"Brakeman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... With the express messenger and a brakeman carrying Toddles, Kelly kicked in the station door, and set his lamp down on ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... after having had their tea, the wounds have to be freshly dressed. This takes till midnight, perhaps longer, and the surgeon must be on the watch continually, for on him falls the responsibility, not only of the welfare of the men, but of the safety of the train. There is a conductor and brakeman, and for them, too, there is no rest. Each finds enough to do as nurse or assistant. In the morning, after a breakfast of delicious coffee or tea, dried beef, dried peaches, soft bread, cheese, etc., the wounds have ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... where a freight-car marked for the Hill Country division of the road, with devices intelligible to the train-men, had been shunted down by a pony engine in obedience to mystical semaphoric gesticulations, from the brakeman risking his life for the purpose among the rails, addressed to the engineer keeping his hand on the pulse of the locomotive, and his head out of the cab window to see how near he could come to killing ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... evil like our railroad management with its yearly tale of bloodshed and dismemberment, its hundreds and thousands of killed and wounded. We cannot pick out and hang a director or president when the dead brakeman is dragged out from between the cars that did not have automatic couplers. The man is dead, is killed, is murdered—but we cannot fix responsibility. Can we arrest for murder the poor mother who is caring for her boy sick with typhoid fever; just because she empties ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... was carried past his stopping place, and the station at which he was set off was a few miles nearer Philadelphia than he had hoped to get. But the brakeman told him that the Quaker City was still fifty ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... as these kept Evan interested until the brakeman shouted "Hometon next!" Then a lofty and exulting happiness took the place of interest. He looked on the approaching spires and humble cupolas of his home town with an expression possibly similar to that of an eagle in flight over a settlement ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... railway brakeman," Ventner said, rushing up to the boys with an air of importance, "that the two lads you are in search of were seen leaving a box car at a little station in Ohio. I don't just recall the name of the ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher
... the head, and say, 'Nice doggie, nice doggie, old fellow,' even if it is a street cur, with a chawed ear, and no tail. They growl and show their teeth, but they like it. A woman—Lordy! there comes the brakeman. Let's beat it. Ain't we ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... was up to Skiplap, there was a swell party on the car—kind of a coppery-lookin' blonde. Allie Ash, the brakeman on No. 4, he tells me she used to be in Spokane, and now she'd got her hooks on to some minin' property up in the Coeur d'Alene. Course, this mightn't ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... estimate of the affable brakeman (a gentleman wearing sky-blue army pantaloons tucked into cowhide boots, half-buttoned vest, flannel shirt open at the throat, and upon his red hair a flaring-brimmed black slouch hat) we were making a fair average of twenty miles an hour across the greatest country ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... The blacksmith climbs into a city pulpit. The popular preacher becomes an excellent insurance agent. The saloon-keeper develops into the legislator, and wears the broadcloth and high hat of the politician. The brakeman becomes the railway magnate, and the college graduate a grocer's clerk, and the messenger-boy, picking up by chance one day the pen, and finding it run easier than his legs, becomes a power on a city journal, and advises society how to conduct ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a leading of Providence which he would be culpable to refuse. Providence had answered his prayer in permitting him to pass the American frontier safely, and Northwick must not be derelict in fulfilling his part of the agreement. The Canadians borrowed the brakeman's lantern, and began to study a map which they spread out on their knees. The one who seemed first among them put his finger on a place in the map, and said that was the spot. It was in the region just back of Chicoutimi. Gold had always been found there, ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... out of the train at Ponkwasset Falls, and the conductor and the brakeman, who knew Dan as his father's son, and treated him with the distinction due a representative of an interest valued by the road, had bidden him a respectfully intimate good-night, and he began to climb the hill to his father's house, he recurred to the difficulty ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... you're splintered in place o' bein' clean you don't want him to learn the difference at your cost. If you lose your leg, Mrs. Lathrop, it certainly will be a awful thing for you. A woman can't ever say 's she was a brakeman or in the war, 'n' them 's the only good excuses 's can be give. Then, too, if you have a wooden leg 'n' the wind catches you at it, it'll take you in a way 's 'll make you look more like a scarecrow 'n a Christian. Mrs. Macy says 't she ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... had to make of him was that he was too fussy about his caboose. His former brakeman had asked to be transferred because, he said, "Kennedy was as fussy about his car as an old maid about her bird-cage." Joe Giddy, who