Sam is the fireman on a big freight locomotive. Like lots of people who work on trains, Sam belongs to a family of railroaders. His father was a locomotive engineer. His grandfather was one, too. And, long ago, grandmother was an “op.” That means she operated the fast-clicking telegraph key in a railroad station. Her telegraph messages helped to keep the trains running safely and on time.

When Sam was a little boy, he listened to his father and grandfather talking railroad talk. They used all kinds of words that ordinary people didn’t understand. They had wonderful nicknames for each other, and slang words for many of the things they did.

For instance, grandfather called his big locomotive a hog. Since he ran it, he was the hogger. After every trip, he brought his engine to the roundhouse, where men cleaned it and fixed it all up. Pig-pen was one nickname for the roundhouse. Can you figure out why? Another nickname was barn, because people often called a locomotive an Iron Horse. The barn had stalls for the engines. A modern roundhouse does, too.

The lumps of coal that grandfather’s engine burned were called black diamonds. Fireman was the regular name for the man who shoveled coal, cleaned out the ashes and helped to grease the wheels with tallow fat. But the fireman also had a whole string of nicknames—diamond pusher, ashcat, bakehead and tallow pot. He called his shovel his banjo.

Once an old-fashioned train began rolling, it was hard to stop it. A man had to run from car to car, putting the brakes on by hand. Naturally, he was the brakeman, but his friends called him the shack.

In the days before electric lights, railroads needed signals just as they do now. The first ones were large balls that hung from a tall post. A black ball hanging halfway to the top of the post meant STOP. A white ball hanging high in the air meant CLEAR TRACK.

Lots of things have changed since then, but a signal

to go ahead is still the “highball” because railroaders still use many of the old words. Firemen and brakemen now have machinery that does many of the things they used to do, but they keep their old names. And one thing hasn’t changed at all: People still love trains. The men who work on the huge powerful engines would rather work there than almost anywhere else. That’s how Sam feels about it.

When Sam reports for work, his big steam locomotive is all ready. Men have oiled it and checked it. The fire is roaring in the firebox. In the old days, a fireman spent most of his time shoveling coal. The faster the train went, the more steam it needed and the faster the fireman had to work with his banjo. Sam knows how to use a shovel if he needs to, but that’s not his main job. His locomotive has a machine called an automatic stoker which feeds coal into the firebox.

Sam just checks up on the fire. He looks at dials and gauges in the locomotive cab, and they tell him what he wants to know. There is enough steam. Everything is ship-shape.

Sam and the engineer and a brakeman work at the front of the train, so they are called the head-end crew. Another brakeman and the freight conductor work in the caboose—the last car on the train. In between the caboose and the locomotive are sixty cars of important freight that has to be delivered fast. A fast freight is called a hotshot or redball. A slow one is a drag.

Sam and the engineer are ready to go. Far down the track the conductor raises his arm and gives the highball signal. He is ready, too. Now the engineer pulls the throttle lever. The long train snakes out of the freight yards onto the main line, and pretty soon they are “batting the stack off her”—which means making fast time.

Sam, on the left side of the cab, watches the track ahead. The engineer sits on the right, keeping a sharp lookout. When they come to a curve, Sam looks back along the train to make sure everything is all right.

After a while they see a little town up ahead, and beside the track stands a signal they have been expecting. It looks like a round plate, with places for nine lights in it. But only three of the lights are ever flashed at once. At the top of the page you will see what each set of lights means.

This time three green go-ahead lights are showing.

“Clear signal,” Sam calls to the engineer.

“Green eye it is,” the engineer replies.

All through the trip he and Sam will call the signals back and forth to each other, just to make sure there is no mistake. The engineer gives one long blast on his whistle to tell the station agent in the little town that the train is coming.

As they go past the station, Sam leans out of the cab and snatches a hoop from the station agent’s hand. Quickly Sam takes a piece of paper from it and tosses

the hoop out again. In the meantime the agent hands another hoop to the conductor in the caboose.

The paper that Sam takes off the hoop is a train order, called a flimsy. On the flimsy the station agent has written instructions for the train’s crew. Orders come to the station by telegraph. Sometimes they tell the crew that the train must make an unexpected stop at the next station. Sometimes they give information about other trains that have been delayed.

Bigger stations often have train order posts that stand beside the track, but small-town agents hoop the orders up by hand. Usually the agent has to walk along the track and pick up hoops that the crew toss down. But the one who gave the orders to Sam has a dog trained to chase hoops and bring them back!

