Here is a very nice old film. I suppose it belongs in the rail fanning section, and the moderators can move it, but it has some portrayals of older practices. Takes me back to our village station that was a junction point and also had three section crews, and healthy freight and passenger activity.

https://www.nfb.ca/film/station-master/

Filmed in 1958, it never dawned on me that steam was still running as Sputnik terrorized the world with its infernal beeping!

I find it interesting that the clock in the tower has Roman numerals on its face, I thought all standard clocks were required to have Arabic numbers.

The thing that went through my head as I saw this is just how many men (and all men) it was felt necessary to keep a railroad running. It resembles, in some ways, a socialist country that "guarantees" employment for all, whether the job is truly necessary or not.

Yes, the railroad did more back then--parcel delivery, small-scale mail transport, etc. And they still ran steam, and they still had labour (Canada, eh?) agreements with unions to abide with. But still, I can show people photos of crews of "last runs" at the start of Conrail, etc. with three or four men across the back of the caboose, or five or six crew members posing before a three-car local, and people today would say, with great justification, "No WONDER the railroads went broke back then!!!"

This may all be true, but I fail to see any reason for your bringing it up in this particular thread.

Les

Edit: the "socialist" comment is highly date sensitive. At one time, the displayed labor was the necessary and required labor to get the job done. As time went on, there were other methods to accomplish the same with less labor. The "socialist" comment is only valid if we are looking at a picture of work done using obsolete methods solely to employ persons. In some cases, the comment is accurate. Remember full crew laws? Amtrak's founding legislation had all kinds of labor protection agreements for porters and dining car crews. Discontinuing trains did not end the labor budget.

Would you rather I used the even more polarizing term "Communist"?

In a sense, such "over-employment" was becoming obsolete even in the era when this film was made. For whatever reasons (labour unions, government mandates, slow-to-react management, whatever), we saw inefficient labour usage on railroads from the end of World War Two right up to, say, labour agreements in the era of deregulation and Conrail, and the Rock Island and western half of the Milwaukee Road disappearing. Virtually all the "unfathomable" horrors predicted by the "Professional Iconoclast" in Trains Magazine--one-man trains, articulated double-stacks, dispatching across a continent, unit trains' domination, and the potential for automated trains--have come to pass, and then some.

A modern person--millennial and younger--is going to look at this film and wonder what farce this was. It literally looks like the ugly (and usually false today) stereotype of ten city workers leaning on shovels watching at the eleventh fill a pothole. TELEGRAPHS? The phone, old as it looks, is right there! Sending a package on a train? Are you kidding???
The same sort of thing applies to British heritage lines. In an era when I have seen certain American rail museums operate with a skeleton staff of 3-4 (and even one if no trains are being operated, there are major British heritage lines that need on the order of 20-30 staff to operate, manning all the signal boxes, stations, locomotives, and trains in an "authentic" Victorian or Edwardian fashion--and that doesn't include gift shops, buffets, bookstalls, or pubs!

The questions are likely to arise, if you honestly address history as well as offering just a cool/scenic train/trolley ride. Are you properly prepared to answer them in as inoffensive and uncontroversial a fashion as possible?