All controlled by the clock
Today I’m going to try to recreate something I have not visited in many decades. We all have places that we would like to see again and in my case it would be the local Telegraph office at the Elmira Station. It was run by my father. He was a trained professional and he could handle many things at the same time including full control of a ticket office all the coming and going in the train station and the click clack of the Telegraph what I remember most of course was a chair that would rotate through a full 360° nothing like that in my home you could get on top and turn around and around and around the seats even had cushions but I digress of course. I never understood what was being sent or received on that Telegraph I learned to read code in a different era with a different system and I never had to master the idea of clicks that lasted longer than others much more difficult than you think. There was also a microphone so that my father could talk to the dispatcher. He never invited me to say hello to anyone but I knew what was going on and then all the different sizes and colours of paper after all a railway never does things simply there was a form for everything and carbon copies so that you could really get your fingers dirty. About the time that I started to be interested in this sort of thing as a profession, my father moved on to other fields and other places, and now I have to rely upon old movies and YouTube videos to try and fill in the blank spaces in my memory. Those memories go beyond the clicks. They (the government) came and took away the trains. Not that I understood why. Trains run on time hopefully and there was a big clock hanging on the wall that was accurate long before I knew the meaning of the word. I knew that the clock was the boss of everything else that happened in that office. If the clock stopped so did the trains.
