“I was one of the last people to learn telegraphy.
“After all these years, my right hand remembers the (telegraph) code, but my mind has forgotten the deciphering of it,” he said with a smile.
Then again, most have forgotten the prime purpose of telegraph wires that ran beside railroads. It was not to let the guys in white hats know about desperados of the Wild West. It was to keep trains from running into one another.
Although they also operated switches, “We were called telegraph operators,” Hatfield said. And in the time before telephones — and for a while after their arrival — once a train went past a tower on a main track, the telegrapher “telegraphed to the next tower the engine number and the time the train went by. In addition, you would get on yet another line and tell the dispatcher.”
That way, the next station knew a train was on the way, and the dispatcher could track trains throughout the region.
“The dispatcher’s office was in the old depot downtown up through somewhere in the early ’60s,” Hatfield said.
The system was a kind of ground traffic control that came before the airline industry’s air traffic control.
The East Street Tower was one of five in Springfield in those days, and Hatfield recalled the others that made up the grid.
• Carney “was immediately south of the Cascade Corporation west of Burnett Road,” he said.
“There was a road that led back there from Sheridan Avenue. That tower had interesting tracks. It was actually the New York Central main track going east and west, but the DT&I (Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railroad) would cross from the yard on the east side of Burnett Road” to pick up cars.
• Glen Echo sat between the New York Central and Erie Railroad tracks off Urbana Road next to Tremont City Road. “The only train (the Erie) ran on a daily basis was a local that came out of Marion, Ohio, and sent to Dayton. They would go to Dayton and the crew would stay overnight. They did that six days a week.”
The New York Central telegraphers would pull a lever to move a track and let the Erie go by.
The telegrapher at Glen Echo also could route New York Central trains into the Springfield Yard off Warder Street. There was no tower there, nor levers, Hatfield said.
“You handled train orders and messages there,” he recalled. “And I think you also went outside and hand-threw the switches yourself.”
Erie trains headed for Dayton and Cincinnati from Glen Echo would proceed to Maitland, an Erie station “located west of the Park Shopping Center, but more toward the south end,” Hatfield said. “The DT&I crossed there. Its trains would be coming from Detroit or somewhere in Michigan (on tracks that go) past Bechtle Avenue by the Dairy Queen and would go out to the DT&I Yard” at Carney.
“Further south of (Maitland) was Cold Springs,” Hatfield said. Like the other towers, Cold Springs had an interlock system.
“There was an array of levers that were color-coded,” he said. “The operators in those towers pulled levers to move tracks outside for the direction of trains. Black levers moved a section of track and brown ones locked them into place. The red ones created the signal, like the traffic signal outside for red, green or yellow.”
There were more levers at Cold Springs because three railroads intersected there: the New York Central, the Erie and a local line of the Peoria and Eastern headed for Indianapolis.
“There was another tower the old railroad heads talked about called West End,” Hatfield said. “I believe it was around the Ohio Edison plant. But it was long gone before I started there.”
Here are some other Hatfield memories from New York Central towers around the state:
Tate’s Point on Dayton’s east side was where the Baltimore and Ohio crossed the New York Central.
On a day when a stopped New York Central train prevented traffic from going into Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, “a state highway patrolman gave me a traffic ticket,” Hatfield said, “like I was driving the train.”
“He said, ‘I know this is crazy, but you’re the only one I can get near to give a ticket to.’ ”
Because of the train was so long, the patrolman couldn’t see walking to the front of the train to find the engineer.
“So I had to go to Chambersburg for a hearing, where the charge was laughed out of court,” Hatfield said. “I believe the charge was obstructing traffic.”
Miami Crossing: To get to this tower in Columbus “you had to drive through the insane asylum on West Broad Street,” Hatfield recalled.
“A friend of mine was riding with me when we went into a little cafeteria there to get coffee in his Thermos. One of the patients stopped him and said, ‘I thought they had it fixed for you kids to get your lunch at school these days.’ ”
Hocking Valley, the tower east of Miami Crossing, “had 108 levers in it, the most of any,” Hatfield said.
“That place would keep you hopping.”
Pulling levers “is one of those things you get used to,” he explained. “I had big weight lifters come up and they couldn’t pull those levers. Yet we could go up there and go ‘wham.’ It’s just what you got used to. Because when you’re pulling a lever, you’re moving a section of track outside, and that did require some strength.”
The caboose of his stories involves The Big Flood of 1959, which not only provided the impetus for building the Clarence J. Brown Reservoir, but led to one of the most unusual railroading moves he ever witnessed.
“The waters were so high at Burt Street that a diesel engine couldn’t get through without sputtering out,” he said.
But like the mail, the trains had to get through.
So the New York Central ran them past a sidetrack called Brooks near London. Engines then would attach to the back of the train and push it through the high water at Burt Street.
An engine backing from the other direction would then hook on to the train west of Burt Street and pull the rest of them through.
Said Hatfield, “That’s the only time I knew that to happen.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.
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