When Wx4 staff began laying out the Jawbone Dispatching pages, we aimed to tell
a tale of transformation on SP's Golden State Route, but we quickly realized that the reader would not truly fathom the enormity of the change unless he/she possessed a basic grounding in the train order and Direct Traffic Control (DTC) methods of dispatching trains.

So, we elected to write brief primers for each - and the DTC offering is just that - but true to the nature of train orders, our primer for same quickly wound out of control. You just can't explain train orders in a sound bite.

In retrospect, this is as it should be. Train orders can be complicated, time-consuming hell, while your pet Airedale can quickly comprehend DTC: "bark at the radio, Fido!"

While the Tucumcari story seemed to write itself, the train order primer presented a challenge. Every professional explanation of movement by train orders that we've ever seen is downright B-O-R-I-N-G, because they always deal in Anna, Bess and Cloy theoretics. In the real world, an operating crew reads train orders as an enigmatic story of their future: a pile of flimsies might foretell a "straight shot" to the other end of the railroad, or twelve hours of misery stuck in a siding on the outskirts of Pluto.

This is what fascinates us about train orders: you can often see a story in them, and this is how we've approached the subject. We've got some fascinating train orders here, and you'll enjoy them.

PART TWO: Fun With Train Orders (includes many pages about individual forms)