The old Morse code and how things have changed

[NW Mailing List]

Friend Abram Burnett sends this along. While it is not N&W per se, its
contents can be transferred to any railroad and are as pertinent 70
years ago or even decades earlier to which they refer. And then the
current day's happenings then are now such a thing of the past.

We like to live and re-live the past. This little piece shows a side
of that long-gone day we seldom consider.

Enjoy.

"A LOST LANGUAGE", by LeRoy Palmer. An Article appearing in the June,
1940 issue of "Railroad Magazine", pages 89-92.

As months and years drift by, the number of us old-time telegraphers
in rail service who know the train wire language is dwindling, like
the "thin blue line" and the "thin gray line" of Civil War veterans.On
practically all the main-line dispatching circuits the telephone has
displaced the telegraph. Only the oldest ops can remember the days
when the average train dispatcher had a "copier", a fast pen operator
who wrote all orders in the order book as the dispatcher issued them
and checked as each was repeated.

In this era of telephone dispatching, the work is, of course, done
much more quickly. Orders are now repeated in one-fourth the time that
was required for even the "gilt-edge" Morse man, although the time and
all station names are spelled out, while train and engine numbers are
repeated on the telephone. The veteran brass pounder has to admit it,
even though he misses the vanishing language.  Formerly I could be
busy at my desk, or even reading the newspaper, and still hear the
train wire with its "OS" reports of trains passing over the district,
and thus I kept posted on everything approaching my station. Now I
hear nothing unless I sit with the telephone receiver hung over my
head. They took some of the romance and fascination away from
railroading when they installed telephones on the train wire.

The twelve-hour night shift men were excellent "spotters". That is,
they were adept at catching much-needed sleep when opportunity offered
and they trained themselves to wake for their call. The old Morse
dispatchers knew that Bill or Joe was "in the hay" when they got no
answer on the first call and they would slowly repeat "RC  RC  RC DS"
or  "ZA ZA ZA DS," or whatever the call was, the repeated chatter
bringing the Op to life. This was customary and was well understood.

One of the first things the op learned was to arouse from deep slumber
for his call.

I remember the first job I ever worked, night operator for the
Milwaukee Road at Burlington, Wis., in 1901. I'd been on the job only
a few nights when. One morning just before daylight, I got mighty
sleepy and stretched out on the freight desk, with an "Official Guide"
making a soft pillow for my head, and was soon sleeping soundly. I
dreamed I was walking along a street, and as I passed a store I heard
a telegraph instrument tapping out "BU BU BU BY" which was my office
call. I thought, "Gosh! I'd better go in there and answer that. It's
my call!" The next thing I knew, I was tumbling off that desk onto my
feet as I realized that the Beliot dispatcher was hammering out slowly
"BU BU BU BU DS."

I dove for the telegraph desk.

I have had this same dream, or one very much like it, many times since
on similar occasions. Other old-time ops report having had identical
experience. Seldom would we get deep enough in the hay to fail to
recognize the familiar sounder call. There's not much excuse for
lightening slingers to drowse on an eight-hour shift nowadays, but
should a man working the late night, or third, trick in the heat of
Summer, slip off to dreamland between trains, the telephone bell is,
perhaps, not the equal of the old repeated Morse call to arouse him
from slumber.

Perhaps you have sat in some wayside depot waiting-room and listened
to the clatter of the instruments in the telegraph office and wished
you could understand what was passing over the wire. But missing now
from the chorus of clicking sounders is the loudest one of all, the
sounder of the train dispatcher's wire. What you would hear now, if
you could read them, would be the message wire and the commercial
wire, carrying private telegrams. Gone is the hottest and fastest of
them all, the sounder with the mysterious abbreviations and language
of its own, which every student aspired to read. When a student could
read the train wire his education was complete; he was a full-fledged
op.

In 1900 I was an apprentice at the CMStP & P depot in Elkhorn, Wis.
George Hayes was the daylight operator there. In addition to his
regular duties, he had the job of teaching two students, Bill Jones
and myself. Both of us were green farm hands. I don't know how dumb I
was as a ham, but I do remember that Mr. Hayes was in despair over
Bill. We both did learn, however. I became a boomer op, and the last I
heard of Bill Jordan he was the chief dispatcher for some Western
pike.

I was given night work with the night man, a short, fat little Irish
fellow named Eddie uinane. Eddie was a prince. He used to send to me
faithfully an hour or so every night when he wasn't too busy, but he
was a rotten sender. The boys along the line had a hard time reading
him. But I got accustomed to the funny twists he put on his Morse, and
I had no trouble. Later on, when I was working along the line on the
extra board, if some op had to copy Eddie and I was around he'd make
me sit in and take Eddie's dots and dashes.

Meanwhile, I put in about six months with Eddie, showing up when he
did at six p.m. and  quitting at one a.m. I was beginning to get
discouraged. I could read words off the Western Union commercial wire
pretty well, but I couldn't get used to those "cut" words used by the
dispatchers, even though I listened faithfully, trying to separate the
characters and make sense of them.

