Origin of railroad slang

I'm a Railroader with just a couple of years under my belt,I've always wondered about the origin of some of the slang that is used,any old heads out here? Tie-up,Tie down,mark up, mark off, these are just a few that come to mind.

I would hazard a guess that tie-up comes from when a horseman or
cowboy would tie up his horse at the end of the day at the ranch or saloon. vs tie up in RR speak is going off duty.

Mark up, mark off, come from when boards were actually boards on the train masters wall and actually got marked on, at least thats the way I understand it.

that's what I thought about mark up and mark off,the cowboy deal, well I did not make that connection.the thing about mark up is I've heard it used a couple of different ways.A new hire is promoted,marked up.A man makes himself available from off sick or vacatoin,mark up.End of tour of duty mark off or tie up.

extra-man wrote:that's what I thought about mark up and mark off,the cowboy deal, well I did not make that connection.the thing about mark up is I've heard it used a couple of different ways.A new hire is promoted,marked up.A man makes himself available from off sick or vacatoin,mark up.End of tour of duty mark off or tie up.

mark off is laying off not tie up at end of the day. power is right about it being related to the days when they had an actual board in the crew callers office(back then crew management was local not centalized)when you were marked up your name was up on the board, marked off your name was off the board.

Getting "marked up" comes from the days when there would be a physical board in the yard office with all the available train crews "marked" on it. If you were in service, you were "marked up" and available for a train. When you were off duty, you were "marked off" because your name had been removed from the active list until you were rested.

"Rack it out"

Full Throttle

The injectors are set to the Governor. The reference is, Governor setting of 1.00 is equal to 1 inch of injector stroke. If I remember correctly a 645E3 had a full throttle setting of .87.

So racking it out is accelerating the Engine to rated horsepower...... now, Idle to 8.

Its been awhile, we used a tool to measure the injector stroke, not a ruler....

ExEMDLOCOTester wrote:
Full Throttle

Heres the three i can think of:

Rake The Throttle

Swipe It

Skinner Back

UPRR engineer wrote:

ExEMDLOCOTester wrote:
Full Throttle

Heres the three i can think of:

Rake The Throttle

Swipe It

Skinner Back

I never heard the old guys use Skinner Back. Sounds kinda kinky....

Hi-Daddy: Assigned Local/Job, anything the crew can do to get the job back in town as soon as possible. A Hi-Daddy Day is usually the crews friday.

Hi-daddy is/was also a type of flying switch where you would kick a car uphill, scoot the loco into the clear, and allow the car to roll back downhill past the switch. Kind of like rolling them by, except you didn't bother to tie the car down, cut the power off, get in the clear, THEN release the brake. You just sent it up the hill and hoped you had time to do what you needed before gravity did its thing. Certainly not in today's rule books but yes, I've done it.

Probably that was related to UP's post - on get-away day when you're going for a quit, you might do a hi-daddy to save time and get done quicker.

Here you go.



http://catskillarchive.com/rrextra/glossry1.Html

git a holt to it wrote:Here you go.



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