My Father Said ... 6

During our conversation on the 27th of November in 1997, my father, Joe Rhode, explained the meaning of the old-time abbreviation LCL: “Less than Carload Lots,” which, as Dad said, “meant that railroadmen had to unload one or more items—but not an entire carload—from a railroad boxcar. They hated doing this. They quit around the early stages of World War II, and small businesses, individuals, and mail-order companies had to resort to trucks.” Harley McDonald, “the station agent for the CA&S, said he sometimes saw the railroad car, which he knew to be carrying a shipment or package destined for unloading at Pine Village, go past as many as six times. It would go back and forth twice, or three times, up to the sixth time when, finally, the package would be unloaded. McDonald knew which car it was on because he [knew] the number on the car. McDonald told people that, when ordering from Chicago, they should request routing from Chicago by the Illinois Central. McDonald said that the C&EI was so unreliable that you could not predict when your freight might arrive. The Illinois Central would get the freight to the CA&S much more reliably.”

My Sketch of Harness Terms Dictated by My Father

My father continued, “A CA&S boxcar could hold 2,000 bushels of wheat. Until Pine Village had a scales, the man filling out the bill of lading would write SWL&C, which meant Shipper’s Weight, Load, and Count—a disclaimer.” In a conversation on the 28th of June in 1998, my father said that coal was “loaded into a boxcar, then brought to Pine Village. A man would have to throw it out by hand to get to the floor. [Then he could] slide [a] scoop along the floor. A man could pitch out fifty-five to sixty tons of coal from one car in two days.”

Before my father’s memory, “Pine Village had a drayage business,” as Dad said to me during a conversation on Christmas in 1997. “Men could haul goods to the stores from the railroad or would haul heavy pieces of furniture. This business ceased sometime around World War I.”

Charlie Russell, the husband of my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Elma Russell, “apprenticed as a telegraph operator at the railroad station in Pine Village.” McDonald “told Charlie … [to] get a job with a major railroad. [The] Nickel Plate hired him to work on a part of the line that had been the Lake Erie & Western Railroad. He first went to Gibson City, Illinois, or, more accurately, the Gibson Transfer, a large railroad yard near Gibson City. [His] title would have been ‘agent.’ Then he came to Templeton, where he replaced the retiring Nickel Plate agent. Charlie remained there until he retired.”

Photo Courtesy of the School of Mechanical Engineering and Purdue University

Purdue University, located in West Lafayette about twenty miles east of Pine Village, planned to build a railroad museum. Dad said that “the incomplete museum contained many items, including cabbage-stack locomotives of various descriptions, passenger cars—some with leather tops—and other locomotives showing the progress of technology.” Dad recalled “a weathered frame building on the old campus” that “held all of that rolling stock. Someone donated a large locomotive to Purdue that was not part of the museum. I remember seeing it at about the time I was a junior in high school. It was for instructional purposes. It [had] drive wheels mounted on rollers and running at thirty or forty miles per hour.” Dad must have seen the roller-mounted locomotive about three years before Purdue closed its locomotive testing facility.