was braking with Ray now, called him "the bride," because he kept the caboose and bunks ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... the other robbers escaped the wounded bandit eluded the conductor, and made his way into the sleeper, where he climbed into an empty berth. But he was soon traced by the drops of blood from his wound. The conductor and a brakeman hauled him out and battled with him in the aisle amid the ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... near it; hence the smoke, which escaped through a crack and floated above him. The few people in the car were climbing out of the windows as best they might. A pair of grimy arms reached down to Demming, and he heard the brakeman's voice (he knew Jim Herndon, the brakeman, well) shouting profanely ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... the crowded car, also carrying a number of packages. I leaned forward and asked Mrs. Peet to sit by me; it was a great pleasure to see her again. The brakeman seemed relieved, and smiled as he tried to put part of his burden into the rack overhead; but even the flowered carpet-bag was much too large, and he explained that he would take care of everything at the end of the ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... After asking the Brakeman if he had been to each of the leading churches, the querist finally suggested the Baptists. "Ah, ha!" he shouted. "Now you're on the Shore Line! River Road, eh? Beautiful curves, lines of grace at every bend and sweep of the river; ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... stuff you sent me. I guess the brakeman must have used it for a chair all the way. It was pretty well baled but that dont matter. And thanks for the fudge too. That was fudge wasnt it, Mable? And the sox. They dont fit but I can use them for somethin. A good soldier never throws nothin away. An thank your mother for the half pair of ...
— Dere Mable - Love Letters Of A Rookie • Edward Streeter
... and storm; and yet, when these men become old and helpless through accident, they are left to shift for themselves. The company is immortal, but the employees become helpless. Now, it seems to me that a certain per cent. should be laid aside, so that every brakeman and conductor could feel that he was providing for himself, as well as for his fellow-workmen, so that when the dark days came there would be a ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... The brakeman's life is full of risk and little comfort, and such moments as these were all too few. When they came they were more than gratefully received. Now the men were spread out in various attitudes of repose, and, for the ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... toward Cockermouth. The day was breaking. From the window Paul Ritson could see vaguely the few ruins of the castle. That familiar object touched him strangely. He hardly knew why, but he felt that a hard lump at his heart melted away. By and by the brakeman shouted to the signalman in the gray silence of the morning. The words were indifferent—only some casual message—but they were spoken in the broad Cumbrian that for a year and a half had never once fallen on Paul Ritson's ear. Then the lump that had melted as his heart ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... he travels, that the face of the newsboy brightens as he buys a paper from him, that the porter is all happiness, that conductor and brakeman are devotedly anxious to be of aid. Everywhere the man wins love. He loves humanity and humanity responds ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... said, "No." An instinctive wisdom seemed to direct Hetty's every step. She waited at some little distance from the station till the train came up: then, without going upon the station platform at all, she entered the rear car from the opposite side of the road. No one saw her; not even a brakeman. When the train began to move, the sense of what she had done smote her with a sudden terror, and she sprang to her feet, but sank down again, before any of the sleepy passengers had observed her motion. ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... his rest until the next afternoon, when the heat and the monotonous rumble of the train, together with its restful swaying, sent him off into a delicious doze, from which he was awakened by a brakeman barely in time to escape discovery. Thereafter he maintained more regular habits, and while no one but the luxury-loving youth himself knew what effort it required to cut short his slumbers in their sweetest part, he never missed his train, and in time the early ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... the conductor, with the gold bands on his cap, and the brakeman. They looked all around, and then straight at Bunny who still held his ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Aunt Lu's City Home • Laura Lee Hope
... one of the periodical cooks of mess No. 15 talk to us. He was a tall, resolute fellow, who had once been a brakeman on a railroad, and he kept us all pretty straight; from his fiat there ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... the character of the country changed suddenly just before you got there merely to justify the name. Surely no one would have the temerity to conjure up so beautiful a name for a desert town. Yet, half unwillingly, I thought of a little place I once visited—against my will, since the brakeman put me off there—by the name of Forest City. I remembered with misgivings how there wasn't a tree within something like four hundred miles. But I pushed that memory aside as a lying prophet. I believed in Goodale ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... then. The thing happened in no time, of course. The girl got over screaming, and ran down to the track, frightened out of her wits. The train