har -- just west of Harrisburg. Okay. And in 1914, while he was getting on a trial -- getting ready to get on a trial, he had jumped the tracks near his home on Hummel Avenue in Lemoine, and he lost his foot because he got pinned between the train and a light post. So the railroad took care of him in that, and they gave him a desk job, which would be a car inspector foreman. He would just sit at the desk and send all the car inspectors out to the trains that came in. Yeah. And that's where he retired. My --

Well, before we get into your -- Yeah. What was his name?

John. John? John Monath? Yes, sir. Okay. And your grandfather? Robert Monath. Okay. And he was a machinist on the Cumberland Valley and also transferred to a machinist at the Pennsylvania Railroad Shops at Enola in Harrisburg. And he was struck -- struck by a piece of metal when he was working on a lathe in 1948, and he lived for a day or so. And that was John -- Robert. My father, Donald, was hired as a block operator, and a block operator was a guy that worked towers. Okay. That's the Pennsy nomenclature. And he couldn't get hired at Harrisburg, so he hired out of Philadelphia. And so I was born down in Philadelphia, and he spent a number of years as a passenger conductor around the Philadelphia area, and Morrisville, Trenton, Yardley. I think we lived in Yardley for a bit. And then moved back to Lemoyne. And that's where he ended his career as a passenger conductor at Lemoyne because he could hold positions up here.

Well, I guess what were the specifics involved in being a passenger conductor in terms of -- I mean, I'm imagining the terminology might be similar to what it would have been in George Monath's time in terms of the conductors that were during the time of the breaks. I'm imagining a passenger conductor was a little bit different.

Passenger conductor, train car still had handbrakes when you're going to leave him sit. You would still tie him on. Okay. But he would lift tickets, and he'd make cash reports, and manage the crew. He was in charge of the train. Okay. And I remember one time when I was a kid -- I used to ride with my dad every once in a while. He'd take me along. And I was riding one time with him on a train from Camden to Trenton, New Jersey. Yep. And it was -- the train was known as a doodle bug, which was a gas-electric single-car engine with a coach and maybe a baggage, I don't recall. But it was a single-car gas-electric. Oh, it was gas-electric or just straight gas. But we're going through -- as we're going back to Trenton, he said, "Go up and see the engineer." So I went up and saw the engineer, and I told him who I was. He said, "Here, sit on my lap." And he put me on his lap and put my hands on the throttle and the brake. And I'm going through Burlington, New Jersey at 60 miles an hour. Yeah. And there was no -- you're going right through the center of the town. It's right through the center of the town. You're up a little -- you're raised a little bit, but you're going right through the center of the town. We did not use a horn or maybe a bell on, and we're just going all by these roads at 60 miles an hour. I'm thinking to myself, "I could get into this." So your father knew what he was doing? Yeah, yeah. He had me on trains. I went to New York with him. I went or arrived with him into Manhattan. And he took me up to the fourth floor where they had a big cafeteria style for all the passenger men. And they had a bowling alley up there. Remember there being a bowling alley up in the fourth floor of Penn Station in Manhattan. That was a nice station. Sorry to see it go. Yeah. So that -- my question was going to be anything you've already answered.

That was your introduction to sort of your family's connection with the railyards? Rail road? –

Yeah, yeah. That was. It was pretty neat.

Did your father or grandfather or any other relatives talk to you about their experiences on the railroad?

Oh, yeah. My dad told me a couple good ones. One time he was working a job out of 30th Street in Philadelphia. And he's going out to the crew dispatcher's office, and the crew dispatcher tells him, "Hey, come on, we -- I got three of these Canackers, and the Canackers was a Delaware -- Delmarva Division road personnel that ran down the Delaware Peninsula. They had a train from New York that would go from New York down to Cape Charles. Okay. Virginia. And he says, "I got these three guys over here, and they had mandatory retirement come out." And he said, "They're all done. They're retired. You got to go tell them." So he goes into the crew room. They were all sitting there. They all had beards and smoked big old mershon pipes. They were sitting there. He said, "Hey, didn't you guys -- you're retired. You've been retired. You're done. You're going on retirement." And they look at each other, and finally one of them takes the pipe out. He says, "I guess we should have read those registered letters." Yeah. Let's see if there's any more. My dad used to have a saying in Passengers. He said, "An empty train was a happy train." Yeah, there was nobody complaining. Yeah. That's about it. I can recall.