I'll never forget that winter night when I opened the waiting room
door, hustled over to the huge coal stove to thaw out, and heard the
big train-wire sounder in the office rattling away. I listened a
moment, when -- just like that-- I could read the language!  Buy, was
I tickled!  What previously had been a jumble of sounds was now clear
to me. When Eddie came in a few minutes later, I had the joyous news
for him that I could read the train wire, and he seemed as pleased as
I was.

After that, I was more anxious than ever to perfect myself. One day
George Hayes said to me: "Kid, I'm going to give you a note to W.H.
Melchoir, the chief train dispatcher at Beliot, and send you over to
take your examination. Eddie says you have your block rules learned
okay and you can read the train wire. They need operators and you are
good enough to start out."

Next day I rode the morning local passenger train to Beliot. Mr.
Melchoir examined me and sent me to Burlington to work that very
night. There was no physical or standard rules examination at that
time, but you had to know the block rules. You had to know how to ask
the man east of you for a "47" before you let an eastbound train into
the block, etc. A "block" was the stretch of track between your office
and his, and "47" meant "Will hold all westbound trains until your
train arrives."

Because the Morse train dispatcher had to work fast in order to keep
his trains moving, there came into use so many abbreviations that if,
as you sat in the wayside station waiting-room listening to the
sounders, you could have to read every letter that was passing over
the train wire, you still would have been unable to know what was
going on, unless you understood the code. You might have heard the
dispatcher and the op converse as follows: "Sa wn x w cmg ma hv 9 r
tm." snaps the dispatcher. {Say when extra west train is coming. I may
have orders for them.}

"Art tnk c tr smk no," returns the op. "Es hr ty cm ty in ste nw."
{All right.  I think I see their smoke now. Yes, here they come. They
are in sight now.}

"U gt nytng r em." asks the DS. {Have you got anything for them?}

"Es abt 15 m wk," replies the operator. {Yes, about 15 minutes work.}

"OK 31 cy 3 r em & let me kw hw mch wk ty gt at DR b4 c clr em ma hv
to chg tt meet wi 42 No 7s ab 20 m1  I'll hnd hm sm ti on tm at DR."
{Okay. Make 3 copies on a 31 order for them and let me know how much
work they've got at Darienbefore you clear them. May have to change
that meet with number 42. Number 7 is about twenty minutes late. I'll
hand him some time on them at Darien.}

Hour after hour, with occasional periods of rest, twenty-four hours a
day, the sounder rattled on, Few words were spelled out in train
movement conversation, as this language -- the "cut" language of the
old Morse train wire -- clicked over the line.

All railroad offices with telephone dispatcher's wire equipment have a
Morse circuit to fall back on in case of trouble on the phone wire.
The young operators dread this. If they happen to be working with an
old Morse dispatcher, they are in hot water trying to read his
abbreviated instructions. To a veteran, however, it's the old familiar
code.

Morse men admit that the telephone, like the typewriter, makes for
greater efficiency. It standardizes operations, saves time and work,
and diminishes the hazards of the iron trail. But we of the old school
miss the romance of the earlier days of rugged individualism when you
reached for a brass key instead of a black telephone receiver, and
were proud of the bold, rapid, flowing strokes with which you wrote
your train orders by hand.

And if a tobacco-chewing boomer op were suddenly yanked out of the dim
past and put to work on a teletype machine, his consternation would be
equalled only by his profanity. Teletypes are doing their bit to make
Morse a dead language. So far, you'll find 'em on only a few of the
big roads. The latest pike to install this system is the Erie, which
is now using teletype machines for their consist and passing report
systems.

As every rail knows the consist of a freight train includes all of its
car numbers, listed in order, beginning at the head end. For each
carload are shown contents, tons, destination, route (including other
roads, if any such are needed to take the car to its destination), and
sometimes the name of the consignee. Ventilation, refrigeration, or
heating instructions are shown for perishable freight, and when
livestock was last fed and rested.

All this information, in the case of the Erie, is transmitted by
teletype to the company's general offices at Chicago, Cleveland, and
New York, and to the district office at Jersey City, NJ, immediately
after hotshot freights have left the yards. There, centralized tracing
bureaus use the information to answer quickly all shipper and receiver
inquiries about the movement of cars -- inquiries that in days gone by
were answered with the aid of Morse conversation.

A friend on the Erie tells me that when his company adopted teletypes
for its consist and passing report systems, last March, it converted
845 miles of telegraph wire to printer circuits, making a total of
2320 miles of these circuits now in operation on the Erie. Of this
total, he says, 2075 miles are equipped with duplex apparatus over
which messages or consists can be sent in both directions at the same
time.

Morse experts concede that the telephone, the typewriter and the
teletype seldom fail and, as I pointed out, do the work more easily
and more rapidly. Few train dispatchers and ops would go back to the
obsolete system if they could. But now and then you'll run across a
mellow old boomer who sighs for the snappy Morse dialogue on the
dispatcher's wire that is fast becoming a lost language.

Bob Cohen

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