managed to stop, about twice its own length farther down, round a bend in the track, and the conductor and brakeman came running back. The mother came out of her hovel, carrying twins. The—the—thing was on the track, across the rails. It was a beastly mess, and Ferguson got the girl away; set her down to cry in a pasture, and then went back and helped out, and gave his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... they ever traveled in a railroad car, or whether they suppose their hearers to be so ignorant of the most common facts as to believe that there is no way of bringing a carriage to a stand but by a sudden jerk, or that God is more stupid than the brakeman of an express train. We will do them the justice, however, to say, that they did not invent it, but merely shut their eyes, and opened their mouths, and swallowed it for philosophy, because they found it in the writings of an Infidel scoffer, and of a Neological professor of theology[305]—an edifying ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... but, thoroughly rural in his taste for sensation, the baggage-master leaped to the bottom step of the nearest car and spoke to a brakeman. The brakeman glanced at the first citizen with respect. There was a hissing noise and a jerk. When the train rumbled to a stop again under the startled eyes of Lindon, Abner Sawyer was already striding up the aisle. With the intelligent eyes of the young minister upon him, ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... for our brief monopoly of the railroad to the superintendent, engineer, stoker, poker, switch-tender, brakeman, baggage-master, and every other official in one. But who would grudge his tribute to the enterprise that opened this narrow vista through toward the Hyperboreans, and planted these once not crumbling sleepers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... been almost morning when, as they stopped at the last water tank west of Grand Forks, they were aroused from their slumbers by the bright rays shed by a lighted lantern held in the hands of a brakeman who roughly shouted: "Which way, kids?" "To Saint Paul," answered Joe. "Got some money, lads, with which you can square your ride?" inquired the railroad man, as he raised his lantern higher so he could the better estimate the fare he could charge his hobo-passengers, who had now risen ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... near Ogallala Station in September, 1868. The ends of two opposite rails were raised so as to penetrate the cylinders, the engine going over into the ditch and the cars piling up on top of it. The fireman was caught in the wreck and burned to death, the engineer and forward brakeman, riding on the engine, escaped unhurt. The train crew and passengers being armed, defended the train, keeping the Indians off until a wrecking train and crew arrived. Word being sent to Major North, who was at Willow Island, with one Company of his Pawnees, he ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... He looked out of the window as the train left the station, and saw a very pretty little child with a fluff of yellow hair, carrying a big doll, climbing laboriously on a train on the other track, with the tender assistance of a brakeman. She was in the wake of a very stout woman, who stumbled on her skirts going up the steps. Edwin Shaw thought that the child looked like Maria's little sister, but that she could not be, because the stout ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... railway service at Crestline, Ohio. On my way thither, while sitting on the end seat of the rear car watching the line, a farmer-looking man approached me. He carried a small green bag in his hand. He said the brakeman had informed him I was connected with the Pennsylvania Railroad. He wished to show me the model of a car which he had invented for night traveling. He took a small model out of the bag, which showed a section of ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... and rear-brakeman Joe, his right-hand man, who had just finished switching their train back on the main track, and getting it again started on its way toward New York. At the sight of Rod, who was of course a perfect stranger to them, sitting on the floor, hatless, covered with dust, ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... arranged the program of sports. At two o'clock there were races on the ice-foot. A seventy-five-yard course was laid out, and the ship's lanterns, about fifty of them, were arranged in two parallel rows, twenty feet apart. These lanterns are similar to a railway brakeman's lantern, only larger. It was a strange sight—that illuminated race-course within seven and a half ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... as a brakeman and five years on ditching trains before I went to braking. My old road master put me on the braking. A fellow got his fingers cut off and they turned his keys over to me and put me to braking and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... The brakeman and conductor came running in to see what was the matter. Nobody knew why the train had stopped. It was several minutes before they discovered the cause, but I had found out while Stuart was climbing ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... traveller by rail how space and time are annihilated! He is barely conscious of progress, only when the brakeman with measured tone shouts the name of the station; he looks up from his paper or rouses from his doze, looks out at the cheerless prospect, and then settles himself for another thirty miles. Time passes as unobserved as the meadows or bushy pastures ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... the intruder closed the door behind him, and lit a match. Peering from a knot-hole, Jack saw that the detective's guess was correct. It was a brakeman. ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... out—cold?" asked Grandpa Ford of a brakeman who came in an hour or so later, covered ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope
