WHITE MOUNTAIN RAILROAD

Spent a day poking around the railroad yard in North Conway N.H. last week. They run a number of tourist trains out of this station throughout the year.

I'm always impressed with the tools designed to solve industrial problems. Imagine trying to turn around a locomotive or bring in rail cars from different tracks for servicing. How do you do that in a limited space. The solution was the turntable, a device which allowed rail rolling stock to be turned or moved in a limited space. We see a similar design with swing bridges but they don't turn when cars are sitting on them. I suspect the early turntables were small and moved by hand.

This is the same turntable but you can see the locomotive waiting its turn to be brought into the yellow shed for servicing.

The old train stations were the hub of the community, always a place where goods were delivered and dispersed years ago before we had airplanes, computers, UPS or PURLATOR. As a kid I would help the delivery man at the local CPR station collect bushels of chilled chickens in ice and stack them in a rail car chilled with ice-blocks. At night the car would be collected by a train on its way to Toronto and those chickens would end up in restaurants or grocery stores throughout the city.

Trains don't have a caboose any more but back when those chickens were on their way to Toronto  every freight train had a brakeman who rode at the back of the train in the caboose. When the train needed to change tracks the brakeman flipped the switch or unhitched the car if one needed to be left on a siding.  Railroading was much more labour intensive back then.