Railroad Series: Chapter 1

In order to tell the story of working on the Railroad back in the 1970’s, the best place to start is with an overview of the organization. Things have changed since then and the SP Company no longer exists and many of the places have changed but the memories are still there. The human characters will come later but the real stars are the trains and tracks and the people only make sense when the big picture in the background is clear.

The entire Southern Pacific System stretched from Washington State clear down the coast to LA and then all the way over to Texas. The System was divided into several Regions and they in turn were broken into Divisions and Districts which put me in the Eastern District of the Oregon Division of the Western Region. Within that Eastern District we had Sections of track connecting the various Stations along the right of way. And every mile along the way was a Mile Post telling how far it is back to San Francisco. We lived at Fields Station, Mile Post 542.

The Work Force is composed of Departments according to their responsibility. Trainmen get to ride the rails but they are away from home the most. Carmen are home every night and rarely leave the roundhouse except for derailments. There are departments for everything from Welders to Mechanics, and Electricians. There are special Departments for Signal Maintainers, Machine Operator Trainers and Curve Lubricator Maintainers. There is a special high risk Department called Bridge and Building which also includes tunnels. I was in the biggest department of all called Maintenance of Way.

The Maintenance of Way department has various gangs the most common being the Section gang with 5 men responsible for every 5 miles of track. There were other seasonal gangs that only worked during the good weather months from May to October. There was the Steel Gang to replace the rails followed by the Tie Gang replacing the bad ties. If the Tie Gang went first you would end up pulling spikes on new ties which was no fun. Last in line is the Surfacing Gang that cleans everything up.

There are System Gangs that have to go the whole distance doing odd jobs like “Rail Grinding” with a big long grinder famous for starting fires. There was the System “Brush Cutter” that cut all the vegetation on both sides of the track up to 30 feet out along the right of way. Then there was the Rail-Car which was a big X-Ray machine running down the tracks looking for internal flaws. The biggest system gang replaced everything all at once using a single monstrous "Track Replacement" train.

Each Gang has its own set of machines unique to the job at hand. That is the next Chapter in the Railroad series.

Mean Time Between Success

It the world of manufacturing hardware there is a rating called Mean Time Between Failure or MTBF. This is a big number that is supposed to represent the length of time before a component will fail but it turns out to represent the lengths they will go to use statistics to confuse the average consumer.

For example, the DVD player I bought a few years ago was rated at 400,000 hours between failures. That means it will last 45 years, but the problem is; there were no DVD players 45 years ago, so how can they honestly make that prediction? Now I have a new Blue-Ray player that is rated for 1.5Million hours, which means I have to wait 171 years to find out if they are lying~! Talk about bogus claims that cannot be proven, that takes the cake.

I wonder why do they call it the “Mean” time between failures? If everything is running well it should be the “Nice” time between disasters. The other point of confusion is the “between” part of the formula which implies that there has to be an original failure before you can measure the time in between failures. That is one too many deaths for most parts.

It’s OK to use this method to measure mechanical devices but human beings can’t stand to be measured by their failures alone so we need a better scale that counts how often things go right. After all it seems somewhat negative to only evaluate the frequency of failures when we all want the world to hear about our successes. So let’s invent the new measurement for Mean Time Between Success.

The MTBS is really just another way for people to ask ourselves and each other, “What have you done for me lately”. It all comes down to how we measure success. I say every pay day is fruitful, every Holiday is eventful and every Friday should be fun. So my MTBS is never more than 6 Days.

George the Pet Porcupine

It may sound a little hard to believe but we really did have a pet porcupine when I was a kid. We came around the corner one October night and saw a dead porcupine in the road. When we stopped to move it out of the way there were two five inch long newborns still alive. We took them home but only one survived to be nursed back to life and we raised him in a pen outside our back door.

As a baby we could easily handle the little fellow and the quills were more like fur that would lay down in a certain direction everywhere except the tail where the quills were smaller and came out at all angles and would stick even with the lightest touch. We never actually house trained the animal but we would bring him into the house regularly for extended play periods on the carpet and as he grew older the number of loose quills that came out during play increased but we never got poked too bad.

There came a time when George was full grown but still young enough to let us pick him up and he even went to school for show and tell. He had a good nature and would play with us on the floor running back and forth between us like a clumsy dog with bad, bad hair. He even went so far as to act playfully with the dog but as he got older his interactions became less playful and more unpredictable.

It finally got to the point where we could no longer pick him up, not so much because of the quills compared to his growling and scratching. By then it was no longer comfortable and we no longer felt like clever animal trainers without his co-operation. At night we could hear him whining and scratching to get out of his pen and the joy of Exotic pet ownership was gradually turning into the realization that we should probably let him go. It was late summer, we had him less than a year but it was clear that his domestic life was over so we deliberately left the cage open day and never saw him again.

Later on we went through a similar cycle with a coyote pup that my Dad brought home one night on his way back from teaching at the prison. That Coyote was a great pet for the first 6 months and then in less than a week he matured into a vicious creature who could not be contained and left on his own before the authorities could catch him. It was still painful to lose a friend and pet like that but after George we knew better than to get too invested. I don’t even remember the Coyote’s name, but I sure do remember wrestling with George before he turned into a wild animal.

Migrating Tarantulas

I first encountered Migrating Tarantulas when I worked on the Railroad out of Ravendale in the northeast corner of California. One day we found a single spider walking down the tracks as if had got stuck trying to climb over. Then further on we saw another and then a few more and before long there was a veritable herd of these big spiders crawling along the rail looking for a way to cross. We got up enough nerve to catch a half a dozen specimens in a spike barrel and took them back to town where the local Science Teacher was glad to have them but quick to point out that they all were males as the females don’t have to migrate. So it really wasn't a migration, it was more like a bunch of single guys out looking for a date.

Before that, I thought I knew all about Tarantulas starting as a young kid with Tarzan movies where Tarantulas were only found in the jungle. Then later on the Discovery channel I learned that all the large spiders were found in exotic climates so imagine my surprise when I discovered they lived right there in my own back yard. This is high desert country, very dry and arid, way up at 5,000 feet elevation and not much to eat for a tropical insect. Most of all I wondered what did those poor creatures do all winter when the ground is covered with snow and how could they survive those freezing temperatures.

The second encounter was while driving back from Reno years later when we suddenly came upon a bunch of miniature tumbleweeds that were rolling across the road in slow motion. Even though I should have recognized them it didn’t dawn on me until the car slowed down enough to recognize those mini- tumbleweeds were really spiders. It was like a bad Science Fiction movie from the ‘50’s where it was hard to believe there could be that many animals in such a sparse environment.

With all due respect to Dave Barry, wouldn’t Migrating Tarantulas make a great name for a Rock Band~!?