... reader, a German brakeman, who had worked in New York and was proud of being able to speak "American," who helped me to slip aboard the military postzug (post train) that left the important military centre of L—— at 1:30 A.M. and started ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... one coach lodge against a tree that was standing exactly in the right place to save it. And I've seen a passenger engine run by a signal and through a block and knock a single car out of a passing freight-train, at a crossing, and that car be the very one that the freight train's brakeman had just reached on his way to the caboose; just like somebody had timed it all, to the second, to kill him. And I've seen a whole wreck piled up, as high as a house, on top of a man, and the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... remains for a passing mention. A Yankee of Yankees, this, born on a New Hampshire farm, and to the ordinary traveller on the Wigmore branch of the railroad just a good-natured, round-faced, tobacco-chewing brakeman who would take a seat beside ladies of his acquaintance aid make himself agreeable until it was time to rise and bawl out, in the approved manner of his profession, the name of the next station. Fillmore Street knew ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... thrown away; so thought the upper classes and the lower classes. About the only people that paid car fare were the Knights of Pythias on their way to their annual convention. Railroad workers could get all the passes they wanted, and any toiler whose sister had married a brakeman or whose second cousin was a conductor "bummed" the railroad for a pass and got it. None of my relatives was a railroad man, and so to obtain the free transportation which was every American's inalienable right, I had to let the passenger trains ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... exchanged coats and caps the vag strolled leisurely down the track and in a little while Patsy followed. He had not gone three cars before the mob saw him and with the cry of "The scab! the scab!" sent a shower of sticks and stones after the flying brakeman. A rock struck Patsy on the head and he fell to the ground. The cap, which he had worn well over his eyes, fell off, and he was recognized by one of the strikers before his ribs could be kicked in. "Begad," said the leader of the mob, "it's the ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... a brakeman with a dirty blue bandana knotted about his brown throat, waved to them and shouted something which they could not hear. He held aloft a white stick from which he had peeled the green bark, pointed to it, then cast it back towards them and pointed ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... for dear life. "You're not going to leave me here, Dinky-Dunk, in the middle of this wilderness?" I cried out, while the conductor and brakeman and station-agent all called and holloed and ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... early freight train on the Old Colony railroad neared the bridge in Quincy, THOMAS ELLIS, a brakeman, raised up for the purpose of throwing off a bundle of newspapers, when he was struck by the timbers of the bridge and knocked senseless upon his car. He wan saved from rolling to the track by TIMOTHY LEE, a paper boy who ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... brakeman goes by swinging his lantern. The boys would like to ask him what time it is, but for one thing they're too bashful. Being a brakeman is almost as good as going with a "troupe" or a circus. You get to go to places that ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... year before Ed and got a steady job as brakeman on the railroad, over on the Coeur d'Alene Branch. He told me he was going to make railroading his life work and had started in at the bottom, which was smart of him, seeing he'd just come off a farm. They ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... a mad man, but the brakeman had gone to the caboose for his lunch pail. I ran to the switch. It was useless. I fought it an instant and then turned to the rails. Putting my foot against the main line rail, I grasped the switch ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... a railroad car, waiting for the train to start. It is winter, and the stove fills the car with pungent smoke. The brakeman enters, and my neighbor asks him to "stop that stove smoking." He replies that it will stop entirely as soon as the car begins to move. "Why so?" asks the passenger. "It always does," replies the brakeman. It is evident from this "always" that the connection between car moving and smoke ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... toward the cushioned back of the seat; the brown eyes drooped drowsily, and in a few minutes Betty was sound asleep. That was the last she knew of the trip that she had settled herself to enjoy, for when she awoke the brakeman was calling "Louisville!" at the top of his voice, and people were beginning to reach up to the racks overhead ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... though he were in one of the huge feather-beds at his grandfather's house—slept until the conductor shook him by the shoulder, when he opened his eyes, grunted, and closed them again. The train stopped, a brakeman yanked him roughly to his feet, put a cheap suit-case into his hand, and pushed him, still dazed, into the chill morning air. The train rumbled on and left him blinking into a lantern held up to his face, but he did not look promising as a hotel guest and the darky porter turned ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr. |
