My Railroad Injuries

There are plenty of ways to get hurt while working on the Railroad and after 17 years I managed to stumble on every possible way to get injured.

I was still a brand new employee with only a few weeks on duty when I suffered my first injury. I took a big swing at a spike I had not set properly and never saw it come straight back and hit me in the mouth so hard it knocked my hard-hat off. I turned around expecting to find some jerk behind who knocked my hat off but instead only found blood dripping from by lip and one tooth pushed in. It took 6 hours to get to a medic and by then it was too swollen to get stitches but on the bright side, it left a good scar.

My most common injury was smashing the ring finger on my right hand between the rail and the hammer handle. There was a specific rule against reaching across the rail to prevent that very injury but it was too much trouble to step over the rail and back so I kept breaking that rule and my poor finger. The Doctor said there is nothing to do with a broken finger, just tape it up.

I once hit my head on a rail I had loaded in the back of the gang truck only a few minutes earlier. It stopped bleeding long before it stopped hurting and that was when I started wearing my Hard Hat all day every day and never regretted it, and I never had any more head bonkers.

I always considered a sliver to be the smallest of all injuries, until I got one in my eye; twice! The first one was made of steel and the Doctor said we should let my body absorb it rather than risk going in to extract it and sure enough, a few days later it stopped hurting and I never thought about it again.

Then a year later while doing the same hand-adzing cleanup after a derailment I got another splinter in the same eye even though I was wearing safety glasses both times. I figured this one would go away like last time but when it was still hurting worse than ever over a week later I went back to that same Doctor who said this sliver was made of cedar wood and cannot be dissolved by the human body like the solid steel, so he had to perform minor surgery to relieve the pain.

My most dramatic injury was being hit by a broken "dead-head" spike that flew out from Tie-Adzer machine in Tunnel 13 back in July 1984. I had metal armored leggings for protection but somehow in the dark of the tunnel that spike found its way to my ankle and took me to the ground like a gunshot. It took less than an hour to get to a Doctor which was impressive considering how far out we were but there was nothing he could do since there was no broken bone. I was back to work in a few days but it took months to stop limping and it still hurts to this day.

By far the worst of all my many injuries was the broken back from lifting a derailed motor car. I was patrolling by myself and was in a hurry to make it to the nearest spur track to clear a train. I was stuck on the switch frog and the train was coming around the corner, any reasonable person would have walked away, but I had to give one last lift with all my effort in a panic attack aided by adrenaline and was able to clear the switch just in time. Afterward my relief was short lived as both legs started going numb from the effort.

Before that I used to laugh at guys with back injuries but after that I never laughed again. By the time it was all over and done I had two different major surgeries called laminectomies where they remove the bulging part of the spinal disk. It helped get me walking again but I will always have numb legs.

So the back injury turned out to be a career ending move, and I ended up going to school to be a computer geek. Thank goodness I work in a cube where there are fewer ways to get hurt.