"David Nebenzahl" <nobody@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote
> Just curious: has anyone here ever been hit in the head/face by a
> telltale? That, after all, was their function. (Me, I've never even seen
> one in its native habitat.)
No, hitting you in the face was *never* their intended function.
Since anyone on a cartop who was facing in the train's direction of travel
would have seen not only the telltale but the upcoming obstruction itself
long before anything could hit them in the face; the telltale was intended
only to alert men who were walking the cartops facing towards the caboose,
and who therefore had their backs turned to the upcoming bridge girder,
tunnel ****tal, or whatever.
Thus the dangling ropes would brush your shoulders and perhaps the back of
your head as you passed them, but would have no chance of hitting you in
the
face unless you happened to suddenly spin around at exactly the right
(wrong) moment.
We had two telltales in the town where I grew up, protecting both ends of
the shortest truss bridge on the entire S.P. system [1], and the train
never
crossed that bridge at anything over 10 MPH anyway, so I doubt that there
could have been much pain in any case, since the ropes appeared to be
something on the order of 3/8" hemp with a knot tied in each dangling end
to
prevent their unraveling.
-Pete
[1] The truss bridge is still there. It wasn't considered worth cutting up
to scrap. The telltales -and the tracks themselves- have been gone now
for
over 40 years.
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