Railroad Morse and Radio Code - A Sequel

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Feedback has been favorable from the piece I posted several days ago, explaining the differences in the two "Morse" Codes... the one composed by Morse/Vail in 1844 and used on the railroads, and the one concocted by the Europeans in 1857 to evade Professor Morse's patents and today used on radio. Here is a sequel piece. To understand it, you must recall my previous iteration that Morse's 1844 "American Morse" code ("Railroad Morse") was principally composed of dots, and was very fast, whereas the 1857 Continental Code (which came to be called "Radio Morse") was a slow, draggy code composed largely of dashes. 



Not all operators restricted themselves to one form of Morse or the other. My own earliest telegraph teacher, Harry Crawford Clark, knew both American Morse ("Railroad Morse") and the later Continental Code. Somewhere along the way he had become interested in radio and had picked up a facility with Continental Code. 


Harry was a boomer. Raised in the West Virginia coal fields, the telegraph caught his attention as a young man. He studied telegraphy at the Dodge Institute of Telegraphy in Valparaiso, Indiana, and began his brass-pounding career on the C&O in 1920. Soon the allure of the West caught his attention and he moved to Kansas, then Texas and Mexico, then Nevada, then California, before coming back and hiring on the N&W Pocahontas Division about 1940. One night we counted the number of outfits he had telegraphed for: 16 railroads, plus Western Union, plus Postal Telegraph Co., and even a shoe brokerage ! I vividly remember his great story of being a telegrapher in Medico City when it was invaded by revolutionary General Escobar (1926?)... and seeing the soldiers come in "by train," riding on the tops of box cars, "holding a pig under one arm and a woman under the other!" Harry ended up his career telegraphing at "GM" (for "General Manager's") telegraph office in the General Office Building at Roanoke in the 1960s. 


Harry had great stories of working night train order jobs in the Texas and Nevada deserts, for the "SP Northern" between El Paso and Tucson, telegraphing on the 1,300 mile line between El Paso and Mexico City, being a boomer in Juarez, and blocking stone trains moving toward the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. He taught me telegraphy by sending me train orders like he had used in the desert: "Eng 536 run extra Steins to Benson has right over First 52 Eng 917 Steins to San Simon right over Second 52 Eng 1432 Steins to Dragoon and hold main track at Dragoon." 


One of his many stories concerned the use of the second (the "Continental") code on the railroad. As I recall, the setting was somewhere on the C&O in the early 1920s. 


A major storm had virtually crippled communication over the division that night, and Harry was trying to work a busy train order job somewhere on single track. The rain was torrential and the pole line was likely down in one or more places. Due to the "leakage of current" through the partial grounding of the circuits by the weather, Harry's telegraph instruments were barely functioning. They sputtered a bit, but the signals were not readable. He could not read any of the train dispatcher's sending, and he had several trains from both directions stopped at his office. He had adjusted his relay so the magnet coils were up close to the iron armature, and had loosed the spring tension on the armature, but there was still not enough current coming through the wire for the relay to make clear dots and dashes. The wire was "soggy" or "muddy," as we say. 


In a stroke of genius, Harry several times sent slowly to the train dispatcher "U READ CONTINENTAL?" The train dispatcher took the cue and began sending slowly in Continental Code, replete with all its dashes. It worked! The current-starved relay could follow the Continental Code sent with all the dashes. Harry was able to copy one train order, and get the first train moving. Then another, then another, and before long the log jam of trains was broken. It was probably a very unusual circumstance that both ends of the "train wire" were manned that night by men who knew both codes. 


--abram burnett 
"SW" Telegraph Office 

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