Forwarded by Bill James (in Guelph):

 

Interesting...  'Distant' is likely to be the right word rather than 'distance', but my knowledge of North American practice is on the negative side of trivial.  I do have a book on the subject somewhere, and I'll look it out. The 'dry roar' certainly could be the safety valves lifting, but quite possibly also the blower, needed to create a draught while the locomotive is standing, and preventing blowback when there is no exhaust from the cylinders to the blast pipe. It would be a ring of holes around the blast pipe nozzle fed with live steam and controlled from the cab. It produces the same ejector effect as the normal exhaust blast to create a vacuum in the smokebox. It can be very loud.  – Andrew Foster

 

 

We have been asked by a correspondent in Italy about an apparently missing annotation in our notes on Letter 7 of From Tideway to Tideway, which has the rather confusing title of ‘Captains Courageous’ (it has nothing to do directly with the ‘Captains Courageous, novel of 1896).

The missing annotation will be found (or rather, won’t be) at page 80, line 28, and is part of Kipling’s impressions of life on a transcontinental train of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a journey he made, in this case west-to-east, on his way back from his and Carrie's aborted honeymoon in Japan, in July 1892.

I did the original annotation, and anyway, I seem to be the Society’s (self-appointed) railway expert, so I have been asked to fill in the missing annotation.  The quote to be annotated is “the dry roar of the engine at the distance signal."  Now, I think I know what Kipling is getting at.  When a train is stopped out of course by a signal, the engine will indicate its presence to the signalman by whistling, but also it will announce its presence by  the safety valves lifting – and when they lifted, they did indeed do so with a roar.  When an engine is stopped out of course, one moment the fireman will have a white-hot fire, producing steam at the maximum rate for the locomotive to use, and the next, it will have suddenly stopped, with a boiler full of steam, which is suddenly not needed and the fire producing more steam every second – so it will inevitably blow off.  So far, so good.  But it is the “at the distance signal” which bothers me and I wonder if Kipling isn’t being a bit too clever.  Such railway expertise as Kipling possessed at this time was of English or Indian practice (and at that time Indian = English).  English railways were signalled, at that time, on a system referred to as ‘absolute block’, in which a railway was divided into ‘block sections’, each usually from one station to the next, controlled by a signalman in a signal box.  Each section had a ‘Home’ signal which marked the end of one block section, and admitted the train into the station limits which marked the end of one section and the start of the next.  And there was a ‘distant’ signal which gave warning of the indication, ‘clear’ or ‘danger’ of the home signal (so that he engine didn’t suddenly come round a curve, say, to suddenly find the ‘home’ signal at danger, and be unable to stop in time, with possibly adverse consequences).  But a distant signal, which had two positions, ‘clear’ or ‘caution’, did not require the engine and train to stop if it was indicating ‘caution’ – the driver was authorised to pass it, at a reduced speed, being ready to stop at short notice, usually whistling as he passed the ‘distant’ at ‘caution’.

That, as I say, was English practice at that time (and in some the remoter parts of Network Rail it still is – just.  Mostly all signalling is now concentrated in a small number of central control centres, though the absolute block principle still applies.)  But Kipling was writing about the Canadian Pacific when it was no more than seven years old – about 98% of its mileage was single track, controlled by a train order system, which utilised the telegraph to pass orders for a train’s movements, which was the same as American practice.  There were no fixed signals every few miles along the track, as in Britain – there might be a single signal at a depot, but there were no ‘distance’, or ‘distant’ signals – the train proceeded under the authority of its ‘orders’, passed to it by the ‘dispatcher’, which gave it clearance to proceed to the next depot where orders for the next section would be received.  Some readers may remember the railroad ballad about ‘Casey Jones’ who “mounted to his cab with his orders in his hand”.  And Kipling later learned a great deal more of American railroad practice, as it applied to the eastern railroads, from the depot agent at Brattleboro, Dave Carey, on which he based his tale .007.

However, I do not know the details of American and Canadian railroad practice in the 1890s, and I am hoping that somewhere among our readership we have a railroad buff, probably in the USA or Canada, who can set me straight before I write the annotation.to answer our Italian correspondent.

Help!