Railworks America

Does anyone know why troop trains are called MAINS? I'm working on a troop train scenario and was just curious. There are lots of good websites with info about the movement of TT's, but none tells why they are MAINS or what "main" stands for.

I grew up in South Alabama and remember a few weeks of solid troop and military equipment trains headed to South Florida during the Cuban Missle Crisis on the old ACL. That must have been a terror to dispatch on a single train line using only train orders (no signals). ACL was also very short-handed on locos and I remember seeing everything from passenger engines to switchers pulling trains.

Harry

MAIN is an acronym that stands for Military Authorization Identification Number. A train movement would be described as "MAIN 68638". Often these trains ran as second sections of scheduled passenger trains.

Thanks!