"Come with us tonight for a journey few men take today. Out where there’s few roads and fewer people, only the twin steel ribbons trace a route between high mountain and deep valley… where, under the gleam of headlights and in the thunder of massive machines, strange events may happen, and what is seen is often not possible… "
(Original title and intro by georgev)
Intrigued yet? Several of us weere telling ghost stories for Halloween, and having a blast. I want to open the floor to a wider array of topics, and see if we can drag in a new set of posters as well. Most of yas have set the back stories for yor towns and places, just add people, and bring the world to life! It might make your next running/ops session more fun too. Or, you can go completely in a new direction and focus on something you haven’t modelled
One request: To save space, let’s use titles, and quote the title and/or author only when referring to a story, not to the whole story itself.
The original thread by Darth Santa Fe is here
Need some motivation? re-read Bill Henderson’s tales from the Coal Belt Or, here’s a few prompts
Got any ideas now? Go! Write free!
This probably comes under the heading of Horror Stories.
In 1968 I was 18yrs old. I hired on with the New York City Transit Authority as an electrical helper and was assigned as a Signal Maintainers Helper. I didn’t like it and wasn’t going to stay there as it was a dirty and dangerous place to work, but my work location was just a few blocks away from where I was living with my folks, so I said what the hell. After about 6 months my work location changed to lower Manhattan and it took about 45 min and two trains to get there. To top that off the Maintainer I had to work with was an old black guy who didn’t like white people very much. He always had trouble with people who were assigned to work with him and they didn’t stay with him very long.
All went well for a couple of months. Each morning at 8 am we would go down to Hudson Terminal Station which was the last stop on the 8th Avenue Local to sit in the tower for the rush hour and be ready in case of signal or switch problems. This station was renamed WORLD TRADE CENTER after the WTC was built. This tower had a GRS lever type interlocking machine that was converted to an automatic plant, but the interlocking machine only had to be operated in case of trouble so the towerman had nothing to do there. Approaching trains initiated a route selection sequence that would line them up to an empty track. The Dispatcher filpped a switch to line up a train to leave. The dispatchers office was in a separate room from the tower separated by a knee wall so the two men could see and talk to each other. I usually sat in the tower watching the modelboard and the Maintainer sat in the dispatchers office. After the rush hour we had to walk back to canal st and make a visual inspection of all the switches in the area.
One morning after a train had just left the station the maintainer came in to the tower and said to me “get your stuff and lets go”. I aske
I guess I could call this “A ride in the cab.”
This happened back in 1978, give or take a year. At the time we were living in an isolated northern community in the middle of nowhere. The nearest city was about 150 miles away (also in the north), an 8 hour trip by train. In case you’re doing the math and it doesn’t add up, most of that area is muskeg which is like laying track on Jello, and the train stops at a few First Nations settlements along the line and also stops anywhere in the bush for trappers and hunters to get on and off. Because of the rough track on the muskeg, the trains are limited to 30 mph.
Anyway, I was waiting on the platform to take the train back home, a voice behind me asked what on earth I was doing there. It was a friend of ours who was a CN engineer. After a little chit-chat he asked if I wanted to ride home in the cab. After debating for all of 3 milliseconds I said, “Yes!” We climbed into the cab and he took me back into the engine compartment and we walked all around the engine. I’m not exactly sure what type of locomotive it was, but it was one of the F-units. I remember the engine and everything else in there as being gigantic and extremely noisy.
I got to sit in the fireman’s seat all the way back. When we pulled slowly out of the station, what struck me was the feeling of raw power coming up through the floor and the seat. It wasn’t just the sound, it was a feeling, a sensation of sitting on an incredible amount of raw power. It’s hard to describe as it’s just a feeling, an emotion, but I think that anyone else fortunate to have ridden in a locomotive will understand. On the trip back my friend explained quite a bit about the operation of a passenger train, how the engineer has to control the slack in the couplers so as not to spill the passengers’ drinks, and so on. He explained that the 30 mph speed limit was due to the track shifting on the muskeg–and he felt that 30 mph was even too fast. Looking out the window at the track in fron