Often, as I am walking down the street, people will stop me
and ask, “ Grouch, what was it like working on the railroad in the late
seventies.” I usually answer with
something brief and move on. But
now, I want to reward my four and half regular readers and provide a more
detailed account of the life of a “gandy dancer” some thirty-six years ago.
Actually, my first recollection of being hired is sitting in
a room with about twenty-five other job applicants taking an intelligence test
designed to determine if we had the candlepower necessary to work like a
government mule. The last part of
the test was one of those deals where they give you a set of four pictures,
three of which were related, and you were asked to pick out the outlier. After we had finished the test, my
neighbor asked me what I had put for the last question. The four pictures were of a pig, a cow,
a sheep, and a tiger. I told him
the tiger and he said he put the pig because he really liked pork. A few minutes later, the guy who was
conducting the test, came back in with the corrected exams and read one name
and asked that individual to leave. My neighbor got up and trudged out of the
room, presumably to go have a pork chop for lunch.
That was how I found out I was smart enough to be a
trackman. What I later learned was
intelligence comes in many guises and forms. I worked with some very intelligent people who had eighth
grade educations and were functionally illiterate. Then again, there were some college graduates who didn’t
have the sense God gave a flea. It
was one of the first lessons I learned working on the railroad and one that
stuck with me throughout my working life.
After I was hired, I was required to attend a series of
safety meetings where I found out the many ways I could get mangled or killed
on the job. They even had short
films, similar to the driver’s education classics, that featured actors being
dismembered, run over by box cars, or in some graphic way being sent to that
big railroad in the sky.
My first actual day on the job, I went with five other
newbies, to a rail yard to replace some ties. We all suffered that first day, because we weren’t used to
heavy physical labor on this scale.
Working on a section crew in those days was similar to working on a
section crew 75 years in the past.
Virtually nothing was automated and everything you dealt with was
heavy. Going to work was like
lifting weights for eight or ten hours a day.
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| Section crews were still using this method to line track in the 70s |
For the first couple weeks, I would wake up in the middle of
the night with my hands cramped into tight fists. I began to wonder if I was going to be able to cut it. Our foreman, who was a barrel chested
Irishman, complete with red beard and hair, had come right out of high school to
work on the railroad. At the time
I met him, he was a ten-year veteran who was incredibly brash and an
instinctively good railroader and leader.
One day he told me not to worry because in a month I was going to feel
better than I ever had before and would be roaring like a lion. He was right, and soon, the work we did
that first day seemed like a piece of cake that we could now accomplish in half
the time.
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| Try swinging this 11 pound spike maul all day |
To sum it up, the work was physically demanding, often
dangerous, filthy, and sometimes downright disgusting, and I liked doing it a
lot. There was something about the
romance of the railroad that seemed to make up for a lot of the downside. I usually am very skeptical of “the
romance” factor but it was definitely there on the railroad. There were people who would come to the
edge of the rail yard and set up folding chairs, pop a few beers and watch us
work for an afternoon. Sometimes
they would travel considerable distances to do it. I never did understand that hobby, but there was something
about the railroad that connected with people in different ways.
Additionally, there were some good things about the
work. The job would often take you
to places, even in the center of a city, where you felt you were way out in the
country. Because little machinery
was used, the worksite was quiet and working in close quarters with your crew
encouraged conversation. Unlike
many factory jobs where the noise is a danger to your hearing and your sanity,
working out on the right of way was peaceful and you really got to know the
people you worked with after talking with them for eight hours every day.
The people I worked with on the railroad were almost
universally really good people. I
would say about 30 percent of them were crazy, but crazy in a good way
(although there were a few who were just plain crazy). Sure, there were a few jerks and
slackers but they weren’t tolerated for very long and usually moved on to
larger rail or tie gangs where they could hide their laziness or incompetence. I worked in Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota and found the
people to be remarkably consistent in their make-up and I really enjoyed
working with them.
So to give you a little flavor of what it was like I thought
I would try to describe a few of my experiences as a trackman on the Chicago Northwestern
Railroad.
It was about 11:00am on a steamy summer morning when the
crew truck pulled up next to a rendering plant about 10 miles outside of
Milwaukee. We were there to retire
an old spur line that had been used by the plant in past years. In other words we were there to take
apart the spur, salvage the plates, spikes, rails, switches, and the frog (a
frog is a section of track that allows train cars to switch from one track to
another). Most, if not all, of the
ties had sunk down into the ground and were in various stages of rot.