Well, I know this is jumping the gun a little bit, but you didn't become a conductor. You became an engineer. Yeah. Was there a reason why you didn't follow directly your father's footsteps?

Yeah, I didn't want to do it. Yeah. Yeah, I'd rather be an engineer. Because what I experienced as a kid down in Burlington. Yeah. Yeah. So while I'm going to school, I said, "Hey, Dad, how about seeing if I could get on a railroad?" Because I had two more years ago. This was -- you mentioned at Penn State? Yeah. I had two more years ago and wanted to start making some money. So I worked for an airline at New Cumberland and over at Middletown. And that dried up. So that got me an interview and got me on a railroad. Our training was down in Philadelphia for firemen. And we had on-the-job training at Harrisburg and Enola as hostlers. We could move engines around. And then we went to -- after about a year of that or so, about a year and a half, they were sent to engineer school in Wilmington, Delaware, where they had the big Amtrak -- the big electric shops. After school, came back and worked as a fireman on on-the-job training and through freight. Prior to that, worked as a fireman in passenger service between Harrisburg. I worked firemen between Harrisburg and Washington, D.C., down the Susquehanna, Harrisburg and New York via Philadelphia. And I got one fireman's assignment to Harrisburg to Altoona, which was not my seniority district, going to mail train because they ran out of men. Now those were the nice days. Passenger service was nice back then.

This was with Amtrak? Well, this was originally -- it was first Penn Central when I hired. Then I was, as a fireman or an engineer in passenger service, when I did get promoted, I would be leased to Amtrak. I would work for Amtrak, but still I checked Penn Central. I was still a Penn Central employee until Amtrak made us -- you either come over with us or stay. So I stayed. But there were some nice trains back then. You had the Broadway Limited, the National Limited. You had a train out of Harrisburg, New York called the Valley Forge. And from Washington -- I worked -- when I couldn't hold passenger in Harrisburg, I would work out of Washington, D.C., Washington, New York and back. Those were nice. Those were Washington, New York turnarounds, 425 miles round trip, 450. 225, I think it was each way. And as in passenger service, almost all firemen ran unless you were a total screw-up. You would trade off with the engineer. And you would also be in charge of maintaining the steam boilers, the steam boiler on the engine that would provide steam back to the coaches. And on the GG1 electrics, which were extremely powerful engines, you had to siphon water because the water tanks were at each end. And once the one went dry, getting down close to the generator, you had to work a steam siphon that would shoot steam back to the other tank, to the water tank, and then siphon that to the lead tank next to the steam generator or boiler. Yeah. Yeah, it was your job. A couple of times, they'd put two engines on us because the lead engine steam generator was faulty. And so you had to -- when you would make a station stop at Philadelphia, say, you would go back to the second unit and fire up the siphon, because you already had the steam generator working back then because the lead unit was down. And then at Trenton or something, you would cut it off because you had filled the tanks because you could see the water overflow coming out. Yeah. And that would take you into New York. And running into Manhattan, that was probably the easiest station to stop a large passenger train, and I'll tell you why. After you left Newark, you could get it up to 60, but then you had the portal movable drawbridge, which was east of the Bergen tunnels. You had to slow down to 30 miles an hour. So you get the train down to 30, and once you cleared portal draw, you work it almost back up to 60, and by that time, you'd be hitting the Bergen tunnels. And the Bergen tunnels are like this to the station, which are going under the Hudson. And you would come into the tunnel, and once you got it up to 60, you would put 10 pounds of air, reduce the brakes by 10 pounds of air, and that would just sting the cars up, stretch them out, sting them up, and you could slowly, as you're going through the tunnel, back down on the throttle, and then when you got up to the top end of the tunnel, you would just release the brake and you'd be down to 10 miles an hour to navigate into the station. Yeah. The one thing about the station there is humongous, but you have Amtrak above in their structures, but down below, that was all Pennsylvania railroad. And they had two what they called "goose-necked" signals that covered entrance to the passenger yard station. And they were curved, and you had the lights on the outside, and it was, to me, it was a really beautiful display of art deco in an industrial art deco design. And what kind of experience? Oh, yeah, one time we were coming in, and we got into the Bergen tunnels, the passenger train, I think it was out of Washington, and all the signals, they were a mile apart. All the signals went red, so you just stopped it, and the engineer said, "Hey, you got to get on that catwalk alongside, and get on one of those call boxes and find out what's going out." So I'm walking down this thing, and it's narrow, and the wind is blowing through, because I guess there's some sort of venting going on there, but it was windy. And I went to the call box, and the call box was a square thing, and there was a, it was the original call box from 1910, two Edison type, one was labeled speaker, and one was labeled mic. So you had to take them off, put one like this and one like this you're talking to A Tower, which is up at the station, and it surprised me, it came through clear as a bell, from 1910 equipment.

