In 1985 -87 I was working in Wyoming and Montana. One morning the motel alarm clock / radio turned on and I heard a female radio announcer naming the crews for the morning’s trains. I think this was a local, but commercial, radio station, not a railroad frequency. Might have been in Cheyenne, or less likely Laramie or Billings. Does anyone remember this, know the name of a station that did this, and is it still done?
Chuck Smart
I remember hearing crew calls on local radio station in Wyoming in the 70’s. Not sure it is still done as many folks have pagers or cell phones.
Jim
Might that have been associated with the surge of Powder River Basin coal trains - especially on BN - at the time ?
Paul,
What I was hearing on the local radio station in 1974 was UP crew calls - or as UP stated in their billboards along I-80 - ‘Wyoming’s Largest Employer’… The Powder River coal traffic was still just a trickle at the time.
Crew call/assignments are not unusual to be broadcast over local radio stations. The local Seneca/Libby’s corn canning operation here will send shift start assignments to the local radio stations. Depending on how much corn as arrived from the fields, they may have to put on extra crews on the ‘corn pack’ lines. I suspect the radio station use this as filler and write it off as public service announcements to keep the FCC happy.
Jim
Jim
I remember reading that there was a radio station in Cheyenne that did this for the Union Pacific back in the late 1970’s. When I was traveling in and through Cheyenne in 1981, I tried to find this station on the radio dial without success.
Would have been a great thing in those pre-cellphone/pager days, when railroaders were practically married to the phone at times.
This seems amazing to us perhaps because “local” media, even in fairly small towns, is hardly "local’ at all any more. Radio in particular with the exception of some talk/sports talk radio, has really moved away from the image of a real person sitting at a microphone in a building in town. This is why sometimes you hear a weather report that would take only a glance outside to see is dead wrong.
Go back to small town newspapers around 1900 to 1920 and they’d mention who was visiting from out of town, or who was going to be leaving town soon to go visit relatives.
When I went to college in Oshkosh (more years ago than I care to admit) one local station would read the local area death notices at noon - either reading from the paper or sent to it from the local “funeral parlors.” The obituary program was sponsored by Pepsi Cola which resulted in a rather creepy opening to the show: you’d hear the announcer say “Today’s Oshkosh obituaries are brought to you by Pepsi. Come Alive - You’re in the Pepsi Generation.”
Sorry. That’s OT.
Dave Nelson
IIRC UP posts their crew calls on the local cable channel in North Platte.
I wonder if these UP jobs aren’t really calls, but the assignments made to the daily mark up board.
Some yards instead of holding the same regular assigned job every day, you have to bid the job you want. You call in the day before, bid in your jobs in preference order, and after they are assigned you can call another number to hear the results and find out what job you will be working the next day. These jobs, like regular assigned yard jobs, are “show up” type jobs. You don’t get called by a caller when they need you to work or have to acknowledge that you’ll be working your assignment, like you normally do when working road or otherwise irregular jobs.
Now with the internet, we can log onto the company site and look at boards and even lay off through it. In fact, we have to use the internet or AVR instead of a human caller to lay off some statuses. This has allowed them to cut the number of people needed to call crews.
Jeff
Jeff, I can’t state it with any certainty but I’m fairly certain that I read about it in a RAILROAD magazine, the old publication that got swallowed up into Railfans and Railroads. I remember thinking that would be great, I was a young, on-call brakeman in those days. All I have to stand by is my memory.