C&) standard watchman's shanty

There has always been need for small shelters for railroad personnel stationed at various locations serving as watchmen. When railroading was a very labor intensive industry, people could be used to do many jobs that technology would later take over or make obsolete.

Many railways employed watchmen to flag highway grade crossings as trains passed, either in an era before electric automatic crossing gates (or flashers), or because the railway didn't want to invest in the new installations but needed positive protection against highway-railway accidents.

There were few crossing watchmen used by the C&O. The Railway's line, however, went through rugged territory, and there was a greater need for people to be stationed near areas that were prone to land/rock slides and washouts. These track-walkers (also called "bluff watchmen" in some locales) usually had a fixed stretch of the line to patrol regularly, and, of course, during adverse weather conditions they needed a place to warm up or dry out between these patrols. The usual structure was some sort of nondescript, simple, and quite small building with a typical Burnside pot-bellied stove and chair as its only furnishings.

We don't have any C&O standard watchman's shanty drawings before the one shown on the facing page, which was drawn rather late, in 1941. We assume that these structures were either left to the discretion of the Division Carpenter Forces to build, or that the standard drawings have not survived.

The small print on this drawing, which can perhaps best be read with a magnifying glass, states the variances between the regular structure and one that was intended for use by a crossing watchman or guard.

As can be imagined, these ugly little structures were not a target of many photographers, so illustrations are fairly rare. The two photos that accompany this article show the shanty strictly because it happened to be in an area where the photographer wanted to capture something else.

The photo at left shows the shanty, unpainted and missing its sliding window, at the big cut near Jerry's Run, at the top of the Alleghany grade west of Covington. The grain in the boards is plainly visible, so it can be assumed that it was never painted, or had weathered for so long that no paint was left. Notice that it is the style with two windows, looking out in each direction. This is the type that the drawing specifies for crossings. Notice also, the signal board appended to the eaves is not shown on the drawing. The signal is in the shanty's photo because this is a bluff watchman's location. If he found a slide or one occurred in his field of view, he then would set the signal at stop to prevent trains from hitting the debris. Note that the watchman himself is standing across the track from the shanty. This photo was made in 1945 as the cut was being enlarged to prevent slides.

The photo on the facing page is a view of the big excavation work involved in the 1945 Jerry's Run cut sloping project. Another watchman's shanty is seen in the lower left, obviously from a time before this construction began. Undoubtedly it was eliminated by this work. This structure is slightly larger than the standard and has a fixed segmented window (eight lites or panes) but in other ways is similar, such as its unpainted sheathing.

Any model railroad set in rugged territory needs to have watchman's shanties at appropriate locations. The drawing reproduced here appears in Chesapeake & Ohio Maintenance-of- Way Standards, Vol 1, for sale by the C&OHS under catalog No. DS-7-034 for $16.95. It is one of 117 drawings of small structures, signs, and similar M-of-W structures, and has a wealth of information about this important but often neglected aspect of railroading.

Copyright Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society, Inc. Nov 1999
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