What year was this, approximately?

I'd say '75, '76, clear as a bell. Then they gave us permission by all the red signals verbally, and we creeped along and got into the station, and the signals were good again. What else on the passenger? Oh yeah, one time I'm on Broadway Limited with my engineer, Jack Norton, and we'd left Harrisburg, and I don't know if they had radios back then, the portable ones a lot, but we, you had communication signals that ran from the engine through the coaches, and they were a cord, you'd pull a cord, and we got a communication signal from the conductor to stop at the next passenger station. Where we were at that time, we were coming into Mountville. So Jack says, "He wants us to stop at Mountville." He said, "All right, you got the signal, buddy." So here's a Broadway Limited with 24 coaches, two GG1s, rolling into a stop at Mountville. And he looks back out the window, and the conductor is gone, which means, "Keep going." He meant us first to stop at Lancaster. But here we are rolling into Mountville, little Mountville, at the Broadway. And when we got done at New York, we put the engine away and came back to the station. He says, "Well, you told us to stop." And he goes, "You know what I meant." He said, "No, no, no." Yeah, Smiley was his name. George Smiley, the conductor.

Did you ever work on the same train as your father?

Yes. Yes, I did. I worked a mail train with my dad. My dad was—I think he was brakeman on that assignment. And worked the mails from Harrisburg. We would deadhead down, and then deadhead means you would take a passenger train down, because they did not have a connecting train for you to come west with. So we would deadhead down to New York and take the mail train in and bring it to Harrisburg. I worked with him a couple times there. Were you a fireman at that point, or were you an engineer? At that point, I was a fireman. I was not the engineer yet. I got to work engineer and passenger a couple times. When they ran short of people, I operated what they called multiple unit MU's that were silver liners out of Harrisburg to Philadelphia and back. Worked them. One time, I worked—they were short people of Paoli, which is a suburb 20 miles west of Philadelphia. They deadheaded me down to Paoli, and I worked a suburban local between Paoli, Philadelphia, and back a couple times. Then I also worked in passenger. I worked the National Limited's Washington Connection, which was—went out of—they would cut it off at Harrisburg, that section, put another engine on, and I would go down to Susquehanna to D.C. and then come back. Did that.

So you mentioned that you had—that you made a choice to stay with Penn Railroad.

Stay with Penn Central or Conrail or whatever it was back then, you know. So was that pretty much the end of your passenger service? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it was pretty much just freight from that point? Yeah, yeah. I got all over on freight, too. Let's see. When Conrail came into being, they merged rosters of all the separate railroads—Redding, Lehigh Valley, CNJ, Penn Central, probably a couple more in there, New Haven, I guess. I'm not sure about that. But anyhow, yeah, I got to work—let's see. I worked a lot of freight out of Enola and Harrisburg. I'll give you—as an engineer, I was operating a trail van train, which was trailers on flat cars, maybe a mile long. And we ran the main line, which is Harrisburg, E-town, Mountville, Lancaster, Philadelphia. And then we would take the Trenton—what they called the Trenton Cut-Off at Thorndale, and that would take you to Morrisville, and back out on the main line to the Meadows in New Jersey, North Jersey. And anyhow, we're coming past Parkesburg, and it's downhill, and at the Bottom of the hill is Coatesville Station. And one of the 600 multiple-unit passenger trains had just discharged on the park track. And people, instead of going under the duck under, under the station, to the main, to the parking area, decided to cross the tracks. And there was four of them. I think it was maybe a mom and four—three kids or something like that, are walking across the tracks, and we're coming down to hell, doing about 60. So I get on the horn, start flashing the light from dim to bright, you know, and they're just, they're just meandering along. And by the time we got close to them, they had to dive to hit the—to catch—get on the platform at the adjacent station. Just weren't picking it up. Yeah. I mean, I had brakes set if I was going to hit them, you know, I set my brakes, because if you're running a train and you just go straight into emergency, you could pop something out. If you had a bunch of loads, empties, in front of loads, and then loads in front of the empties, you'd get a massive braking effect that could pop them out. So you'd stretch them, get them, you know, like I was saying about going into New York station ten times, and then if you had to dump them, you'd dump them. But I didn't have to, thank God. And yeah, that was one of them. Also got to run—when I got married, my wife answered me, "Where do you want to live?" And I said, "Give me a map." So I wanted—wherever there was a place I could work out of, I would draw a line. And so I moved into Lancaster County. I stayed in Lancaster because I could make Harrisburg, I could make Enola, I could make Wilmington, I could make Allentown, you know, Reading. Yeah. Got to work—let's see, the long halls—Allentown, Corning, New York, up to Lehigh Valley. That was gorgeous when the leaves turned. That was gorgeous.

