Rail Fanning

During one of my rail-fanning photography trips I was luckly enough to secure this engineer's "key". I was taking movies and a loco pulled up and stopped to make a meet.The engineer and his wife invited me on board (no-joke), let me look around the cab, and gave me this wooden key. They told me it was necessary to put the locomotive into reverse.

The sheet of paper was a complete manifest of all of the cars they were pulling, and the total weight of the load.

I'll never forget it. It was definitely a high light for me. Below is a short movie I took. You can see the other train passing during the meet. Awesome!