The Deadliest Coupler in Railroad History

There was a hiring ritual in American rail yards in the 1880s that tells you everything you need to know about the most dangerous job in the country. A man would walk up looking for work as a brakeman. The yardmaster would not ask for references. He would just say one thing. Hold up your hands. If the man was missing two or three fingers, he got the job. Missing fingers meant experience. Missing fingers meant he had survived long enough to lose them. The thing that took those fingers was the link and pin coupler, and for half a century it was the deadliest piece of equipment in America. To join two freight cars, a brakeman had to step in between them while they were moving, hold an iron link up by hand, and drop a pin at the exact half second the cars slammed together. Half a second late and the cars closed on his hand, his arm, or him. In December of 1891 President Benjamin Harrison stood before Congress and told them that in a single year, three hundred sixty nine brakemen had been killed and over seven thousand maimed coupling cars. The fix already existed. A former Confederate major named Eli Janney, working as a dry goods clerk in Virginia, had whittled a wooden model of a knuckle coupler on his lunch breaks and patented it back in 1873. The railroads were in no hurry to pay for it. In this video we walk through the entire story. We cover how the link and pin actually worked and why it maimed so many men. We get into the staggering casualty numbers the federal government finally could not ignore. We tell the story of Eli Janney and the design that still holds every freight train in North America together today. And we walk through the 1893 Railroad Safety Appliance Act, the first time Washington ever reached into a private industry to make it stop killing its own workers. If you worked the yards, or your father or grandfather did, the comments are for you. Hold up your hands. The old timers knew exactly what that meant. #RailroadHistory #LegendaryLocomotives #LinkAndPin #Brakeman #EliJanney #SafetyApplianceAct #RailroadSafety #AmericanRailroads #TrainHistory