Was that hauling glass?

All I know is we—I don't know what we—I forget what we were hauling. Okay. Whether it was stuff to make glass, you know, or whatever. But yeah, you went up to Corning, and you went up to Lehigh Valley, and they told you, "If you have trouble with your train, when you're going up to Lehigh Valley Gorge, do not get out and walk. Call us and somebody will come in a vehicle." Because you would hit animals and stuff that were running along the tracks now and then. And that was like horn harder for bears. You know, so yeah, I seen a couple of bears walk—you know, walk along the right-of-way. Yeah. Not on the tracks, but alongside the tracks. Yeah, you didn't—you didn't get out. You called somebody.

This might be a very just straightforward or obvious answer. I don't know. But was there a big difference between working passenger service as a fireman engineer versus freight?

Yeah. Less time on duty, because you got over the road quick. Less time on duty.

But in terms of operating the train, there wasn't as much—it was pretty much the same?

Well, no, no. It was different, because with a train, a long freight train, you had to be conscious of the track conditions, which what I mean by that is, you know, curves, up and down, undulating. And you also had the use in freight of what's called dynamic braking. And dynamic braking is basically you would take the—take the motors that are driving the wheels of the diesel engine and convert them into generators by changing a circuitry in the engine. And thereby changing them to generators, they would produce electricity, which would be sent up to grids, like in an oven in your house, and the fans—you'd have fans to exhaust it. But that—generating that electricity caused a lot of resistance, and that's how you could bunch up a train with just—without putting the air on. And sometimes you really had to do that, depending on if you're going on down a steep grade or something like that.

As an engineer, were you given detailed information about how much weight was in each car?

You were given total weight per train. Okay. Total weight per train. Now, you could figure out, say, if you got 100 cars of coal and they were 200-ton hoppers, you could do the math and come up with it, but they would tie in.

Well, I just didn't know if, you know, you had—you mentioned earlier about, you know, you can just apply emergency brakes because of different— Yeah. I didn't know if different cars may have been empty or not, and therefore that would cause bad things to happen. But I didn't know if you were given information about—all right, so the first 15 cars have X amount of weight, the next 15 cars—

No, we didn't back them, but they do now. Okay. They do now. Yeah. Yeah. They're making the trains real long now. I hear some of them are three miles long. That's too long. Yeah. I mean, if you're going up a hill or something and you have a lot of empties and you're pulling up a steep grade and you're pulling that train, you hit a curve and you could actually pull the empties right off the rail. They used to call it—what did they call it? String line it. String line. You had to watch that with the long train. Need mid-train helpers or helpers on the rear to keep it bunched up. Yeah. That's—maybe having a long train might have been—see, back in the old days—let's go back to the old days. Back in the old days, yeah.

When you say old days, what—

Prior to, let's say, 19—I'll say my time, my time, '70s, in the '70s. You still had full crews. You'd have an engineer, conductor, front brakeman, rear brakeman, and a flagman. They would be on a caboose, and they could be up on a gig top, what I call a gig top, would be a viewing section in the caboose, which is up high. One could be on this side, one could be on that side. Then in the engine, you had somebody on both sides, so you could—whenever you hit curves. Say if you had a mile-long train and there was a straight line, when you hit that curve, you could look back and look over your train, because it was only a mile long. And the guys in the rear, when they were hit curves and stuff, they couldn't look over the train and see on which side, if it curves on this side, if it curves on that side, you could see how your train's doing, you know. And there's been times when I was—they put the brakes on me from the hind end because there was trouble. There was something wrong. Leaving Enola once they couldn't reach me on the radio, so there was a valve in the caboose that they could set the brakes, and they did that. Yeah. But now you don't have that. You just have two guys up front. And there's no towers no more. I mean, the towers exist, but there's nobody manning them. The structures are still there. And the tower man, he would also have a readout of an infrared scan. You'd go over what they call hotbox detectors, and he would get an infrared scan tape readout in the tower. And you'd go also sit in the tower and look over the train—he'd look over the train as you would go by. Yeah. Yeah. Not anymore. So I hope they figure out what's—how to fix what they're doing. Yeah.

