All The Live Long Day

                       

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.

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.

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.