We were standing around the warming fire during our 7:30Am Safety Meeting at Milepost 568 between Black Butte and Edgewood when we got a call to stop tamping ties in the Montague yard and get on over to the branch line to help the nearby section gang clear a slow order. We hated tamping by hand and were glad to go but we got there only to find out the slow order was a curve full of low joints that had to be tamped by hand.
Mike Anzo was the Section Foreman on the gang in Mt. Shasta and I had the one in Weed so it was natural for us to end up competing to be the best new Foreman in our District. We worked together on urgent issues and this slow-order limiting all trains to 5 Mph had to be removed today or else. We had to wait for a train to go by and even at that slow speed you could see the boxcars rock and roll as they hit the low joints.
We were both young whippersnappers in our early 20's from two different schools, his Dad was a cat-skinner and they lived in company housing since the day he was born where I was a new comer from the system steel gang. I was schooled by the book and he did things off the cuff in the old school way. I was the expert when it came to installing new rails or ties but when it came to maintaining the existing track structure I still needed some schooling and Mike was pleased to show off.
The first point of discussion was replacing the old cinder ballast with new heavy grade gravel. I assumed since it was cinder to begin with we had to keep that standard but Mike had his Dad haul in several truck loads of gravel that would fix this curve for good. This made the guys even madder because we had been tamping red cinder rock which is light as sugar compared to the heavy gage gravel which was so much harder to tamp we would have to use tamping bars instead of shovels and that meant a whole new set of sore muscles for that night.
Then we argued about the elevation of the hi-side rail. The official ballast chart said 1 inch maximum but the book of rules said a curve that sharp needed 2 inches. I was all for leaving things the way they were until we got the official order but Mike was more than willing to change things on his own authority. Then next point of contention had to do with the rail joints. The standard was to tighten the bolts first and then do the tamping but Mike insisted on raising first and then tightening. I didn't even argue that one since it was not mentioned in the book of rules and it seemed to make sense.
We broke for lunch and both gangs were still chowing down when the 30 minute lunch ended and I was calling for everyone to get back to work but Mike told me to take it easy even though it was clear we were no where near half way done. I already knew Mike made lots of money working overtime and assumed this would be another case but then his Dad showed up unexpectedly again this time with a full sized tamping machine that would make it easy for us to finish early without breaking our backs.
The next item that came up did get us to arguing about how high we should hump the joints. The old guys had shown me how to go to level with the track jack and then a notch or two at most above level but good old Mike liked to really hump the joints higher than I ever would. He figured the bump after should be the same size as the dip before since the ballast needed to get packed down by the train. We settled on "sky high" as the upper limit.
We watched another train rocking and rolling over the same track after our work and there was no difference from this morning maybe even worse, but sure enough a week later it was smoother than ever. I started out all mad and insulted for being shown up so many times in one day but I couldn't bring myself to keep it up since I was having so much fun learning new tricks. I had to admit Mike really did know what he was doing.
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