Colour-blindness, Visual Acuity, Hearing Tests - 1897

Safety rules are written in _____.

As the railroad network expanded across the United States in the late 1800s, state regulation of local railroad activities resulted in a patchwork of safety standards. Railroad companies had crossed state lines and thus were engaged in interstate commerce. 

Link and pin couplers, individual rooftop handbrakes on freight cars for train control, and the lack of proper standardized grabirons for brakemen and conductors made railroad employment a very unsafe occupation. Of course, this had spillover effects for members of the general public travelling on passenger trains.

from: Railroads in America; Oliver Jensen; 1975; American Heritage.

Railroad Superintendent, Inspector of Steam Boilers - a cartoon from 1883.

Eventually, Congress acted in 1893, bringing forth the Railroad Safety Appliance Act:

An Act to Promote the Safety of Employees and Travelers upon Railroads by Compelling Common Carriers Engaged in Interstate Commerce to Equip Their Cars with Automatic Couplers and Continuous Brakes and Their Locomotives with Driving-wheel Brakes, and for Other Purposes.

Railroads had 7 years to bring themselves into compliance with the law.

The Interstate Commerce Commission collated and maintained comprehensive railroad safety statistics.

Regulating railroad safety after years of 'non-interference'
was an overdue exercise in the late 1890s

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Another interesting safety development of this time period ... the first Standard Code ... was published in July 1889. In its modern day incarnation, this was the master standardized rulebook language promulgated by the Association of American Railroads. It could be adapted to suit the needs of local railroads - including those in Canada. It promoted standardized safe practices to protect property and human life. 

... A key benefit of this type of continent-wide exercise was that individual railroads did not have to 're-invent the wheel' after one serious accident on their own railroad. Rule revisions necessary because of serious accidents, new technology (eg. the telephone), or to employ equally effective but less cumbersome safety rules ... could be reviewed and adopted before a particular railroad, itself, had a crisis.

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Testing Vision and Hearing for Railway Employees

Having preserved this fragile artifact for quite a while, I am glad to finally be discharging my responsibility to it. It is a reprinted section from a medical textbook on the eye. You can find this chapter within several versions of the textbook available on archive.org. But the full medical textbook is about structure and diseases of the eye.

A little over 40 years ago, I was fortunate to briefly see, and work in, a perfect example of an isolated railway town - Schreiber, Ontario. Back in 1977, the entire division was run from the CPR station there. The superintendent, his staff and his official car; the dispatchers; carmen, and everyone and everything else you can imagine as being necessary in the diesel age ... remained in this single-purpose town. As I've mentioned before, we were told it had the highest per capita income of any town in Ontario because of the union and management jobs concentrated here.

A classroom instruction program for new spareboard trainmen has just started. Instruction was provided by a freight conductor. Before beginning one's employment, vision testing and a physical exam by the local doctor were required. Among other things, the doctor inspected your spine - looking for any signs of disc problems which might get in the way of changing coupler knuckles in complete comfort.

I can't remember if hearing was checked by the physician or at the division office. Good hearing was important - whether you were communicating via radio ... (in the old days) listening for an approaching whistle at a siding's mile board ... or being aware of your surroundings and the nearly-silent ringing of a kicked car's wheels as it approached you in the darkness of a yard.

Eighty years after the following supplement on sensory testing was produced, the visual exam was considerably less complicated. Individually, we presented ourselves at the division office upstairs and an employee trained in the process checked our vision ...

The acuity part consisted of reading a standard eye chart and (probably) reading text in various sizes of print - all without glasses ... like a standard optometry test.

... They didn't simulate completing a Rule 264/266 form with a pencil (pencils don't freeze), working at a plywood daffodil telephone box, wearing a wire 1940s headset, illuminated by a battery trainman's lantern. If you were doing this because your train was blocking the main line, it would be an inconvenient time for the employer to discover that you couldn't see or hear well.

Railroaders were always looking for distant objects ... such as signals; switch targets and switch point alignment; and locomotive, car and signal numbers. If your unaided distance vision was not good enough, you would not be hired.  Obviously, lots of people wanted to be spareboard trainmen and the CPR could take their pick of people with perfect vision.

*  *  *

An engineer comes around a curve at speed.

On the track ahead, one these displays is seen.

The engineer would have two very different reactions

... illustrating the need for uncompromised colour sense.

from: Uniform Code of Operating Rules; CPR; 1951.

*  *  *

Rule 99 illustrates the need to have
visual acuity, acceptable colour sense and good hearing.

from: Operating Rules; CNR, Grand Trunk, Duluth Winnipeg and Pacific, Central Vermont Railway; 1929.

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Getting Back to Schreiber ...

