Chapter 5: Maintenance of Way Cars

When it comes to railroad cars there are those famous train cars, the flatcar, the boxcar, the tanker, the refrigerator (or reefer) but there is another class for the maintenance department. The Maintenance of Way Department gets its name from the old “right of way” concept that was leftover from the “Eminent Domain” loop hole that all railroads used to make a land grab back when that was still legal.

In all my years working on the railroad I was always on the lookout for one of those hand cars where two people would push the handle up and down in a teeter-totter motion to drive along the tracks like the ones used by Charlie Chaplin in the old movies. I never did find one of those hand powered cars even though I made a thorough search through all the scrap heaps in all the train yards and camps up and down the line. But I did find a heap of other kinds of track cars such as these.

Gravity Car:

No more than six inches tall it folds into two pieces and can be removed by one man in a single move. Weighing no more than 45 pounds the gravity car may sound light weight but in fact is a heavyweight contender being capable of carrying over 2 tons. It is composed of heavy metal diamond shaped wire mesh of hollow pipe frames for an incredibly strong yet light little piece of equipment. These are loaded with everything from spikes, creepers, plates, ties rails and even workers though not recommended. This car was responsible for a number of ankle and foot injuries beyond the protection offered by the mandatory steel toe boots.

Track Car:

This small square box was nothing more than a frame with a lawn mower motor in between the two passenger seats and barely room for any equipment. These were light enough for one person to take them off at a crossing though two people was the minimum under the book of rules, though we often went out alone. These small cars were only meant for inspection purposes and light weight tools though they invariably were overloaded with tools and extra workers.

Motor Car:

This is the four cylinder version of track car with room for 6 workers sitting on ¾ inch plywood top over the engine and it was so heavy it could only be taken off the tracks using a pair of runner rails that pivot on a center allowing the car to be turned out into a tool house or take-off ramps conveniently located at regular intervals between stations.

The minimum crew for a motor car was 4 men but 2 experienced employees were generally allowed to skip that rule. Yes, I have done it alone several time but only using the best take off rails and pivot that were supposed to never leave the local tool house.

We used to have a morning ritual to fill the gas tank without a funnel and not spill a drop. It may sound droll if not dangerous but I remember practicing and finally getting good enough to volunteer for the morning fill up without a funnel.

Crew Car:

These Diesel powered trolleys were up to 10 feet long and could carry as many as 40 men and equipment by attaching push cars. Crew cars did have take off rails but they were rarely used and crew cars were always used in conjunction with work trains and would simply stay on the sidings with the trains.

Push Car:

These are low flat cars that can be attached to any of the motorized cars but are just as frequently found to be pushed by hand. With two push cars you can accommodate even the longest rail using one at each end. Railroad rails will easily turn from side to side but not very much in the up and down direction. You can load ties and even loose gravel on a push car and then move it an dump like a wheel barrow. It still takes two strong men to take a push car off.

The first fatality after I started was a runaway push car that went 17 miles down the hill to hit an unsuspecting welder sitting on the rail. His helper never heard or saw anything because the push car is so low to the ground and runs silently. We all had a different view of push cars after that.

Hi-Rail Car:

This is any motorized vehicle with the necessary attachments to allow it to drive down the rails. It is mostly heavy trucks for work but can be more suburban looking passenger vehicles for the big shots to have a special close look. The bigger the shot the fancier the hi-rail car all the way up to actual Cadillacs just so they could remain comfortable during their track inspection while we had to poke along in our motor cars.

I never did find one of those hand powered push cars like Charlie Chaplin used but I did find out that they were outlawed in the 1940’s for causing too many injuries and were thereafter banned for life nationwide. I am sure they still exist somewhere and I would even pay money to ride one despite the risk if they ever put one in at Six Flags.

Molecule Missed

Whatever happened to the lowly molecule. When I was a kid there was plenty of news about molecular studies but then everything moved on to Atomic science and we never looked back. It’s not that we should stop working on the atom but by now we should have completely mapped out the molecule when it turns out that no one knows a thing because they stopped working on it anymore. They all moved on to the more sexy stuff in bigger or smaller fields of study.

Somewhere between the elements and the atom is the Rodney Dangerfield of all Scientific subjects; the molecule. When the scientists who study physics first went in search of how things work, the molecule was their first theory as the chunk of matter that could not be seen but must exist to keep things together. The molecule was soon found boring and they next invented an even smaller bit called the atom which also cannot be seen but must exist in order for molecules to exist. They are driving so fast they have not time to look in the rear view mirror to see what they missed in their blind spot.

And that was the last time anyone gave a darn about the poor maligned molecule. Those scientists were on a mad dash to find even smaller stuff they called sub-atomic and they would be happy if they turn up sub-sub-atomic dinkies but what about the molecule? Does anyone know how it works? No, they are too busy going the other way.

That same thing happens everywhere we look. The computer engineers are trying to make the smallest transistor possible but they still don’t understand the potential of a big one. The Doctors only want to cure obscure corner cases but no one works on the common cold. The weatherman wants to talk about a hundred year flood but can only predict the rain a few days in the future.

It’s like trying to fly to Jupiter without stopping at Mars first. It’s the least we can do on the way out there, for practice at least. And if we ever do get to Mars we would soon lose interest in the moon no doubt as we work our way out to Jupiter and beyond. So we should also find our way around the molecule before we go any further in, as it were.

There is definitely a missing link between what we want to know and what we need to know let alone what we should know. If we are all that smart then we should know more by now.

Get Out of My Road

There is a well worn analogy in general use lately that states that any given amount of energy can be translated into the “Equivalent of taking thousands of cars off the road”. The favorite number for the amount of cars is 280,000 but it can be as much as millions and as little as a few thousand depending on the subject in question, but in all cases the formula is clearly meant get an emotional response. We are either scared of all that pollution if we don’t do something or delighted at the idea of taking all those cars off our road. Who hasn’t been stuck in traffic and wished all the other cars would just go away.

This verbal sleight of hand is an equal opportunity deception used by any speaker from any political party and can be tailor made to fit any scenario. Of course it can be used by the Green Team to make a case for turning off the lights or recycling paper but the other side can use the same logic to prove that we need to drill for more oil or add another nuclear plant. The problem with this line of thinking is that none of those things will actually reduce the number of cars on the road. We can turn off all the lights and build a big new power plant but it won’t take any cars off the road.

The theory states that if everyone would just start to do the right things it will be like taking so many cars off the road, but no one ever bothers to mention what year, make and model of car. Are those Hummers or Fiats? Eight Cylinders or 4? Do all those cars have good tires and a tune-up? What will happen to those cars? The whole idea is based on a ridiculous assumption to begin with and if we try to analyze it logically it only gets more meaningless.

Some of the blame goes to the word “equivalent” because it is so close to the word “equivocate” which means to “ deliberately mislead with the intent to deceive.” That sounds exactly like what is happening when we start out by assuming the positive outcome (fewer cars on the road) but end up with a negative result (fewer lights and more nuclear power plants). Whenever an argument uses an equivalent statement you can start to worry about equivocation.

Why can't paper reduction be compared to trees, lights compared to electricity and plastic bottles compared to…: Plastic. But instead we keep dragging the image of those cars being taken off the road like a tired old movie plot twist that is guaranteed to satisfy the viewing public. Why can't we just take cars off the road if that is the result we crave so much? Because we only want to remove the other cars, not ours.

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~!?