Working on the railroads (Part 2)
Photo: Prince George Rail Yard (looking west)
During the latter part of 1980 and into 1981, a huge spike in house prices occurred in the metropolitan Vancouver area. It drove the real estate market crazy. People were flipping properties left and right. Downright ravenous. The small 50 year old house on Brock Street in East Vancouver we had purchased in the Fall of 1977 for $47,500, went on the market for $120,000 just three years later.
The deal was done before the “For Sale” sign went up on the front lawn. When our agent, Mrs Tatarniuk, came to see Donata and I with an offer of $118,000, we just kind of looked at each other with a shrug and a smirk and said okay. Of course we did. (It wasn’t long, unfortunately for some, before the market reached a cliff and a lot of people fell over, many sustaining serious financial injury).
Our incentive for selling was to get out from under a burdensome mortgage in Vancouver, believe it or not. I worked as much overtime as I could find in those days to help make ends meet for our family. In order to start the process of change and the move north, I bid on a work train, the Speno rail grinder, in October 1980, as a way of getting my “clearance”, a collective agreement provision which allowed a running trades employee to transfer to another home terminal location once the work train assignment was completed.
Meanwhile, we had bought a beautiful log house on a small acreage about 25 kilometres north of Prince George in a small community named Salmon Valley, a place where moose and bears would come by and visit. PG is about 800 highway kilometres north of Vancouver. We would spend four good years there.
Back to the Speno for a moment. The rail grinder is a small train equipped with several cars and power plants providing coarse grinding discs that burn off excess flange wear and imperfections and improve the rail profile. Sparks and fire fly everywhere. Our job was to cover off the Yale Subdivision, the main line segment between Thornton Yard and Boston Bar, 114 rail miles to the east of Vancouver in the Fraser River Canyon. The job took about five or six days as I recall. Our conductor was Terry Watters and the senior brakeman was Wiley Abel, one of the funniest guys I have ever worked with. I was the junior.
Wiley was so good natured and told great stories. He shared one about how he was going to show his young son how to properly fall a tree only to drop the damn thing right on top of his new truck. As senior brakeman, it was Wiley’s critical role to follow the train with the water hose and extinguish the hot spots that caught fire on the right of way. It was a fun week.
The Speno originated in the U.S., and travelled all across the lower 48 states and Canada. Most of the crew were good old boys from way down south, some not long out of prison. Their working conditions were not that great and they worked long days which included the re-fitting of discs after the grinding day was done and the work train was put to rest. I called the train the “pig pen” because it smelled so bad — it had this acrid, coarse and lingering burnt metal pall that hung about it. This technology is used on railways around the world.
When we packed up our house in Vancouver we also brought along several house plants. One of them was a dieffenbachia or rubber plant which stood about six feet high. When the moving truck arrived at our new home on November 30, the plant was at the back and still intact. Thing is, the temperature in Prince George region overnight reached minus 25 degrees celsius and the plant froze solid. Once it thawed inside our warm new house it collapsed like a huge wet green noodle.
Why didn’t someone tell us that it got really cold in Northern B.C.? Being from Vancouver, sure, it got rainy and sodden and chilly and such, but not so cold it would freeze the pump in your well house which is what happened to us on our first night in our new house. I had to go outside in the deep chill and pour boiling water over it to get it primed and working again.
My first pay trip was working as the head end brakeman on the Fraser Sub Wayfreight assignment 582. It was in the first week of December 1980. The train would be called for 0800 in Prince George and work east to McBride, 146 rail miles distant. We would get away in good time and then switch/shunt at the various mills and sidings en route to McBride. It would take us several hours to get across the subdivision and once at McBride we would switch out our train marshalling the cars destined to various locations to separate tracks in the yard. That first night was very chilly, around -30 and I was just not prepared for the conditions at hand and I have never felt so cold in my entire life. I got better gear after that.
We would overnight in the bunkhouse there, have a quick breakfast at the McBride Hotel, situated right across the road from the bunkhouse then prepare to head west back to PG. Our train home was 581 and we would pick up and switch traffic at various locations on the return. If you held this assignment as a regular you would work east on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and return home on the following days except on Friday when we would turn around and come right home. That is, after some dinner and a glass of beer or two, which you could do in those days.
