Watch Jim Leonard talk about the Pennsylvania Railroad.

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Transcript of the interview with Jim Leonard:

All right, let's say that you have two sheets of cardboard and they must be welded together. Our purpose would be to, uh, get the two sheets lined up (BACKGROUND NOISE) and sort of tack weld it. Let me see if I can do it this way, tack weld it so that the next sheet would be adjacent to it; but it wouldn't be up and down and up and down. It would be completely straight for 30, 40, or 50 feet no matter what. And we tack welded it as we, the linermen, leveled the two sheets that were butting against one another so that when the real welder, the final welders came they would have a perfectly smooth surface that would go right across. Finally when that welder, the finish welder is done, the chippers would come along and smooth the raised area of the weld; and then you would look it and become one big sheet. So our duty was to line these sheets up.

Another sheet might be when it's erected, they don't erect it right down to the minute position. So we would also have to shift one sheet to the other with the top of the crane that would be holding on to that sheet before it would release it. And, of course, I'm talking about the shell plating and deck plating sheets as long as this room and about eight feet high and so forth. So that's basically what lining up. It's like linermen, we lined up the sheets and had them prewelded so that the piece workers who came to do the final welding would be able to go right ahead.