Sam and the engineer and the brakeman read the orders to be sure nobody makes a mistake that might cause an accident. Back in the caboose the other brakeman and the conductor read their copy of the orders, too. Then the conductor goes to work at his desk again. The caboose is really his office. There he checks the papers that tell where every freight car in the train is supposed to go.

The brakeman pours himself a cup of coffee that’s been heating on the stove in the caboose. Then he climbs to his seat in the cupola—the little tower with windows through which he can watch the train. Squirrel cage is a nickname for the cupola. The caboose has the most nicknames of all. Crib, crum box, crummy, bounce, doghouse, parlor and monkey house are some of them.

Safety is everybody’s job on a train, and each man in the crew knows the rules. If the train makes an emergency stop, the men take care that no other train will bump into them. One brakeman runs out ahead and the other runs back along the track with signal flags to warn the other trains. At night they take along fusees, which look like giant firecrackers and burn with a bright red warning glow. Torpedoes are the best warning of all.

The brakeman fastens torpedoes to the track with little clamps. Then, if a locomotive runs over them, they explode with loud bangs that tell the engineer to stop before he runs into the stalled train ahead.

The first regular stop for Sam’s train is a station where the tender is filled with water. The long string of freight cars waits here on a siding while a fast passenger train goes by.

On the next part of Sam’s trip, the train has to climb some steep grades. One engine alone can’t do all the work, so a helper engine couples on just ahead of the caboose. On the days when Sam’s train is extra long and heavy, two helpers are needed.

Going downhill in the mountains is work, too—work for the brakes. In the old days, the brakeman had to run along the tops of freight cars and “club down.”

That means he used a long club called a sap, to turn the wheels that set the hand brakes on each car.

The catwalks or decks along the car roofs made a path for the brakemen. Sometimes they walked up and down inspecting the train. Then they said they were “deckorating.”

Fast freight cars, and slow ones, too, now have air brakes which are squeezed against the wheels by compressed air. Every car has an air hose that runs underneath it to the brake machinery. The hose from each car can be joined to the hose on the ones behind and in front, and finally to the locomotive’s hose. A pump in the locomotive compresses the air for the whole train. Now if the engineer wants to stop, he just moves a lever. A whoosh of air tightens the brakes on every car.

When the train goes down a long hill, the squeezing of the brakes can actually make the wheels get red hot. Some freight trains have to stop and let the wheels get cool. But the cars in Sam’s train have a sort of fan built into the brake machinery. The fan cools the wheels, and the redball freight goes right on down.

After a while, Sam takes a little scoop and tosses some sand into the firebox. He knows that the engine’s flues are likely to get clogged up with soot, and the sand will clean them out. Later on, sand does an even more important job. The train has run into a storm in the cold, high mountains. Slushy snow has frozen on the rails. Instead of pulling ahead, the engine’s wheels begin to slip round and round.

But the engineer fixes that easily. He squirts sand onto the slick track to make the wheels pull again. The sand comes from the dome, which is the hump you can see behind the stack on top of a locomotive. Pipes lead down from the dome on each side and aim the sand onto the track just in front of the driving wheels.

A locomotive’s sand is just as important as coal and water. Ice or rain or even the dampness in a tunnel can make slippery tracks. So the railroads keep supplies of fine dry sand to fill the domes. Sam always checks to see if he has enough sand when the tender takes on coal.

The huge coal towers in big freight yards can fill several tenders at once. Often, while the loading goes on, ashes from the locomotive’s firebox get cleaned out at the same time. There is a dump pit under the tracks, with little cars that run on their own rails. After a little car is filled with ashes, it can be pushed away and unloaded at the ash heap.

When Sam pulls into the next big freight yard, his part of the run is finished. After a while he will board another engine and take another freight train back to his home station. He has a regular schedule for work. That doesn’t seem strange these days, but Sam’s grandfather would have thought it was something miraculous.

In the old days, grandfather never knew what time he’d have to leave for work. Sometimes, when he was just ready to blow out the kerosene lamp and go to bed, there would be a knock at the door. On the dark porch stood a boy, still panting from a bicycle ride up the street. He was the railroad call boy, and he’d come to say that an engineer was needed right away. Grandfather had been assigned to the job. So he pulled on his clothes and went off, no matter how sleepy he was.

The place where Sam leaves his train is called a division point. Other men will take over all the cars of redball freight and speed them on another division of their trip. Let’s see who these different railroaders are and what they do.