In the era before typewriters and ballpoint pens, operators copied orders using a stylus against double-sided carbons backed by a steel plate. New York Central and Nickel Plate used green. The Pennsylvania used yellow, while the Erie preferred a grayish white for its 19’s and a buff color for 31’s. Train-order forms themselves came in pads printed on a thin onionskin paper, or “flimsy,” which enabled crews to read them over the light of a firebox or against a kerosene lantern. The former were employed when the dispatcher needed to know that the affected train actually had the order, while the latter were used when he did not. Train orders were of two types: “31’s,” which had to be signed for by a member of the train crew, and “19’s,” which did not. There was an old saying: “What the timetable giveth, the dispatcher taketh.” They were used to advance an inferior train against a superior one, establish positive meeting points, create extra trains and sections, annul schedules, authorize work trains, and warn of track conditions and the like. Train orders were issued by the dispatcher and superseded the timetable. The onus was on the latter to clear the former. The superior train did not have to wait on an inferior train at a timetable meet. It was only an “advisory” where such trains should meet if they were both on time. Meeting points between scheduled trains were indicated in the timetable, usually in boldface type together with the number of the train or trains to be met. Simpler versions of the timetables, showing times and other information regarding passenger trains, were made available to the public so riders could know when the trains ran. These timetables, distributed to all employees with duties involving train operation, conveyed the authority for a train to move over a given section of track at a given time they were the official operating schedules of the railroad. Inferior trains were required to clear the schedule of opposing superior trains, and they were also required to clear the schedule of following superior trains, although in latter days this meant first-class trains only. First-class trains were superior to or had precedence over second-class trains, which were superior to third-class trains, etc.īetween trains of the same class, those in the direction specified in the timetable were superior to those in the opposite direction. Such trains were called “regular trains,” e.g., authorized by the timetable. In it were contained schedules of each train, which were accorded a number and a numerical class. Typical train-order operations began with the timetable. The system remained essentially unchanged for more than a century. Train movements were controlled by a dispatcher who used telegraph agents to deliver orders to affected trains. The term “cornfield meet” (for a head-on collision) had real meaning in those days.īy the time of the Civil War, the train-order system begun on the Erie in 1854 was well established. Still, there was no way to supersede it, and single-track operation was slow, haphazard at best, downright dangerous at worst. Meets were prescribed, and one train simply waited on the other.Īs traffic increased so did the level of sophistication, culminating in a timetable containing schedules of various classes and establishing priority. In the early to mid-1800’s, opposing trains on the same track were governed by a timetable, which contained a schedule for most regular freight and passenger train movements. Throughout the 1980’s railroad after railroad adopted either DTC, which depends on verbal instructions only (mostly by radio), or Track Warrant Control (TWC), which uses a preprinted form copied by the crew. Up to that time the TCEU (previously the Order of Railroad Telegraphers) had jealously guarded its right to such work, and exclusive work rules had for years prohibited the adoption of a more modern system. The train order’s ultimate demise was sealed in 1986 by a national agreement between the railroads and the Transportation Communication Employees Union giving dispatchers the right to issue movement instructions directly to train crews, bypassing operators, in what is called Direct Train Control (DTC) territory. With its passing in the late 1980s, so did a whole concept of railroad traffic control that had been a hallmark of U.S. The train order, variously called the “flimsy” or the “tissue” – together with its attendant operators, train order offices, and order hoops – has been rendered obsolete by the radio, the computer, and amended work rules.