It was the colour sense test that was the most interesting to me, and the most surprising - because I never pictured Casey Jones as a big knitter. It is estimated that up to 8% of males (with northern European genetics) are colour-blind. The testing employee opened up a shoe box filled with small windings of yarn in a very wide variety of colours. He picked up a bundle and asked me what colour it was, repeating the process until I had satisfied him that I'd be able to correctly perceive the colour light 'searchlight' signals, the flags marking slow orders, blue carman's flags, and so on.

Having been through that testing process, I was interested in purchasing and preserving this frail 'artifact' when I saw it 20 years later. Back in its day, it would have been important to railway officials studying ways to make their operations safer ... beyond using air brake systems, Janney-style couplers, and other safety appliances.

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The Practical Examination of Railway Employés as to
Color-Blindness, Acuteness of Vision and Hearing

William Thomson MD, 1897

Here's the author:

American ophthalmologist, born January 28, 1833,
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania; died August 3, 1907.

http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/2203.html

This scientific paper becomes rather medically dense as you go through it. I have summary paragraphs preceding the page image - so you can decide if you want to read more detail and understand the historical issues and challenges. Their testing protocol is much more involved than my Schreiber experience ... but it doesn't hurt to begin with tight procedures and then loosen things up later.

Near the end, there is a lot of medical and process information, and I don't attempt to summarize it. Decades from now, perhaps some ferro-ophthalmolo-historiographer may find it and decide it is interesting ... you're welcome.

There are some point form sections and implementation details which you might find interesting. 

At the end of this post, I have some images to show different aspects of signalling to make things a little more interesting for readers who persevere through my effort here ...

The issue arose at the International Medical Congress of 1881, in London - how to use medically-developed testing methods for vision. This was needed for signallers and lookout men, on land and sea, to insure the safety of life and property on railways and ships.

There was a need to develop simple tests for colour sense. In Europe, it seemed that governments would set standards and have medical professionals administer the tests. In England, railways were reluctant to agree to use this system.

However, how would this system work when a railway operated through different legal jurisdictions, each with their own laws? 

Consequently, the author worked to develop a system which could be used by non-medical people to perform examinations. A trial of this was done on the Pennsylvania Railroad. 

In Connecticut, railroads were concerned that a state-run system might result in the immediate discharge of 15% of their operating employees. How would the railroads deal with this loss of experience and expertise?

The advantage of a railroad company-based system, using non-medical staff for the initial tests, seemed more appropriate. Any problems requiring medical interpretation could then be forwarded to the railroad company's supervising medical authority in charge of the testing program. Employees would be tested for the following abilities:

1. To see objects at a distance and to read forms.
2. To identify the colours used in day and night signals
3. To hear sounds as required.

The need to protect skilled railroad employees from discharge because of problems with vision and hearing, and the opportunity to find them alternate employment in the railroad, was an advantage of the railroad-controlled company-wide testing system.

A trial of the author's system was conducted with 1383 conductors, engineers, firemen and brakemen. Of this group, 18% were deficient in visual acuity; 4% (55 employees) were completely colour-blind; 1.5% had hearing deficiencies.

The trial used 150 colour tints. These were assigned numbers to make follow-up by medical staff easier and more uniform.

Above, I avoided altering the colours in the image - but the paper and ink are probably 100 years old.

Below, the colours were changed to better resolve the number plates.

I couldn't find the device to which the marginal note refers.
... Just use a watch, it'll work fine.

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Various Signalling Images
... because you made it this far.

from: The Compendium of Signals; Roger FR Karl; 1971; Boynton.

from: Railways Then and Now; OS Nock; 1975; Crown.

Above/Below: Looking west toward Union Station, Toronto, August 1914
This earlier version of Union Station (the highest tower in the distant right) was superseded by the current building.
The towerman at the left activates the crossing barrier, the pith-helmeted 'Bobby' shoos people to safety.
The hip-roofed interlocking tower is seen beside the right support of the signal bridge.
You can see the actuator rods coming from that tower and connecting to the switches.
... the closest rod appears over the head of that worker in the foreground with well-used overalls.

As you can see:
Another long-overdue railway safety change was separating
street traffic from railway traffic on different levels.
This was necessary at cities all over North America.

Below, I've enlarged some signal detail.
Notice the 'lower quadrant' semaphore on the highest mast.
There are many things you can see in the organization of those signals ...
Also notice there are two interlocked dwarf signals at track level below the signal bridge.

from: Railways Then and Now; OS Nock; 1975; Crown.

from: Operating Rules; CNR, Grand Trunk, Duluth Winnipeg and Pacific, Central Vermont Railway; 1929.

from: The Pennsylvania Railroad; Edwin P Alexander; 1947; Bonanza.

from: The Compendium of Signals; Roger FR Karl; 1971; Boynton.

It seems very unlikely that the unique Pennsylvania position light signals eliminated colour sense testing.

You can imagine there were some advantages in using these instead of colour-position signals or searchlight signals.

The PRR considered itself 'The Standard Railroad of the World'

so they probably had a long list of reasons.