link-and-pin

Updated: May 10, 2025

While the "grade crossing" slew its thousands of non-travelling citizens, the freight-car, with its link-and-pin coupling, its block-bumpers, its hand-brakes, its slippery roofs, its manifold shiftings over frogs and switches, slew its tens of thousands of railway operatives.

William Elliot Griffis - Charles Carleton Coffin: War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman

Lorenzo Coffin, of Iowa, a distant cousin of Carleton's, whom so many railway men always salute as "father," had been for years trying to throttle the two twin enemies of the railway man, alcohol, and the freight-car equipment of link-and-pin coupler and hand-brake. It was he who agitated unceasingly for national protection to railway men, and to the brakeman especially.

William Elliot Griffis - Charles Carleton Coffin: War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman