About the columnist
Novelist Sylvia Maner Nickels of Colonial Heights, a member of the Lost State Writers Association, has written several books, including short stories, works of nostalgia and mystery.
Her column “Life Slices” includes a wide vareity of subjects, ranging from current events and world problems to experiences of growing up on a very rural Georgia farm.
We think you will find her column amusing and informative, a work worthy of your interest and attention.
Look for “Life Slices” each weekend in the Daily News, the Washington County News and the Scott County News.
By Sylvia Maner Nickels
I love trains. I’m old enough (barely) to re-call the wail of steam engines across the cotton fields on a frosty Georgia morning. I once dated a guy who worked at Inman Yards in Atlanta. While surfing the internet a while back I came across a list of the rather strange nicknames for various jobs on railroads long ago.
“Baby Lifter” - Brakeman. Maybe he helped carry babies on the train for
their mothers?
“Bakehead” - Nickname for the Fireman, because his head was so close to the fire box while he was shoveling coal.
“Big E” - The Engineer.
“Brass Hat” - A railway executive (usually a division manager or higher).
“Bull” - Railroad detective.
“Conductor” - Traditionally, the railroad employee who walked up and down the aisles of the passenger cars taking tickets, etc.
“Door Slammer” - What freight trainmen called passenger trainmen.
“Flagman” - The rear brakeman. To be a Flagman, the brakeman had to know how to read, so he could understand train orders, which from time to time would be changed enroute. Most Flagmen were proud of the fact that they were Flagmen, which set them above their fellow brakemen who could not read.
“Lighting Slinger” - A railroad telegraph operator.
“Iron Bender” - A switchman.
“Gandy Dancer” - Name given to a railroad track worker. The name came from the Gandy Manufacturing Company in the 1800’s who made a lot of track tools.
When I was a child in rural Georgia we often walked to town or to visit a neighbor. Walking gave us a closer relationship to roads than most of us have now and of necessity, a smaller known world.
After a heavy rain, we knew which roads would be impassable because babbling brooks with no bridges had become raging torrents. Sometimes a road had been ‘scraped’ by the county highway department. A huge grader with a wide, angled steel blade on its front would scrape and smooth out the ruts. Then dump trucks would spread a layer of crushed rock. The improved roadway was easier on car transmissions, but painful for our bare feet.
US Highway 78, The Bankhead, was the nearest paved road in our county. Built during the war of concrete, not asphalt, the highway was named for Georgia’s then U. S. Senator William Bankhead.
Atlanta, a city I considered unimaginably far away though it was only about forty miles, lay in one direction. Six miles in the other direction was Temple and after that The Bankhead continued through a slightly bigger town, Bremen.
These were the only towns with which I was actually familiar though I knew others existed. I heard grownups speak of Dallas, Rockmart, Cedartown, and Tallapoosa. I understood that The Bankhead continued on past Tallapoosa to the Alabama town, Oxford, then Heflin, and in the misty distance, Birmingham. Altogether my actual experienced world had a radius of perhaps a hundred miles until I was nearly in my ‘teens.
