RUNAWAY TRAIN

“And the sons of Pullman porters and the son’s of engineers,

 ride their father’s magic carpet made of steel”

The City of New Orleans by Arlo Guthrie is one of my all time favorite songs. I never get tired of hearing it. It’s one of those songs that have all the best elements in it to make it a perfect song, a haunting song.

I love trains, one of the greatest Christmas gifts me and my brother ever got (and I’m sure he will agree) was a train set back in the early 60s. I believe it was a 1:48 scale model, but I’m not sure about that. I remember mom and dad got us all up that Christmas morning around 3 or 4 am. When we ran into the living room the train was all set up and running around in a figure 8 track setup. We went ape shit over it, I remember it came with a powered hand car and a bottle of oil that you use to make oil puff out of the stack. I’m sure Obama and all the environmental wacko’s would worry about the carbon footprint we were leaving and make that liquid smoke illegal now.

My brother Mike is still a train nut, he and his grandson Kyle play with a train set Mike has set up in his spare bedroom. They also use a train computer game to while away the hours when Kyle comes over and they go to all the local train shows possible.

The reason blogging about trains came to me; is a memory that keeps popping up in my rapidly aging brain. In my early 20’s I worked for a company that repaired, inspected and rebuilt railroad cars. This was not Amtrak, we didn’t work on passenger cars, we did mostly coal hoppers, we also repaired freight cars, tankers, gondola’s ect. I first started there around 1979 or 80, working with some old high school buddies building railroad tracks in the yard. I’ll use their nicknames; there was Wormy, Amos P. Moses and my buddies called me Maddog back then, couldn’t tell you why.

It was a very interesting job, but could be extremely dangerous too. We were young and full of piss and vinegar and felt like we were 10 feet tall and bullet proof. Aside from laying track, we also worked in the shop, flipping railroad cars upside down, climbing to dizzying heights above shop and anything else that was required to keep a paycheck coming.

From time to time, we had to travel to our two other shops to repair or lay new track at either Sidney Nebraska or Paris Kentucky. This particular memory that keeps popping up stems from our trip to Paris Ky, our company had secured a contract with a railroad co. down there to perform mandatory inspections on their coal cars. Me, Amos and Wormy were down there with other guys from the Indy shop to repair some track and help out with the guys doing the inspections and repairs. There was no shop; we were working on the cars outside which was not uncommon. After we got the access tracks shaped up, we helped the road crews anyway we could for the next few days.

The work area was in a flat clearing and the cars we were to work on were all coupled up together several hundred yards up a fairly gentle grade. We were taxed with the job of cutting the cars loose in strings of 5 and riding them down in a free gravity ride. One guy would stand between two cars and drive them down while the other guy pulled the lever that opened the coupler and broke the string of 5 loose from the rest.



coal hopper, top right is an exampe of a hand brake



Here’s tricky part, you need to climb the ladder on one of the cars and stand at the top of the rungs where the was a tiny platform because that’s where the hand brake was, so you stand between 2 cars because that gives you twice the braking power. Railroad cars are normally stopped by pneumatic brakes with air supplied by the engine coupled to all the cars by a series of air hoses and glad-hands, but they also have a mechanical backup system where you can actuate the brakes with hand cranks.

The dangers here are miss-judging your speed and coming into the work station too fast, where there are cars jacked up off the trucks (the wheel sets that the car rides on) and guys on and under the cars working on them. Even though these cars were not carrying their usual payload of tons of coal, you still had about 550 tons you had to get stopped before you ran through the workstation and killed some of your buddies. These things sure as hell don’t stop on a dime! The other danger is falling off the string of cars and getting ran over by a railroad car, even though empty they still weigh 110 tons each. That almost happened to a guy we called Rat. He was riding a string and fell, just before he hit the track, his leg got caught and he was dangling upside down hanging by one leg staring at the track going by and the wheel of the railroad car. Luckily for him, Amos saw him and ran to catch up with the train, grabbed Rat and pulled him off and away from certain death. They went tumbling safely in the ditch, but now we got a runaway train heading for the work station till someone else caught up to the coal cars,  jumped on and cranked the brakes down.

The prospect of getting cut in half by a railroad wheel is too gruesome to imagine. Sadly it did happen at the shop one day about a year after I left that company, a teenager who was helping switch cars in the yard was riding on the outside of the track mobile and slipped off was ran over and cut in two at the pelvis. Believe it or not he lived, with a dramatically limited quality of life.

But that horrible event was in the distant future and aside from Rats close call which was retold several times over several beers after all the strings were cut and the cars inspected and we could laugh about Rats’ adventure the way guys do when they are covering up their fear of what could have been.

But that was not the lasting memory I came away with from our mission in Ky,

It was standing on the footrest by the top of the ladder between the 1^st and 2^nd car; cranking the handbrakes to get the brake shoes close to the wheels but not touching. Feeling the jerk of someone uncoupling the string that cuts our train loose and the railroad cars slowly begins their journey through the woods towards the poor stiffs down the line that actually had to work while we got to play choo choo train.

The more strings we rode down, the farther we had to hoof it up the woods to get to the next string, but that meant the free ride down was getting longer too. When the cars got up to a safe speed I’d crank the brake wheels down just little to keep the cars under control. It’s a perfect summer day in the backwoods of Kentucky, the only sounds I can hear are the breeze of the 550 tons of American made steel whizzing through the trees and the sound of the steel wheels clicking a steady rhythm against the rail. Looking at the secluded woods from the 20-foot high vantage point I had, was like a rolling vista. Approaching my next stop, applying the breaks on car #1 then turning around reaching across the two cars grabbing onto the hand brake of car #2 jumping across to the small foothold on car #2 and cranking that hand brake down gently bringing my train to a safe stop at the work station; no runaway train on this run.  I was a kid again playing with the worlds biggest train set.

Nighttime on The City of New Orleans,

Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.

Halfway home, we'll be there by morning

Through the Mississippi darkness

Rolling down to the sea.

And all the towns and people seem

To fade into a bad dream

And the steel rails still ain't heard the news.

The conductor sings his song again,

The passengers will please refrain

This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

Good night, America, how are you?

Don't you know me I'm your native son,

I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,

I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.