Jerkwater.

August 14th, 2008 by admin

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Posted in August 2008, columns | 6 comments

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6 comments on this post.

  1. Carl:

    July 2nd, 2012 at 8:54 pm

    Nice job! The first time the word interested me, but not necessarily the first time I heard it, was when Bruce Willis referred to a town as a “jerkwater” town, in the movie “Last Man Standing”. I liked the directors effort to make the movie’s dialog time appropriate. Naturally I went on a Google quest for a definition, and so far this on is the best.

  2. James Barré:

    August 26th, 2015 at 6:22 pm

    How many others have pointed out the word “vein” is misused in the blog title and should be “vain?”
    Shouldn’t happen on a web site devoted to words.
    Otherwise,that notwithstanding, a fun site.

  3. admin:

    August 27th, 2015 at 5:35 pm

    “Vein” in the sense of “mood, tendency, spirit” dates back to the 16th century. “Vain” would make no sense whatsoever. But I admire your imperious tone.

    “Otherwise, that notwithstanding” is redundant.

  4. Bob Coe:

    December 16th, 2015 at 2:32 am

    I believe that this explanation, widespread as it seems to be, is totally bogus. Rather, a jerkwater is a very specific type of railroad water tower with a long spout for filling the tank in the tender of a steam locomotive. The spout was normally held in the “up” position by the weight of the water inside. To bring the spout to the “down” position and start the flow of water, a trainman had to pull (or “jerk”) on a rope attached to the spout. When the tank was full, he released the rope, and the spout would return to the “up” position. Many small towns along railroad lines had such towers, because early steam locomotives used water inefficiently and couldn’t go very far between fillings. A town without much but a jerkwater was referred to as a “jerkwater town”, a term that has survived much longer than the jerkwaters themselves.

  5. Sargon:

    March 29th, 2016 at 8:51 am

    This traditional explanation is quite incorrect. The term does derive from the railroading era, but has nothing to do with drawing water by hand. Quite the opposite:

    ” . . . Ramsbottom troughs, or ‘jerk-water’ system for filling the tenders while the train is in motion . . . ” (from The Elements of Railroading, Charles Paine, 1885).
    An excellent find. So now we turn to the website of the Ann Arbor Model Railroad Club for an explanation of how that was done:

    Kinnear, located two miles east of Dexter, was the site of Michigan’s first railroad track water pans, which were built in 1901. The pans were situated between the rails and heated during cold weather. Steam locomotives scooped up the water as they moved over the pans. The Kinnear pans and telegraph station were named after Wilson S. Kinnear, chief engineer of the Detroit River railroad tunnel.

    Final details from Wikipedia:

    A scoop is fitted to the underside of the locomotive’s tender (or the locomotive itself in the case of tank locomotives) in such a way that it can be raised or lowered, by a screw mechanism or a compressed air mechanism. The scoop feeds into a vertical pipe that discharges into the water tank… Venting on the tender needed to be free to allow a high release of expelled air from the tank.

  6. Steve:

    April 3rd, 2016 at 8:12 pm

    You might also add that a bit later the bucket brigade was done away with in some locations and replaced with a water pan between the tracks from which a properly equipped tender could scoop water as the train passed over, thereby replenishing the water in the tender. Such an activity was referred to in railroad slang as “jerking a drink”.

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