Our first task was to cut down the eye level grass that had
grown in order to get to the job and find the old line. Another truck pulled up with a bunch of
scythes; you know, the kind used by the Grim Reaper. So we plunged into the tall grass, swinging the scythes and
waking up the billions of mosquitoes and other flying insects that liked to
hang around tall marshy grass next to a rendering plant. We quickly retreated and the call went
out for repellant. Not too much
later, the assistant foreman came back with several cans of Raid. We were all doused and headed back to
the tall grass. By now the
temperature was pushing ninety and the repellant quickly was washed off as we
sweat through our clothes. We
would work for ten minutes and retreat for another dousing with the bug
spray. This went on for the better
part of two hours until we had cleared the grass enough to start taking apart
the track.
The work itself was not particularly difficult, but digging
next to the rendering plant was a repulsive and stinky task. Every other shovelful brought up bones
or pieces of rotting hides. Our
assistant foreman started talking about going into the plant and finding the
“kill room.” I wasn’t particularly
interested in this field trip and eventually the assistant foreman went off by
himself to see what he could find out.
Before too long he came back to the crew and told us he had found a
foreman in the plant who had agreed to give us a tour culminating at the “kill
room.” I didn’t want to go but the
other crewmembers agreed to go and I didn’t want to miss what undoubtedly was
going to be a topic of conversation for the next couple of days, so I agreed to
go along.
I will spare you the details, but just say the ‘kill room” was
an appalling thing to witness. One
of the things that struck me was the eyes of the workers. They went about their business covered
in gore with a far away stare.
They did not acknowledge us as we crowed into their nightmarish
workspace. In one corner of the
room there was a small table with their lunch pails and thermoses. Apparently they ate their lunch right
there. I wondered how these guys
dealt with the psychological aspects of their job. Killing all day, every day, had to leave its mark. We left
the “kill room” and quietly finished our work. Not much was said about our little side trip.
Now that I have you thinking about your lunch, let me say a
few words about the trackman’s eating habits. I was not the shortest guy on my crew but at 145 pounds I
was by far the lightest. There
were some work sites where it was necessary to pack a lunch. I knew one guy who would pack nine
sandwiches along with a piece of fruit or two and a slice of cake or pie. He was a great customer of the
Tupperware Company and had plastic containers for pie, cake, sandwiches and
anything else that was eatable. He
would eat the first three sandwiches at our 10:00am break and take care of the
last six at lunch. Many of the
crewmembers packed their lunches in those large Play Skool coolers. These guys worked hard and ate like
turn of the century farmers.
One time I accompanied three of these hungry men to a little
pizza parlor not far from our work site.
The four of us ordered an extra large 16-inch pizza with everything on
it. When the pizza was set in
front of us, my companions rolled up the slices like a tortilla and took two
bites to consume an entire slice.
As I watched amazed, they ate the whole pizza like they were contestants
in a hot dog eating contest. I took
my initial slice and was eating it in the conventional manner when I realized
it was going to be the only slice I was going to get if I didn’t hurry. So I grabbed another slice with my left
hand and was just starting to eat it when the last slice went down. I was grateful I got through that lunch
without losing a finger or two.
Working on the railroad was a dangerous job. Besides the obvious hazards related to
working around moving trains, there were many other ways you could get
hurt. One of the most common ways
to hurt yourself was to injure your back.
You were always lifting heavy objects and early on in my tenure I vowed
I would not leave the job with a screwed up back. There were innumerable ways to squash fingers or toes, hurt
knees, or lose eyes if you were not careful. Sometimes danger showed up in the most unexpected ways.
One day we were working replacing ties up on a crest. The crest dropped off dramatically just
a couple of feet from the right of way.
In order to remove a tie, you have to pull out the spikes, jack up the
track, remove the plates, dig out the tie if necessary, so it could be slid
under the jacked up rail. The
roadbed we were working on was extremely hard and it was necessary to use a
pick ax to loosen the earth around the ties so they could be slid under the
rail.
In order to slide the old tie out, you use a tool called a
tie tong. The tie tong looked like
what you see people using when they are moving big blocks of ice around. The trick was to jam the sharpened
points of the tongs into both sides of the ties, then pull back and slide the
tie between your legs and out under the rail. The points of the tie tongs would become dull and as a
result people would grind them down to create sharper points. The problem was that each time the
points were ground they became thinner and weaker and more likely to break when
the trackman put all of his strength into pulling a reluctant tie under the
rail.
