The Man With Five Names
We're passing to the south of the city of Conneaut. Conneaut has a long history as a railroad town. The New York Central had a station here as did the Nickel Plate. Today the successors to those railroads--CSX and Norfolk Southern--maintain a strong presence.
The railroads brought dramatic changes to this area. Before trains, Ohio was the frontier. Raw materials were shipped to the east and manufactured goods sent back in return, primarily by way of the extensive canal system that had been built in the early 1800's. The railroads changed all that. Factories could now be established here and goods sent by train all over the developing country. By 1840, Ohio led the nation with over 3000 miles of track and 28 different railroads, and Ohio's economy was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial base.
There's a railroad museum in the old New York Central passenger station in Conneaut. We stopped to absorb something of the bygone era when trains ruled the land, and there we met a man who said he went by five names. He was a volunteer at the museum and had spent his life working on the railroad. He had retired 21 years before and, assuming a customary retirement age, well, you can do the math. He made for a lively companion with stories about railroading that he told with enthusiasm.
Back to those five names. "On the railroad," our guide said, "everybody had a nickname." Such as, "Scrap Iron," or "Chew Tabbac." We figured how "Chew Tabbac" got his name but "Scrap Iron" was a puzzler. So our guide explained. "Scrap Iron" was in charge of coupling railroad cars together. When he joined the cars, he would do it kind of rough; they would come together with a bang. Folks said he was making scrap iron."
We asked him about his own names. First of all, why so many? "Because," he replied, "when you're on the railroad as long as I was, you accumulate them. I'd answer to 'em all." We asked him to list his names, and he counted them off on the fingers of his left hand: "Jigs, Jerry, Baldy, Lefty, and..." Well, there was one more we forgot. Presumably he had yet another name--the one that's on his driver's license. But we didn't ask about that one. It didn't seem important.
There was something that's been bothering me about trains. "How come," I asked. "How come trains don't have cabooses anymore?" I see a train going by and it's perfectly nice but then the last car is just like all the others. There's no caboose, no ending, no sense of completion, no conclusion, no punctuation mark: it's just another railroad car.
"Well, it happened," said Jigs/Jerry/Baldy/Lefty, "in the late 1980's. There was a strike and the trains were run by supervisory personnel. They didn't have enough people for the cabooses and then they decided they didn't need them." When the strike was over, the cabooses didn't return.
I shook my head, and he shook his head too. We seemed to share the understanding that a caboose doesn't require a function. I don't like the thought of a nation filled with unfinished trains, racing from one destination to another and never exactly ending. But Jigs/Jerry/Baldy/Lefty seemed unable to remain stuck in the past. He brought us back with the observation that railroads are doing very well these days.
To illustrate, he noted, "There used to be four tracks running through here. Some years back, they tore out two of the four because they didn't think they'd ever need them again. But now they could use those four tracks. Sixty-six trains pass by this station every day."
"How do those trains keep from running into each other?" we asked. It seems that there's someone who functions in a similar role to that of an air traffic controller. That person, from a facility in Atlanta, directs the trains to where they need to go and makes sure that there's free track on which to do it. It sounded like having a giant train set covering something like half the nation.
Then he was telling us about his days working for the Nickel Plate Railroad which now is part of the Norfolk Southern system. "We were a good railroad," he said. "We always made our connections."
We must have looked blank so he explained. "In railroading," he said, "it all comes down to making connections." He was talking about how freight cars must be connected to the right trains on time to reach their destinations. But that truth isn't limited to railroading: in most things doesn't it come down to making connections? Connecting with people, resources, information--connecting with what we need?
After we left the Conneaut Railroad Museum and headed back toward the Interstate, we crossed a section of railroad tracks. We saw a sign that looked as if it had been recently installed. It warned: “Notice increased train traffic," just like Jigs/Jerry/Baldy/Lefty had said.
From Museum of the Open Road audio script
for Interstate 70 East: Columbus, Ohio
to Wheeling, West Virginia