photo location

[NW Mailing List]

I hired on the Radford Division in 1964 and vaguely remember one of those
modernist glass-box-on-stilts  "towers" at East Bluefield Yard Office.   So
I checked a negative exposed in August 1965, while standing atop cabin
518287, and it does show such a tower there.  The image file is attached.


To the best of my memory, the structure was unoccupied at the time.  I
never saw any lights on in the building and I never observed anyone going
up or down the stairs.  The Yard Master was located in the brick yard
office building.


The Hump Conductor, located at the west end of the East Yard Office
Building shown in the attached photo, worked both the switching signal, and
a small set of squeezer retarders (to get slack to make cuts.)  He also
assigned how many brakemen would ride each cut.  There were no other
retarders at East Bluefield, and all coal was handled down grade by hand
braking.


Cabin 518287 was standing on one of the two cab tracks when this photo was
taken.  The view looks eastward.  One of the cab tracks was called the Time
Freight Cab Track, and the other was called the Slow Freight Cab track.
Inbound Radford Division crews cut their own cabin off on the fly, threw
the cab track switches, and dropped their cabin into the appropriate cab
track.  In the photo, you can see the derails and the switch lamps for the
derails, at the east end of the cab tracks (lower left in photo.)


Normally the Slow Freight cabins would be dropped out eastward by gravity
in the order received, and the only switching necessary was for a brakeman
to come over occasionally and drop the whole string of cabins eastward in
the track, as it filled up.  The same usually worked for the Time Freight
cab track.  But occasionally a filler would be added to the rear end of an
eastward time freight (such as No. 84, from the Mercer St end of the yard,
and an engine would dig the appropriate Radford Division cabin out of the
cab track from the west end.  Which meant that every poor soul trying to
get some rest on the rest on the other cabooses was rattled into a
wide-awake state.


At the time I hired, there were no structures at RD.  I was told that I had
missed seeing RD Tower by about 2 years.  And I have never been able to
find a photo of it in the years since.


Attachment.


-- abram burnett

===========================================
                  Sent to You from my Telegraph Key
Successor to the MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH LINE of 1844
===========================================

Moderator:
http://www.nwhs.org/mailinglist/2018/20180607.ADB_NW_Aug%201965_East%20Bluefield_from%20atop%20caboose%20518287_neg-103417.jpg
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist6.pair.net/pipermail/nw-mailing-list/attachments/20180607/00ac7f57/attachment.html>