In the early days of railroading they used telegraph for communication between and among stations. Sending info by telegraph is relatively slow process. Transmitting the names of stations was a common occurance, so it’d have been a real good idea for them to assign short codes to each station. Save a whole bunch of time.
However, just because it was a good idea doesn’t mean it occurred to someone to do it. Today rail operators do use such codes, but when they first start using them?
Codes have been used in telegraphing right from the get-go, for the reason you point out, and I’d be astonished if that didn’t include station codes, since the names of transmitting and receiving stations must be among the most frequently transmitted information.
Telegraph operators used a huge variety of short codes to make transmission easier. ‘Q’ codes are the most well known but there are a whole raft of others, often specific to a particular group; maritime, air etc. It would be astonishing if the rail operators didn’t develop their own and along with that, codes for cities and stations.
Of course, before the electric telegraph, there were flags and semaphore; both systems had a short code library. The Royal Navy had the Signal Book which vastly reduced the number of flags needed to send a routine message. NELSON'S TRAFALGAR SIGNALS
Yes, but my question is when did they start to do it? Do we have any lists of station codes from the early days of railroading? Say from the 1860s or 70s or around then?
According to Wiki, Amtrak didn’t start using station codes until 1992.
I expect that there might have been local abbreviations, but I doubt there was some system-wide effort to create such codes until computers became regularly used in train operations. Creating codes with a specific number of letters is most helpful for working with computer database fields.
From personal observation, many (most?) of the station codes just happen to be the same as the codes for the nearby airports. (No coincidence, I’m sure.) You can still get some eyes to open around here by mentioning that you’re taking a train from LAX.
As others noted, the use of station codes goes back to the earliest days of telegraph usage. Page 42 of the 1848 edition of Railway Appliances in the Nineteenth Century reviews the practice in England over a pre-Morse “needle” electric telegraph system:
Short codes were used for telegraph stations almost from the beginning, and that practice obviously continued when telegraphy began to be used by railways in the 1840s. It wasn’t just passenger stations, but also control towers that had short codes. Some junction points came to be known to railfans by their codes (KY Tower near Waukegan) rather than placenames.
I’m surprised to learn that Amtrak’s usage of three-letter codes only dates from the 1990s, but probably was needed for them to participate in SABRE, the main reservation network used by travel agents and airlines at the time.
I guess what I’m really asking is: Was there any kind of systematic assignment of codes to stations (even if only within one railroad’s system), or was it all ad hoc, making-it-up-as-they-went-along kind of thing? And if they did do the former, when did they do it?
It’s not like the rail lines couldn’t do the systematic stuff. For example, I know of at least three places where various railroads assigned station names in alphabetic order. That is, the first station name along a section of track starts with A, the next with B, etc.
I don’t see any clear patterns in the two early examples I was able to find:
“OFFICES AND OFFICE SIGNITURES” from the 1860 edition of Rules and Regulations for Conducting the Business of the Catawissa Rail Road:
Williamsport Depot, A.
Williamsport Supt’s Office, W.
Muncy Town, F.
Muncy Depot, Q.
Milton Depot, X.
Danville Town, G.
Danville Depot, N.
Catawissa, M.
Ringtown, 2.
Summit, B.
Tamaqua, S.
Ringold, R.
Port Clinton, P.
Philadelphia, J.
“Office Calls” from Telegraph Rules, adopted October 1, 1873. Lake Shore and Tuscarawas Valley Railway Company:
O Grafton.
S V Eharte.
D I Medina.
C Seville.
R S Russell.
W Warwick.
F Fulton.
M S Massillon.
Z Barr’s Mills.
D Dover.
N New Philadelphia.
X Uhrichsville.
U Dennison— P., C. & St. L. B’y Office.
Thanks, whitetho. Those are short lines and could get away with single, or at most two-letter codes. They really didn’t need any kind of systematic assignments. But what about the longer lines, that had hundreds of stations?
My guess: probably didn’t have any railroad-wide assignment system, but each subdivision had its own set of codes. After all, many of those subdivisions originated as a different railroad.
The Florida Chapter (FX) of the Morse Telegraph Club has a page with a large collection of Telegraph Call Signs. Other than being short, I don’t see any particular standards.
Thanks again Whitetho. To an extent, that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for. The publication of all the codes together. At least all those for one railroad. I wasn’t sure that had actually been done.
Looks like everyone used one or two letter codes. That’ll work until they need more than about 700 of them. I’m wondering if one of the real big lines (e.g. Union Pacific, Southern Pacific) may have eventually needed more.
I don’t think any railroad ever tried to address an entire multistate system using such codes. Any form of control that centralized wouldn’t have come until the telephone era, probably the teleprinter or even the computer era, if used at all. I don’t think Union Pacific’s Omaha office ever tried to raise the towerman in Laramie directly.
Now for a hijack: tell me about the three alphabetic station schemes you know. I know about the CB&Q west of Lincoln (Crete-Dorchester-Exeter-Fairfield), and I once saw a CN or CP map of alphabetically named towns someplace in the prairie provinces. I’ve heard of a sequence in California, but have never found it.
The same three.
The one in Canada was in Saskatchewan. I think it started from the border of Manitoba and went west, but I may be misremembering and it started a few stations before the border. I don’t remember the names of any stations, unfortunately. The place I read about it was in a book on the origins of Saskatchewan place names which I got from the library (ILL) and is not on Googlebooks. So I can’t check my source.
The one in CA was on the Arizona & California RR, which was a subsidiary of AT&SF. Now of course, the line is part of BNSF. Amboy, Bristol, Cadiz, Danby, Edson, Fenner, Goffs, Homer, Ibis, Java and Klinefelter are the stations of this sequence. Here’s a discussion (which I found by googling the names of the stations) about this line.
Doing a bit of googling for that Canadian one, I find there were several alpha sequences on the Grand Trunk RR between Manitoba and Alberta. Here’s a book listing them.
Thanks for the additions to my files on curious toponyms.
I get a kick out of picturing North American railroads being built across a land so seemingly empty that they just threw a “town” off the back of the train every 10 miles or so—in alphabetical order.
Railroads named a huge number of places in North America. They built very extensive lines, often in very thinly populated areas, They figured they and their customers would need a station and/or siding every 5 miles or so, even of no ome lived there at the time. So they alowed for that and came up a large number of names for them. Their main requirements were that the name not be duplicated on their line, be easily pronounced, and not be easily confused with another name. But coming up with such a large quantity of these names is actually difficult. And there’s only so many relatives of the company president who he wants to name something for.
So sometimes they went for this aphabetic scheme to inspire the coinage of names. They also named a lot of places after foreign cities and lands. When the rail crossed a border, they sometimes comnined the names of the two territories with a portmanteau name. I’ve compiled a list of the latter for Wikipedia.
Found another alphabetic rail station sequence. This is in eastern Iowa on a line out of Clinton, which is on the Mississippi. Source is city of Delmar’s page, which says it was on the Midland RR (which of several Midland lines it was, I don’t know). The stations in that sequence are Almont, Bryant, Charlotte, Delmar, and Elwood, which are about 7 or 8 miles apart. Not sure if it went any further, but my road atlas shows a place named Hale at about the right distance that an H-station would be.