Photo of the Week: 3/25/2011

It's Friday, and time for another Photo of the Week! First off, I realize I missed this post last week. I was having problems uploading the photo all weekend, and when Monday came around and it still wasn't working I decided to just skip it. So this week's photo is the one I was going to post last week.

I went to Long Island again for a couple of days last week. I made it there in less than 27 hours this time, so I had a little time to do some railfanning. While at Mineola, my regular stomping ground on Long Island, I witnessed a rather unique event where one of the Nassau Tower workers came out of the tower, flagged a train down, and handed off train order forms to the conductor. Of course, I had a camera handy, and took lots of photos of this event. Here is the best one:

The train was coming off the Oyster Bay Branch and stopping at Mineola, so it was going rather slowly. It was headed back to Jamaica when the tower employee came out and stood by the pedestrian crossing. When the train came into view, she walked out to the track and the train stopped. She explained what the paperwork was and handed it off to the conductor. A slow order had been issued between Merillon Avenue and Bellerose. The westbound main track was being worked on, and all trains were using the eastbound track between those points. The track speed had been reduced from 80mph to 35mph for the duration of the track work. After the hand off, the train and the tower employee went their separate ways.

Before the advent of the radio and telephone, this practice was much more common. Back then, most depots had operators who would communicate with the dispatcher by telegraph. The operator would receive the train orders and when the right train appeared, he would go out with a hoop and "hoop" the orders up to the train's crew. It is hard to describe the hoop, but it is basically a long pole which had the orders attached to it. I have a photo of one here. However, with modern radio communications, train crews talk directly to the dispatcher and write down their own orders. The practice of hooping is now obsolete, but still used on a very rare occasion. I do not know why this train got their orders the old fashioned way rather than over the radio, but I was not complaining about the chance to see it happen!