Re: Desperately Seeking Signals: The Saga Of The Train Order Board

Posted by Jim Courtney on Oct 30, 2016; 11:38pm
URL: http://c-sng-discussion-forum.254.s1.nabble.com/Desperately-Seeking-Signals-The-Saga-Of-The-Train-Order-Board-tp6678p6697.html

Chris, you never cease to amaze me!

This is an incredibly researched and well illustrated thread.

I guess I've always taken order boards on depots for granted. Obviously, the DSP&P didn't feel a need for signaling trains to stop for new orders at a given station. As ComoDepot has pointed out, perhaps South Park trains stopped at every station with a telegraph operator to check for orders, by convention.

Since the earliest photo to show an order board on depot (Webster) was in 1887, perhaps train order boards were a UP policy, pushed upon the South Park and Clear Creek lines, as the UP tried to fully integrate all the subsidiaries of the system.

I can understand not having an order board at Leadville ( Gunnison, too?) as they were terminals. I'm surprised, now that I think about it, that Como had a TOB, as it was a division point.

Thinking back to my brief Rock Island career, trains could not leave terminals such as Fort Worth, or division points like Waurika, OK, without the C&E both manually receiving orders and clearance from the Dispatcher by way of the Trainmaster or Agent/Operator, as these were train crew change points, nothing actually running through.

The only time new train orders were picked up at stations along the subdivision, were for changes in locations of meets with opposing trains. These were almost always picked up on the fly. The only time that I recall having a train stop for orders was when my drowsy engineer forgot to stick his arm out to snare the "flimsies" on the string, running the order board. Red faced, he had to stop the train on the main and I, as the head-end brakeman, had to walk a half mile back down the train, in the dark, to retrieve his orders.

So, now I think that I'll start looking for other C&S depot TOBs or the lack there of!