I started on the Trainman’s Spareboard at the beginning there and occasionally you could catch a yard shift as well, work which I really liked. More about that in a moment. I was called as the brakeman on VIA Rail №6, the eastbound passenger to Jasper during my first week. You would run either to McBride or beyond, to “the meet”, where we would exchange passenger train crews at a prearranged siding on the Tete Jaune Sub and then work №5 back to PG.
On night in early December after arriving back in PG about midnight off №5, I saw something that will stay with me for the rest of my life. I was driving home northbound along Hwy 97 and as the car came clear of broad stands of evergreens on either side of the road and started down a long sloping grade toward the river I believed I saw the entire valley on fire.
I had to catch my breath and it took me a moment to realize that it was the Aurora Borealis. The sky was flaming orange. You don’t see the aurora in Vancouver. I have since seen the Northern Lights on many occasions, the shimmering green and aqua curtains that undulate and weave across the heavens, but never as fiery and pluming orange as I saw them that night.
Another quick story about the wayfreight. Some years on I worked a trip on the head end with Larry Shultz as the engineer. Larry was a good natured and happy guy and it was always a good trip if you worked with him. I understand he contracted cancer years later and is no longer with us. He would be remembered fondly.
One day we had to make a lift of some lumber loads at Upper Fraser sawmill, located about 40 miles east of PG. The tail end crew stopped the train across from the mill on radio instruction and the conductor and tail end brakey made a cut in the train. We had a caboose in those days. The cut was made for re-marshalling purposes and the front portion of the train was sent on toward the west switch points which provided access into the mill track. I had already climbed off the locomotive and walked up to the switch while the boys made the cut, leaving cars behind on the main track.
While I was standing at the switch points I saw a huge bullfrog mere feet away. It was as big as my gloved hand and I picked it up. As Larry approached closely on the loco I said into my radio mike, “Hey Larry, check this out.”, and lobbed the frog up into the loco cab as it went by. It landed in his lap. Larry jumped back in his seat and shrieked and the poor frog came flying back out and returned to earth with a thud. Poor thing. I believe that it was a truly lucky toss on my part and that I could not have made a better fling if I had tried a hundred times. Larry forgave me.
During this four year period in PG I worked mostly in yard service as a Yard Foreman. In those days we ran on the job. We hustled throughout the shift. Nowadays an employee in train or yard service would catch hell if they were seen hoofing it. We strove for the early quit, essentially compressing eight hours work into five. Sometimes we cut corners and to this day I have to be thankful that I never got seriously injured. Many did. I know a lot railroaders would have lost legs by falling beneath the wheels of moving rollingstock. I know of one who lost an arm and who came back to work at CN as an engineer/driver.
During the winter of 1981 I was working a yard assignment as a yard helper (senior helper/field man/“field mouse”) which meant that it was my job to line up the tracks where cars shunted were destined and to apply hand brakes to either slow or stop them and to be a step ahead of the foreman in lining up the cuts in the cars to be pulled out by the yard engine (“goat”). One cold January day I was in my usual hurry to get across cars in the various tracks in order to be in position to pull the pin and separate the cars from those coming out to those staying behind.
Rail cars have a walking platform made of corrugated metal about one foot wide across the end and above the draft gear (couplers, hand brakes and such) and on this day I was hustling and slipped on the platform and my right shin struck the metal deck of the platform. What pain! I managed to hold on and regain my composure and climb to the ground and I cried. I carried a bruise there for four years and had a doctor check it out.
I was young and fit and strong and I could run all day long, finish up, go home for a few hours then come back for a night shift on overtime at time and a half (a “double”). This was my routine for a few years in PG. The yard work was great and I felt that I really hit my stride as a railroad man in those years. I also worked as a yardmaster and found that I was pretty good at it. I still do it around the house occasionally and my wife knows when I do.
See you in Part 3 (we’ll get out to Prince Rupert on the Pacific coast) …