Yeah, because maybe it could just be, again, all more connected, and so hearing about its stories, but it does seem like you're hearing more and more about train derailments. Yeah.

Yeah, the frequency. Yeah. Yeah, but the thing is, with freight, say you could bunch a train up with your dynamic brakes. You would use the engine brake a little bit to bring things in, and then you would go for the circuitry, set up the dynamic, and then start loading that up. And then once you had them all together, you'd use your air brake if need be, whether you had to bring a train to stop or down to a crawl. You mentioned that probably especially when you were training to become a fireman and some of your other positions that you had a lot of on-the-job training.

Yeah. I'm wondering how much of that was still—you know, you just had to learn it on the job versus sitting in a classroom.

Well, you train—they tell you about train handling in the classroom, but until you got on the job, you know, you knew how to do things. Say if you're going down a hill, and then at the bottom, you're going to cross over and go up another track or something, an uphill. And that track speed is lower than the speed you're coming down on. You'd get it down to that speed for that section, right? And then when you got close, you would release the brakes, and the brakes would come off the train, and it would take you—you could take that right up to, say, 10 miles an hour, come from 30 or 40 or 50 to 10. And the brakes release, and the tonnage of the train would send you up that hill and under controlled speed. You know, that was a big thing. Have them control of your train. That's the main thing. Wherever you were at.

And how much of being an engineer was—I imagine this might have been the case more with the passenger side a little bit, but you kind of just knew that when you were rolling into a station for a stop, that you kind of had to set rules. I should be at 60 miles an hour than 50, versus sort of by feel with the freight on those words. You kind of feel what the train is doing.

Yeah. Say like with passenger, you had what guys would call breaking points. Yeah, it would be like a structure or a rock, a big rock or something, and you're coming in. That's where you would start to put your brakes on in passenger. Freight, again, it would depend on what—if you're coming into a yard or something, where you would start your braking, as opposed to what you were hauling. It was handling as opposed to what's in your train. If you had heavy, you would do it earlier. If it wasn't heavy, you'd do it later.

You were describing, especially going to Penn Station, where it seemed like it was very much—

That was the easiest station to stop. Yeah, you kind of knew exactly what you were doing at each point. Yeah. That was the easiest.

Did you find that, again, with some of those breaking points, that doing those same runs over and over was helpful, or did you like to mix it up?

Well, I would say it all depended on the train. Say like with passenger, it was pretty standard. With freight again it, it differed. Like I remember one time in the middle of winter, we had a train of high-value cars for boxcars for Philadelphia. And they were such high value, they didn't run them, rust down the Susquehanna and up what they called the low grade. They ran a straight mainline, and it was freezing, wind blowing. And coming into Lancaster, and the distance signal to the Lancaster Tower, which was called Cork back then, was approach, which means approach the next signal prepared to stop, not exceeding thirty miles an hour. So, okay, we got the approach, and I'm putting the brakes on, and not much is happening. Not much is happening. Not much is still happening. An emergency. It's because the snow had built up on the wheels, and it was a light train. It reduced the amount of friction that would be generated to stop the train. And I got in and put an emergency, and we came to a stop, and I'm looking at the signal where you are. We were sitting. That's how close we were.

Yeah. It gets the heart going.

Yeah, yeah, she was there.

When did you finally retire?

2010.

Was that still with Conrail?

No, that would have been with Norfolk Southern. Norfolk Southern took over in, I think it was '99.

What were the big changes, or were there any big changes sort of over the course of maybe those final ten years or so?

I guess maybe starting with when Norfolk Southern took over from Conrail. Well, they had their system of operating. Basically, with train handling, it was still the same. Management was a little stricter. They had their policy of the reinforcement of operating rules and stuff was negative reinforcement. You know, if you did bad, you're going to get spanked. And whereas Conrail, with regard to safety rules and everything, was more positive reinforcement. Different management styles, basically. So, but you still operated the trains. You still went from point A to point B, you know. And now they have what they call precision scheduled railroading, I think is the new operating trend. We'll see how that goes.

