Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura
In 1960, looking west from the Texas and Pacific freight yard in El Paso, Texas, you’d see the lines of the rails curving off to the north, towards the city buildings and smokestacks in the distance.
In the yard, after an engine gave a rail car a push on its way, workers might uncouple the car and let it roll under its own momentum down the way, or simply release a brake to start it in motion. During the day and the night, children from the neighboring houses would find their way into the yard, along with itinerant workers and drifters. Cars and trucks following Tornillo Street, a public road, across the dozen or so rails in the yard, might find heavy train cars traveling straight towards them or blocking their way.For the men working on the trains, it felt like a dangerous situation. The photos shown here were taken by engineers and other rail workers on tracks across the country, in an effort to prove how hazardous these places could be and to show why cutting crews was a terrible idea.
Starting around the 1950s, the railroad business had started sliding into a decline, even as the engines had modernized from wood- and coal-burning to sleeker diesel machines. But both passenger and commercial business had fallen as cars and trucks became the dominant mode of transportation in the United States. Under President Eisenhower, the Interstate Highway System was authorized in 1956. Railroads saw the future and were trying to cut costs—which meant cutting crews—where they could.
Since the 1920s, safety regulations had helped determine the make-up of crews on the train. In the days of steam engines, every train had an engineer, who operated the train, and a fireman…
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