Brakemen on cars old time RailRoading

Before modern air brakes and when brakemen rode on the cars, how many cars were assigned to them to turn the brakes on?
Just wondering about this question, probably varies with RR policy?

Trains were really short back then compared to today, so there probably wasnt an assigned number of cars to be tied down.

I might be wrong here, but im pretty sure they (brakemen) took signals from the engineer when he blew the whistle as to, when to start tying, when to stop, and when to kick them off.

Along with those whistle signals theres "toots" to protect the the train and ones to call the flagmen back.