I am blanking on the name of the technology. Is it like PCR or something? Precision, PSR.

This is the precision scheduled railroading.

No, no, no. This is in reverse setting. What are we doing? The actual lines themselves or something about like braking. Is that?

Oh, are you talking about a car, a train, or?

Maybe. I don't know. Something, I just remember it seemed like there was a big debate a few years ago about installing this.

Oh, positive train control.

Yeah. Was that, I'm assuming that was a lot more post 2010?

 Yeah, yeah. That wasn't around when I was, when I said goodbye. I guess that's good, you know, but if you're going to stop a train from a satellite, know where that train is and how its makeup is. You know, don't put it in the hole if you're going to pop something out. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Any safety improvements good. One of the ways you know how to use it properly. Yeah. I guess, again, I'm not super familiar with that. Yeah.

Well, not only that, but how much of the technology changed over the course of your career?

From operating the train, I would say technology did change because they took the cabooses off and put on a radio transmitting. I didn't even forget the name of that. Flashing red indicator or something like that. It's the box that goes on the rear of the train. It has a radio transmission. You can, which is a good, it does have a good point because when you used to put a train in emergency, it would have to travel all the way from the front to the back. That would take some seconds. But now with this box on the rear, you can put an emergency on the front and initiate it on the rear at the same time with the push of a button. Like it comes up from the rear and goes back from the front. Emergency application. And it also tells you how much air is in the pipe, brake pipe, which controls the brakes on the car. Let me explain how that works. You have, on the engine, you have air compressors. They charge up what's called a brake pipe, which is a connection that runs between every car and it's a portable connection between each car. And in that, that charges up tanks on each car, puts the air in. Each car has X amount of air. And that goes all the way back to the rear of the train. When you're putting the brakes on, you actually make a leak, a controlled leak. Say you take it down 10 pounds. When you take that down 10 pounds, each car reads that reduction in its machinery and then puts the brake on each car. When you put a train in emergency, you remove the air from that and that dumps all the air that's staying in the cars down to the brakes. So when you can do it from back to front and front to back at the same time, that reduces buffeting force within the train. So that's a good point. Also, it tells you how much air is in the last car. So if you got a bad leak or something, you could see that that's showing up because a bad leak can put the brakes on.

Well, yeah. I guess if by applying brakes, you're causing a leak, then just a leak in general would also…

Yeah, a leak, say like a hose or something is frayed or whatever and then air is coming out.

So that was impossible to control the brakes from the rear when there was a caboose there?

No. If there was a caboose there, then the guys back there, if they could put the brakes on.

That's right. You mentioned earlier that they could watch and apply the brakes. I think you said when you were coming out of Enola, they did that.

We had one thrown sparks and we didn't see it, but they did, so they stopped the train.

So you mentioned, I guess, between the 1970s and the 2000s that they took off the caboose. They immediately put on this other device?

No, they put on a device, but it didn't transmit to the head end. It's just what they called a star marker. It just was a marker that showed it would have a flashing red light and would indicate what the air was on the rear. Okay. It did not provide you knowledge of that at the head end. And it didn't allow you to control the brakes? No, from the rear. That didn't come until later.

Well, I know I asked Jim Leonard this question. I don't know if you remember his answer, but I'll ask you and we'll see if they compare. What would you say to someone who's thinking about getting into the railroad industry?

I'd say it's a good paying job. I mean, the demands are heavy because you could be away from home a lot. I mean, you have to be able to realize that if you're in freight, you could go from, say, Harrisburg to Pittsburgh on the other side of the river and they would take rest at a hotel there near Conway, Pennsylvania, where the big yard was. Swickly, I believe, is where they stay. And then you would come back when your train was ready to come back, whatever you were assigned to. So you'd be away from home a lot. Now, starting out, you'd probably be working around the yards and stuff until they get you ready for being an engineer. They hire them all as brakemen now, or conductors, brakemen conductors, and then they come. They weren't hired directly as firemen like it was back in my day. Then they promote them to engineers from that craft. So it is demanding, but it is financially good. How technology in the future will change that, I don't know, but it could. It could be radical, you know, the change. I mean, there's some little lines, say, that run in a continuous loop from, say, a quarry to a mine to a processing place. And they have a train, and it's all done without anybody on it, you know. But having eyes up front, I think, is still necessary regardless of what technology brings, especially in this stage of age. What's going to happen with this artificial intelligence? Could bad people get involved with that and do things that would not be good for railroading? Yeah, that worries me. That worries me big time what artificial intelligence could come up with. They could get somebody's voice, imitate it, you know, make a program that sounds just like them, and they could say, "Hey, do this or do that," to somebody down the line, and that's not what it should be. Yeah. That's scary. That's really scary.

