Just below Douglas, a steep ten-mile railroad grade crested after trains from Elkins reached Hendricks, where crews added extra locomotives called helpers. Heavy locomotives could handle long trains in most places, but the three percent grade limited them to about ten cars, so a ninety-car coal train could require nine locomotives. Downhill trips were also difficult: in the nineteenth century, brakemen walked the tops of cars to set each car’s brakes by hand, and later air brakes could stop an entire train from a valve in the engine cab but still required great skill for safe use. Richard Crawford, recalling childhood in Douglas in the nineteen forties, remembered whistle posts at each end of town, the noise, cinders, and smoke from passing locomotives, passenger trains going by four times a day and coal freights twice a day, and steam engines taking forty minutes to climb from Hendricks to Douglas. He also recalled children putting soap on the rail, making train wheels slip and spin in place and creating heavy smoke. On the steep, twisting grade, errors or mechanical failures could cause disaster, including a freight wreck in 1914 that killed one person, a 1906 wreck that scattered cars over an embankment, and a 1922 derailment of a trainload of striking miners in Blackwater Canyon that killed one and prompted accusations of sabotage. Before radios, telephones, and digital electronics, train crews communicated by hand and whistle signals and depended on dispatchers’ written orders to know when and where to stop and wait for other trains, while a timekeeper ensured that every watch and clock on the railroad worked properly and was set to precisely the same time.