Coal at Atkins on the Bristol Line ?

[NW Mailing List]

 Here is a photo of the Atkins station in 1911, taken by J. L. Akers. The note says he came to work there in 1910. That may have been his first assignment as an operator.
    On Monday, September 30, 2019, 03:21:43 PM EDT, NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> wrote:  
 
  
Thanks to Mr. Josephus von Shawzhinsky for links to the Adkins drawings.    That first one is a jewel, and I am glad to know it now has loving home in the Archives.  The extreme fascination of such things for me is that my grandfather railroaded through Adkins in that time period.  So, I am looking at what he knew and worked with.  He threw those switches many, many times.




The arrangement of tracks shown on the drawing tells me why Adkins was always such an important spot on the Bristol Line.  From what I am able to see, the Train Dispatcher could have five trains there at once, headlight-to-headlight.




That layout of tracks shown at Adkins approximates what was often called a "lap siding" arrangement.  There would be a passing siding for each direction, and the Train Order office was at, near or between the inner switches of the sidings.  The purpose was so that the head ends of the trains, when stopped, were near the point of communication (the telegraph office.)  Remember, there were no radios or wayside telephones back then, and in order to receive communications from the Train Dispatcher, the Conductor and Engineman had to be near a telegraph office.  Thus, busy places like Adkins were generally set up so that when trains pulled in on the passing sidings, their head ends were close to the telegraph operator and the Train Dispatcher could "grab" them for a Train Order.  In those days of large numbers of short trains, if the Train Dispatcher saw a way to save five or ten minutes on the movement of a train, the Train Orders would start flying.




There were probably a number of places that had passing sidings for both directions.  Glade Spring, Payne and Waynesboro come to mind, on territory that I worked.   Dry Branch may have been set up that way, too, at one time, and perhaps Loch Laird.  At Arthur, the same thing was accomplished in double track territory by having both eastward and westward middle tracks, with the telegraph office in the middle, which in this case was an interlocking with crossovers in and out of the middle sidings.




Middle Tracks and Lap Sidings are alien to today's way of thinking.  A package of things killed them off:  the chasing away of the passenger trains, for which every other train had to hunt-a-hole and get out of the way; the coming of automatic block signaling and (even worse) of CTC;  the loss of the system of operation by the Superiority of Trains by Right, Class and Direction, and the loss of the concomitant system of operation by Time Table and Train Order; the huge increase in train size due to the coming of the Dismal locomotive; the almost complete loss of the local car-load business along the Divisions, which required the constant activity of local freight trains working between the through trains; and the general reduction of multiple-track railroads to single track wherever possible.   




The result of all these changes is that today everything runs as an Extra and, by and large, no train is any longer more important than any other.  Today's monster trains just all go in the pipeline at one end, slobber along, and come out the pipeline at the other end in the same order in which they entered the pipeline.  Like it or not, that is a description of 95% of today's railroading.




If I ever get a pair of tickets for the Time Machine, my friend Josephus shall be my guest for a day-trip Adkins.  Shucks, we might even slip over to Mr. Akers' depot museum at Rural Retreat and enjoy a glass of his Cabbage Schnapps !




Yours in the bonds of  Puh-syzh-un  Sked-youul'd  Ray-Roadin' .




                          -- abram burnett,

reformed brakesman; now rocking-chair railroader




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Successor to the MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH LINE of 1844
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