Crewe Yard Hath Nearly Vamoosed

[NW Mailing List]

Wow. It is getting sparce. The empty tracks are good if you just want to see the track plan. I’m glad I got some photos in the early 1990’s when more of it was still there and there were coal trains (rather than a few coal cars) waiting their turn to move east and engines waiting to be dispatched. If I ever get my train layout built, it’ll have a scaled down, but busy Crew yard. 

Phil Miller

 

From: NW-Mailing-List <nw-mailing-list-bounces at nwhs.org> On Behalf Of NW Mailing List
Sent: Thursday, April 7, 2022 12:04 AM
To: N&W Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
Subject: Crewe Yard Hath Nearly Vamoosed

 

Want a shock?  Go to Google Maps and check the aerial image of the yard at Crew. Almost all tracks are empty; all the structures are gone.  The next set of satellite images which Google posts will show where the tracks "used to be." 

 

My father, in his inimitable Southern-speak, would have said that Crewe. "Looks like a chicken leg after the Methodist preacher came for dinner." 

 

The only thing I see which looks at all familiar there are the two middle ladders.  Everything else is, well... like that chicken bone. 

 

Somewhere between those middle ladders was the "Bully."  A Bully was a very large coal stove for out-door use, placed where numbers of men worked out-of-doors in cold weather.  It was about five feet in diameter and built up of cast iron ring segments, laid upon one another.  One section, about two feet off the ground, held  the fire door and a grate  Immediately under that was a clean-out door for removing the ash.  The grate was connected to a shaker hub on the outside, and as I recall we used grate shaker bars off steam engines to shake the grate.  The top section was a cast round conical covering with a hole in the middle for a sheet iron stove pipe. In the Winter, the Bullies were lit and the men working outside in the cold weather, especially at night, could warm themselves at the Bully.  Often the men built benches and wind breaks near the Bullies, fabricated from grain doors out of box cars. or old dunnage found in empty cars.  The section gangs used a clam shell several times a year to stock the coal piles at yard offices, depots, shanties and the like, from a gondola load of coal.  The coal bins, such as they were, were built up on three sides with old cross ties to a height of perhaps three feet and, of course, open on the top, and the coal was dumped on the ground, with the cross ties restraining it from random dispersion around the sides. Almost none of the coal piles had a roof over them, so the coal filled up with snow in the Winter.  If the coal pile at your location were exhausted, you used a shovel and went up on top of a hopper load of coal and shoveled off whatever amount you needed.  I can remember pulling into Crewe in the middle of the night and seeing at least one Bully, perhaps two, glowing with a bright, cheery glow in the cold darkness, often with the flames shooting out of the sheet iron stove pipe on top.  An experience repeated on railroads all over the country.  Good memories of the Good Old Days which, like Crew Yard, are now all gone. 

 

Some day we shall talk about the drums of journal box oil which were kept all around the yards.  But that is another story.  I will do you a little essay before long. 

 

-- abram burnett 

Drink More Turnip Tonic ! 

  

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