I'm not going to go back and look at what I covered before; apparently I did a decent job in my post.
No, the skate jobs were separate from anyone who happened to be riding down from the hump. If you were riding into a clear alley, you hoped that rules had been followed, and the track was properly skated, at the proper distance up into the track. Once the skates stopped you (or at least slowed you down, then it woud be safe to go from car to car of your cut and apply the hand brakes).
If there were no riders, it was the skateman's job to stop the cars, meaning he set his skates, then walked up to catch the cars rolling in. If he were notified (via the page system, and later by radio) that some heavy cars were coming into the track, he'd tie brakes on those, too, to keep them from pushing the track out.
And that, my friends, is how I had my first and only on-the-job injury. I had skated Track 24, and ridden three loaded cars into the skates, applying brakes on those cars. The "post" I thus created should have stopped anything. But I got a call about another bunch of heavy cars coming down for that track. In those days, a "heavy car" was likely to be a fully-loaded 40-foot box car with grain. Well, I climbed on the first car, climbed up, and started winding that brake. I wasn't having much luck, and wound up riding those cars right into my post. I was right...those...cars...didn't..budge! When I hit, I was knocked off the platform, but still hanging onto the brake wheel. My thigh hit something (probably the platform), and that laid it open with a puncture wound...I never have bled like that before or since! I was able to climb down, walk to the skate shanty, page the hump, and report that I'd been banged up a bit. They asked if I could still walk to the East Five yard office, and I said I thought so. I got to the access road, and the trainmaster was waiting to take me to the hospital, where I was treated and released for some days of physical therapy before I went back to work. I was later told by Herbie (my skate instructor from a few weeks before) that I never should have ridden the car into my post.
I worked one skate job after that, just to convince myself that I still could. It was not long after that that i strated my training for the job that was the skatemen's nemesis...Car Retarder Operator. It took them a few more years to abolish the skate jobs and require a crew pulling out of the track to provide a "post" in the proper position.
For the record, we did not skate both rails. This was an efficient operation...only the south rail was skated, so the switchmen coupling the track could remove any and all skates from that side. Why that side? Because all of the pulldown jobs had engines that faced east, putting the engineer on that side. The amont of sliding an axle did to flatten the north-side wheel was negligible when compared to, say, a handbrake left on a car.
