We have a community and culture unlike any other. We live out on the rails in a strange brotherhood. We are cobbled from every background and together we are railroaders.
Many of us grew up together out here. We became men, women, parents, spouses; all while riding the rails and moving the freight. We miss our nights and weekends, holidays and family events. We sacrifice our sleep and comfort and health to provide for those we love and to keep our country supplied.
We spend days and weeks and months and years cramped up in tiny stinking boxes hurling through the darkness and fog and rain and snow. We often share more time time together than we do with anyone else.
We share experiences that no one from outside our brotherhood could ever understand. People hurl themselves and their vehicles in front of our trains accidentally or on purpose and we are there together dealing with the nightmares and the tragedy of the sights. We know no schedule and sleep in far flung cities more than we sleep in our own beds. We drop everything to run to the train yard and disappear down the tracks. We fight the brutal fatigue. We lose the friendships with people who will never understand the life.
In the decades we share together in our tiny boxes we see marriages made and broken, children born and raised. We see each other drunkenly jolly and sternly sober. Our families spend time together because they understand that mom or dad may or may not be there and that its just the way it goes.
We constantly make fun of each other. I’ve seen crowded rooms of men collectively roll their eyes when the one guy that we all know “just doesn’t get it” walks into our midst. We nickname ourselves and keep each other’
Cool. So when is a railroader not a railroader? Obviously the people who work on the trains, the MOW people, the yardmasters, the mechanics, and the dispatchers are railroaders. And I guess the top brass are railroaders too as they’e the only ones ever awarded with the distinction “Railroader of the Year”. But what about the administrative and sales people… are clerks and “account executives” railroaders too?
For the most part, they are not railroaders, they could be doing the same type jobs at insurance companies, bank, health providers - any number of other business types and not have their jobs changed in any material way.
Not sure I would agree with that sentiment. They know the language and they know how to manipulate the system to benefit the railroad. (Alex/ LARams guy was a trainman, but also one of those.)
The engineers/architects/surveyors around me are sure I came from another world (Grand Railroad of the Holy Faith) and speak in heiroglyphics half the time (FGROW, DOT#, undercutter, frog angles, lead distance, bent stockrail, A&B blocks, cribbing, little “o” distance, bents, EE BR, spring line…whut the?) … But I suddenly get popular when they have to deal with a railroad because their project is “the most important ever” for a nanosecond.
Some of those account execs keep railroads alive…I don’t see anybody trying to offend the beancounters, claim agents or attorneys…
(for that matter, I’m sure many of the high and mighty here have no true idea of what a surveyor does [there are 3 surveyors on Rushmore with that insignificant (?) “other guy”] besides look through an optical astronomy telescope (the damn recent History Channel docudrama on the Royal Gorge War left us in stitches . Telescopes are not vernier transits and wye/dumpy levels. Anything with tripod legs is a transit [(-D] )
MC, proir to the D&RG - ATSF sitoo at the Royal Gorge the significant western gunfighter Bat Masterson was a grader as the Santa Fe built toward Dodge City. He along with a brother later became part of law enforcement in Dodge City and as Bat’s reputation grew he served in similar positions throughout the west. His “loyalty” to Santa Fe placed him in the Royal Gorge situation where he never fired a shot. Railroaders come in all in stripes as you point out.
Well, MC, if those types ever have to work with anything connected to a railroad, I’m sure you can explain matters to them in words of one syllable so they can comprehend what it is all about.
The part about new traveling fast got a chuckle from me.
Many years ago on a WICT train to Chicago I finished the run and got cabbed to the hotel.
We arrived at about 5 am , woke up about noonish , went outside of the hotel to smoke and promptly got arrested for robbing the gas station across the street from the hotel.
It didn’t take long to get everything straightened out but… By 9 pm when our train arrived in Fox Lake even the Metra car cleaners knew I got busted for armed robbery…
Of course every dispatcher, operator, train crew was on the radio asking how much the WICT was paying us…
All the more reason to wave at a train’s head-end crew when they pass. Steam locomotives, cabooses, semaphores, position-light signals, all have passed, but the heroes are still out there.
Several times I have seen jokes told at the home terminal arrive at the AFHT well before the person who told them.
Great post Balt, really sums up reality neatly.
And I will always consider the clerks, sectionmen and others to be railroaders. It just wouldn’t be a railroad without track, customers and (above all) paperwork.
Not to put too fine a point on it, in my opinion the people who don’t work on trains are “railroad employees” or “work for the railroad.” I had an uncle who worked in the NKP’s real estate department; suffice it to say no one ever considered him a “railroader.”
“Railroaders” are, I think, just as Balt’s essay described them: the guys who work on the trains, but the other folks are vital, too, of course.
In that essay, Balt, I thought the most vivid paragraph was the part about engineers. “We share the feeling of screaming through small towns in the middle of the night ringing our bells, belching black smoke and blowing our horns.” Great image! Some engineers who roar through our town at those hours blow their horns for the crossing as if they realize thousands of people are trying to sleep; others seem to feel it their duty to make horn-blowing last as long as possible.
In the middle of the night I love hearing fast-moving trains, operated by railroaders, blowing those horns and ringing those bells.
I blow in accordance to federal regulation. If I hit someone and wasn’t blowing the proper amount, then it’s my ass on the line. Can’t be nice out here anymore. It is what it is. Heaven help you if you only blew for 13 seconds.
As for as the term “railroader”: I really don’t care. It’s just a term. Most of us are out here for a paycheck - not some higher calling*. There’s some ‘railroaders’ out there (and probably here, too) that wouldn’t consider me a ‘railroader’ because I don’t currently run road trains or stay in dirtbag motels. I don’t lose sleep over it.
I had a trainmaster that once said “brotherhood ends where the wallet begins”. I don’t know if truer words were ever spoken.
Sigh Yet another piece of work that reinforces the notion that the railroad only runs with engineers and conductors. Also, to whomever said clerks are not railroaders, what a foolish statement.