Jerkwater Town

A listener asked about the term jerkwater town, as in “We were stranded in some jerkwater town with nothing to do and nowhere to go.” It means insignificant, small, inferior.

The term goes back to railroading. Steam engines were nothing more than boilers on wheels, where water was heated to the boiling point in order to get steam power. In larger towns, water towers were available for the trains to use. In jerkwater towns, they were not.

A jerkwater train was a branch-line train. It received its name from the fact that these trains were smaller than the main-line trains, so water had to be replenished far more often. The crews would have to stop at a river or stream and “jerk” water (draw it) from the source and carry it in buckets to the train.

From the 1941 Sun (Baltimore) 7 Mar. 12/7: “In the early days of railroads the small boilers of the locomotives required frequent refilling, and water tanks were very few. Every train crew carried a leather bucket on a long rope with which they ‘jerked water’ from the streams along their track. As locomotives increased in size the small ‘jerk-water’ engines were relegated to branch-line service. Today no train crew carries a bucket, but the name ‘jerk water’ still sticks and has become part of our national heritage of American slang.”


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