Best wishes to everyone for a happy Thanksgiving, and here's an old chestnut you'll no doubt enjoy reading.

A jewel, indeed! And it looks like it's been copied from a newspaper, from how far back nobody knows. . .an example of both the now-gone practice of papers printing local poets, and of how railroads were as much a part of life as water from a faucet today. . .

Thanks for sharing.

jsmatlak where did you find that.

Air brake written material of any kind is super rare outside of railroaders collections.

I found it at the big Toy Train meet in Pasadena. Someone had a classroom manual from an EMD locomotive training course on their table with lots of loose pages inside, the page with the poem was one of them.

Those are quite lovely. I have one myself, clearly wartime, as it has a long rant about the conductor walking back and forth and using up his shoe coupon... Ah yes, here it is. I typed that in myself back in the 90s.
http://www.sdrm.org/roster/diesel/facts_fables.html

That fable that Robert mentions seems to have been quite widely distributed in the 1940s, I also have some EMD training center documents from that time period that include copies of the fable.

Two of the men whose names were omitted from paragraph two are Sloan and Kettering. They may sound familiar.

I once asked at a museum why they were not mentioned in a display on the transition from steam to Diesel and was told it was because they were not railroaders. I could not see why that should disqualify them from being acknowledged as participants in the making of railroad history.

Sloan and Kettering were the primary commercial decision makers at GM who facilitated the acquisition and growth of Electro-Motive and GM's involvement with Diesel power and thus were two principal architects of the retirement of about 60,000 steam locomotives from the US railroads.

PC

You should have asked them to define who a railroader is and why they think GM didn't have anything to do with the dieselization process. Sounds like the folks there don't know as much about railroading and railroad history as they think...

The designers of equipment and the "captains" of industry who provided the commercial means to construct it seem to get a lot more credit for their work in Europe than is the case in the US. This is a shame because it isn't that difficult to find out who designed particularly significant equipment just by doing a patent search on the company they worked for, and in many instances telling the story of the designers significantly improves the display.

Another example of an overlooked US designer: James G. Blunt of the American Locomotive Company, best known for his diesel switcher truck, but the designer of many innovative components used on steam and diesel locomotives.

PC

I think I read that the Blunt designed switcher truck actually began as a tender truck. Any information about this?

Regarding Mr. Kettering: The work he led on 2-stroke diesel engines also had consequences for the streetcar industry; a scaled-down version of his locomotive engine made possible relatively inexpensive and reliable diesel buses, another nail in the coffin of the trolley car. We could even go back to his development of the electric starter (and its associated generator and battery system) for automobiles that made cars easier and safer to start, an important step leading to the privately owned and operated motor car taking over much of the local and regional travel in the US.