Well, on a, the last question I always ask is, is there anything I should have asked or that you'd like to mention before the end?

Oh, I could give you a couple. This is a good one. I'm working a local out of Thorndale, Pennsylvania, which is down near Coatesville. And we would interchange with a short line. It used to be the Reading at Coatesville. The Reading ran from Birdsboro south to Wilmington. And there's big – Luken Steelmill used to be there. I think it's a foreign outfit now. But they had a real steep grade from Coatesville on the main down to the connecting the interchange track on the Reading, I'll say for now, whatever it is, called the short line. Anyhow, we would bring cars and take them down, set them on the interchange track, and then pick up what's coming back. A lot of steel products, every steel product. And then shove up this steep hill to Coatesville station. So we're shoving up the hill. I had a full crew back then, and a caboose. And the rear brakemen, let's just call them Joe, we're shoving back up, and we're communicating by radio. So you give so many car lengths, you know. "Okay, Joe, coming back. All right, good for 30. 30 cars. Shove back. I'm halfway, you should stay. Good for 15 cars. Okay, Joe." Then we're shoving back. And we're starting to get close to the main line. At the main line, there's a split rail, which if you went through the split rail, you go in the ground. Because it's split, it's a brake and a rail. And you have to throw a switch to make it normal. And so we said, "Hey, Joe, how about a report?" And he goes, "Well, the sky is blue, and the leaves are starting to turn, and stop, stop, stop. Put it in the hole." I said, "I hope he didn't get us through that split rail." After about a minute or something, we hear, "Okay, back two cars." "Yeah, stop, stop, stop. Whew." "What else? What else happened down there at Thorndale?" "Oh, yeah, one time we were there, and we're just, I'm just, we're just jiving with the tower." And we had to tie up because we were out of time. So we tied up on the hill, put all the brakes, handbrakes on, chocks under the track, under the wheels. They said, "Hey, we're going to be done here at the, on the interchange, on the, at the interchange with the connecting track." "How about calling us a cab?" The tower comes back, "Okay, your cab." I said, "Hey, come on, I want to go get some, get some Chinese. Maybe I'm going to get some Chinese, maybe I'll get some flame and Peking Duck." And he says, then he come back, he says, "Oh, so you want to get a Chinese fire quacka?" "Yeah." "Little, little joke." "What else?" at Thorndale?" Lancaster was a fun place to work. That was like a, like a cast out of Hollywood. Oh man, you had characters there. Geez, Reading was nice too. Well, there's so many stories there at Lancaster. I can't remember them.

Well, while you were talking, I did think I had two more questions. Was there a lot of communication between the crew? You were jiving with the tower. Was there a lot, did you do that on some radio back and forth with the caboose and talking to your conductor?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mostly, you know, before you got going, while you were, when you were running, there wasn't that much because you were focused on getting down the road. And, oh yeah, there's another, there's another one. I'm down on a Jersey from Harrisburg to North Jersey. I forget what the symbol of the train was. But we went down Harrisburg, down, and through Coatesville and at Thorndale we take what they call the P&T, the Philadelphia and Thorndale branch. It was a single track railroad that connected with the Trenton Cut-Off. So we go up to the P&T and out on the Trenton Cut-Off, which would take us to Morrisville. And somewhere along the line, we had to, we got a notice that we had to cross over and go on the adjacent track, which was called Against the Current because it wasn't signaled the way we were gone. It was signaled the opposite way. So we got written orders and all that to operate and we gave us a clear block, which would mean no opposing trains would be in your area from X to Y. So we opened up the switches and crossed over to the other track and tried to get a hold of the hind end to tell them to close up the track so we keep going and couldn't raise them. So I had to get the train going a little bit, stop it, let it come in. Had to do that about three times before I shook them awake. Said, "What's the matter?" "Close the switch." And sometimes they have those cabooses and I forget if they were coal or oil fired back then, but then they would get super warm in there and that could get you out. So I had to shake them awake with a mile and a half train.

You mentioned going through New Jersey. Did you ever get a chance to, as an engineer, go through Burlington?

Burlington? No, not on the, that was on the other side of the river. Well, no.

