Looks like I am over the hump...apropos of hump day, today, Wednesday. In case someone reads this and thinks that "humping" is a sexual act, well, it can be but in this context it's a term from rail yards. Yes, I lived near a huge, multi-track, intensely busy railroad yard for a couple of years.

Anyway, this yard contained a couple of artificially built mounds or small hills over which a railroad track was laid. This mound was called a hump. When large trains (some 200+cars), with 2-4 engines at each end, needed to 'download' some of their coal cars or wheat cars or lumber cars, they would back slowly, arduously, up onto a hump. At the point in the train where an uncoupling of the unwanted cars was needed, someone would manually operate the coupling mechanism between cars and, with a little extra push by the engine, the uncoupled section of train would roll down the opposite side of the hump, sometimes faster than the engine backed up the cars.

So, over the hump has this industrial origin. In the common vernacular we call Wednesday hump day because "it's all downhill after Wednesday." Meaning that we have maanged to climb through our work week and made it to Wednesday, after which we had only 2 more days to endure before the weekend.