So on that particular day, I was using a too often sharpened
tie tong to pull out ties when the points broke off and I flew backward and
over the side of the crest. Later,
my crewmates told me they heard a noise and looked up and all they saw was my
hardhat twenty feet in the air and me gone. When I flew backward my feet had come up and kicked my
helmet straight up in the air as I began my plunge to the bottom of the
crest. You probably have seen
videos of skiers who lose control and do endless somersaults, ass over
teakettle, down the slope. That
was what I was doing to the bottom of the crest. When I got to the bottom, I was able to get up and after a
bit, determine I was bruised and cut up, but had not suffered any serious
injuries. As I looked around, I
saw numerous large rocks and places where I could have dashed my brains
out. By sheer luck, I am still
able to feed myself and you get to read these wonderful stories.
And sometimes, the work was worthy of the theatre of the
absurd. One dark and cloudy Friday
afternoon it began to rain about 15 minutes before quitting time. We piled into the truck and slowly rode
back to our locker room where we changed out of our work clothes and headed
home. Because it was Friday and
most everybody had plans, the locker room emptied quickly and I found myself
the last one leaving. As I was
walking across the gravel parking lot to my luxury AMC Gremlin, I was stopped
by a railroad official, who told me I couldn’t leave because there had been a
derailment at the far eastern part of the yard. I was caught and couldn’t figure any way out of it, so I
went back in the locker room and put my work clothes back on.
While I was
dressing, I heard the official making calls to the homes of various workers
trying to get them back to the yard.
Mysteriously, nobody’s wife had any idea where her husband was at the
moment and the official had no idea what bars he could have called to collect
most of them. So I was the lone
grunt heading out to work until it was determined there was nothing more that
could be done that night.
The official drove me out to the site of the derailment and
I went to work, as the rain became a downpour. It was just a foreman, who practically lived at the yard,
and me working to repair a sidetrack so the burro crane could come in and lift
the trucks (train wheels are called trucks) onto the sidetrack and then put the
derailed cars on the trucks so they could be moved out of the way. We first had to clear a lot of broken
rail and splintered ties that required getting down in the muck. It continued to rain until about an
hour before we were told to go home about eight hours after I had been
shanghaied.
The official apparently forgot about me and got in his car
and left. So I began the walk back
to the locker room as the mud and dirt began to dry somewhat. When I got back
to the locker room there was no one around and everything was locked up
tight. So I walked over to my car,
wondering if I had anything I could throw down to protect my upholstery, and
seeing I didn’t, jumped in the car and turned the key. You know the sound a car makes when a
battery is dead? That was what I
heard. This was before the days of
cell phones and all the mom and pop places I knew around the yard were closed,
so I began a half a mile walk to the nearest bus stop.
As I was making my way, it began to rain again. Soon the bus came and when the doors
opened the driver looked at me like he was picking up the creature from the
black lagoon. As I walked down the
aisle looking to sit down, veteran urban bus riders began taking all kind of
actions designed to discourage me from sitting next to them. Finally, I found a
seat and collapsed into it. The
other bus riders kept throwing me glances like they were worried that at any
moment I would let out a roar and began to eat anyone foolish enough to sit
within six seats of me.
Finally I made it to the door of the one bedroom apartment
Pat and I shared on Milwaukee’s east side. As I unlocked the door and stood in the doorframe, Pat
looked up from the book she was reading, and burst into a loud and prolonged
laugh. To this day, I think, in
this instance, she lacked a certain level of empathy.
Despite all of what I have related here, and I have just
scratched the surface, I really did enjoy my time on the railroad. It taught me that you could do more
than you think yourself capable of.
I also enjoyed the people.
They were a rough and tumble bunch, almost always profane and
politically incorrect, but below the gruff exterior, they would give you the
shirt off their back if you needed it.
They worked and lived hard and were an incredible amount of fun to be
around.
But, the handwriting was on the wall. The work I was doing was a young man’s
job and people who held on too long either got injured or exposed themselves to
ridicule when they could no longer keep up with the young bucks. A 50-year-old trackman looked 70 and
probably felt like a 110. So it
was with mixed feelings as I came to realize it was time for me to move on and
took the steps that would lead to me entering the corporate world. My railroad background would play a
surprising role in my first corporate job, but that is a story for another
time.