But as an engineer, did you ever get the chance to go through the city of Burlington? Because you mentioned that was sort of your first...

Yeah, no, I did not. That was, no. No big freights back then over that way. Yeah, that was a secondary track. That was in my mind.

So you never got the chance to relive that childhood experience?

No, I never got that chance.

Well, the other original question that came to me while you were talking about Thorndale was sort of, what were, did you, you mentioned that you were sometimes out of Enola. I'm just wondering if you could sort of talk about what the, that railroad, or rail yard was like.

Oh, Enola was massive. Yeah, they had two humps, an east and a westbound hump, a bunch of classification tracks, and then a series of departure tracks. And when I first hired, I can remember the old boys telling me they would get a thousand cars over a hump, a shift. And back then they had, they had, for the departure tracks, they had different colored lights. And you would pull down the departure track, they'd stop you with that light, there was a purple light for track X, or a yellow light for Y, or whatever. And then they would give you a backup signal, which would be three blinks of that light, and you'd back your train up to make a coupling. And then just before the coupling, they'd give you a steady, a steady light to stay on, and it means you're going to the couple soon. And then once you coupled, the light would go out. You'd feel it, you'd feel it, you know what I'm against. Yeah, and that's how they did it originally, then they started using the radios, they went to radios. Yeah, Enola was a massive yard, you had all kind of electrics, like you had GG1, E44, and before my time they had the P5As. And electric engines were very powerful. Nothing had to power like a GG1, because one thing about a GG1 is that you had six driving wheels, but on each wheel there was two motors, two traction motors, one a V-shaped connection to the wheel. So you had 12 traction motors. I remember doing, well I remember one time, I'm a fireman, and I need to ride back to Baltimore to get my car from Washington. And I was, I got on the engine with a crew out of New York. And this train was from the south, came out of the south, and it was all what they called D-stops. D-stops means that you would stop to let people off. Nobody would get back on, because of all the contracts with the foreign railroads. So we're going along, I said I'm going to catch the hind end, the back end of the G, and so I sat back there, because you had controls on the GG1 at both ends. And we're going along, I'm looking down, the speedometer is buried at 100 miles an hour. He's doing 100, 100 plus. So when we pulled into Baltimore or wherever, I said, hey, and the fireman, you get out and you check the pantograph to make sure there's no, no ceramics are coming off. They said, did you see what that guy's doing? He says, yeah. The speed back then was 80, but a lot of times you want to make up time, because they wanted you too. Amtrak them, get over the road. Yeah, the GG1s, the E44s were very powerful too, but they were not articulated. The GG1s were articulated means that you had three wheels, the three wheels, the power wheels, then you had four pony trucks up front and four in the rear. But in between those two, they were separate, but connected with a pin to each unit. So coming through and interlocking or stuffing, it would really do better than something that was rigid frame. They would, if you could get a lot of sway. That's why some of the engines didn't make it, the Amtrak got after the Gs, the E60s, they were too much lateral sway. So they didn't last long. These new ones though are pretty good. The E33s, they were off of foreign railroad, and they were electrics, and they had good power at the low end, a lot of power, but they didn't have much top end. Getting over 50 was tough on them. It's not 100.

Well, actually, I apologize, I just keep thinking things. So you're wearing a Brotherhood of Engineers hat. What was it like being part of that particular union?

Well, I think it was, well, I enjoyed being part of that union. It was a good organization. I mean, they fought a lot for what we could have, you know, and it was, it still is. It still was a good organization. I mean, without unions, you wouldn't be getting treated too well on a railroad these days. They may, they have safety concerns just like the general public does. They were good organizations, still is. Did you have a lot of interaction with the leadership, or was it more so you just counted on them to do their job? Well, I was, I held vice chairman positions with the Brotherhood of Locomotive of Engineers in Lancaster. I was vice chairman at Lancaster. So I had communication with people, you know. And people would come to you with their concerns? Sure. We had Lancaster when I was there. We had the best safety record on the division. And they took us down as a reward. They took us down to the Conrail box at a Philadelphia Phillies game, which was kind of neat. They had their own box there. The managers, system managers. So like I say, that was positive reinforcement, safety, being nice. When people did good.

Well, that's all I had. So unless you have anything else?

No, no, that's it.

Well, again, thanks so much, Bob, for coming out today and speaking with me about sort of your family's history with the railroad as well as yours. So I really appreciate it. All right.