How to hoop an engine

The sun has dropped and in its wake steel-purple cutouts of silos, out-buildings, hedge rows and willows are propped against an alabaster sky. Beside the ditch on the old rail line, beyond clumps of teasel and burdock is a squared post rising ghostlike from the ground. The burdocks shackle my socks when I try to get a closer look, but from here I can see that it is more than garage height with the number 28, painted black on white. Bleached from years of standing, the pole fades into the vanishing light.

“Up in the engine the rail seems to be coming up at you all of the time…it’s beautiful to sit up in there and watch the rails go by.” The sound of a diesel train wails from far-off as Aubrey Sharpe describes the era of steam from the comfort of his living room in Trenton. Aubrey was a railway station agent when Morse code sent on a wire was a standard of communication; and before the time of signal lights to guide trains running on a single track in opposite directions. The system ran on discipline and strict timing. The ‘Uniform Code of Operating Rules’ was the holy book for train crew while for over a century and a half, the railway watch, checked for accuracy every 90 days, was the “pocket deity” of the industry.

“If you rode in a coal engine and I had to be dressed pretty good to be at the station…I’d have a white shirt on…by the time I got there I would be black with the coal dust and smoke,” Aubrey tells me. Without speedometers, an engineer timed the train between mile boards on his ‘turnip’ or pocket watch while the dispatcher referenced time to control train traffic and to estimate a train’s position. He would telegraph orders telling one of the oncoming trains to ‘take the hole,’ as the siding was referred to. “It was like a chess game,” Jim Munsey, a former train dispatcher, once said. “You issued train orders based on the timetable, told trains where to meet, where to wait for other trains, which trains to pass, which not to pass. You tried to set it up so they met with a minimum of delay and no risk of collision,” he said. “When you delivered orders to a station for a train on the line, and it passed that station, it was gone until the next station. And if you made a mistake on those orders there was no way to get a hold of him to tell him to stop…there was a lot of stress and strain,” Munsey said.

Aubrey illustrates how a station agent used something called a hoop; a long bamboo fishing pole affair bent into a figure 9 at one end to which a telegraph message would be attached. “I tell you when you got out there and stood right beside the track…that’s the engine”—he points to the sofa—“they were going full speed and you were only 10 inches away…and you’d stand right here”—pointing to the rug —“and you might have two hoops or three,” he goes on. “The engineer would see me out there…and he could see the order board was on green…that indicated to him that he was going to get a hoop and take an order on the go…if it was a double header…boy that was a trick …you had to hoop both engines and the conductor as well…you’d have two arms out there and the conductor would be down on the bottom step of the caboose…the hoop you used for the tail end was only half as long.” Aubrey’s telling is real enough that the room quakes with the thunder and whistle of a 300-tonne locomotive in full flight with smoke trailing, “her tail over her back” in rail speak. I hang on to my seat.

“So you stood out there with your train order clipped to the hoop,” Aubrey looks like he’s casting for trout. “And the engineer would put his arm like this out of the window,” now he’s hooking his arm as if in a square dance. “You held the hoop up as high as he is and he’d guide his arm through it and take the message off and throw the hoop out along the tracks…and then you hooped the conductor as well…he’d come out on the step of the caboose and he’d just…pung….grab it. Some would hang onto to it or if they couldn’t get the message out they’d delay before throwing it…just to see me walk along a mile of track…they’d get a laugh,” Aubrey continues. “I’d love to hear the whistle and that drive arm that rattled…you could hear it coming two miles down the track.”

Now sitting on my back porch picking burdocks from my socks I think about how the extraordinary is often found within the everyday. How a simple curiosity by the wayside—a ‘mile board’— greeting one passerby, turns out to be a symbol of a way of life for another.