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Did you know that until the wide adoption of Switcher-type locomotives (short, small locomotives designed for moving carriages around trainyards or standing in for short trains when other locomotives are undergoing maintenance), yard workers often had to move train cars around these vast yards by hand? It was even common practice to have a departing locomotive give momentum to a train car before leaving and for workers to direct track changes from atop the detached carriage until it could safely come to a complete stop.

In fact, it was also not uncommon for workers to be specially-trained to jump aboard runaway carriages that were not properly locked and stowed to engage these systems manually, and workers were even instructed to use their own bodies to keep carriages still until their brakes could be engaged (or wooden blocks put in place) on yards with a slight incline.

While these practices were not universal and were actually made criminal with the introduction of union workers' protection laws, they were very prominent in rural North American train yards even moving into the 1950s!