On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 09:10 AM, Tony Thompson wrote:
On many cars with no brake step, the wheel had a taller shaft and the brakeman stood on the roof. You are right that operating it from the ladder is pretty unsafe.
Or not. Safe or not, there was never a requirement to have a brake step, just recommended practice, I believe. The Soo Line had thousands of boxcars where the brakeman would have had to be a midget to operate the brake wheel from the roof, and the last of them were still in service, unmodified, through the sixties.
