Happy Easter to those of you
celebrating to-day, and to those of you not celebrating to-day…well,
either try your best to hold out until May 1, or go find yourself a
religion.

There’s a saying amongst locomotive
mechanics about the difference between diesel engines and steam
engines. With a diesel, it takes three days to find the problem and
three minutes to fix it. With a steamer, it takes three minutes to find
the problem and three days to fix it. This morning, I found out just
what an industrial-sized grain of truth that is.

Passengers and train crew alike got the gyp of a lifetime today.

We had the steam engine out the freaking door – and lo and behold:
engineer’s injector was busted, safety valves were out of adjustment,
and water sight glasses were seized up the wazoo. It didn’t take a
brain surgeon to figure out who made a plumber’s nightmare of the
valves in the cab (and no, it wasn’t yours truly); so as high as the
expectations ran for this weekend, I might have known they were going
to get dumped in the ash pit. It never fails these days. You’ve got
something to look forward to and SPLAT. How’d that banana peel get
there?

All is not lost, though – while my boss and I are dead tired of
traipsing up and down the line with a diesel engine, at least that
engine didn’t break down again, and I got to do a couple of runarounds
this afternoon. Un-for-gettable…if I had any reservations about
staying here and staying with the job, they were obliterated by that
first crack of the throttle.

Curiously enough, running the engine for the first time wasn’t quite as
exhilarating as I thought it might be. I guess that’s one of the big
differences between being a railfan and being a railroader – when
you’re a railfan, excitement runs to an all-time high at the very
thought of being able to grip that throttle and answer the highball.
When you’re a railroader, however, the first – and only – thing that’s
circulating through your synapses is how much machine you’ve got at
your command, how severe the consequences if you don’t do it by the
book, and how heavy the responsibility you’re assuming when you release
that brake. Knowing how to move which lever at which moment is not the
only knowledge you need to run a train. Does engineering sound exciting
to you? It sounds responsible – enormously responsible – to me.

Guess who just got home from his first boiler wash?

I went in to work this morning expecting to be doing a few small
tinkerworkings on the track or on the NdeM passenger steamer we’re
restoring. When what to my wondering ears should accost, but a boiler
wash and all cleanliness lost! I spent most of the morning lugging a
1.5-inch fire hose up the side of the engine, squeezing down into the
boiler through the steam dome (which is a feat in itself for a guy my
size when trying to get around the throttle valve), and then using
high-pressure water to clean all the crud out of the interior. And what
a lot o’ crud there was…This is why Delaware River water would not be
my first choice for providing steam power. It was lit’rally CAKED on
the heating tubes, which I just happened to be lying on while trying to
clean them off, not to mention the sides of the boiler and the firebox
area. Bit of a tight squeeze, that. On average, it took me five or six
minutes to get my posterior turned around so I could attack an
uncleaned area.

As you can well imagine, I got pretty well soaked cleaning all that crap off the top and the middle.

After lunch, though? That’s where the fun really began.

After donning my rain gear, I found myself shoving that same fire hose
into the washout plugs on the bottom of the engine and removing all the
crud and gunk and goo that I’d washed down earlier. Anybody who has a
rain suit, let me clue you in: it does not, I repeat, not do any good
when you’re washing out the inside of a steam locomotive.
Uncounted gallons of crummy water came pouring back out of those
washout plugs – and a fair share of it went straight into my sleeve and
pooled there, threatening to pour out the wrong end and gush down my
side like a New Jersey waterfall. (Some of it did…) Not to mention
the water that accumulated in my boots, threaded its way through my
hair, and couldn’t seem to quit getting in my eyes from there.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not getting paid nearly enough for this
business – but I’ll be a-lookin’ forward to it when the summer sun is
beating us to death. After all, I’ll be cleaning up my own mess
from firing almost daily…

Yeah, that’s the wet side of railroading for you. Thankfully, I’m
returning to the dry (albeit windy) side later this week, hoping
against hope that the freight cars we’re supposed to be pulling out
won’t be hooked up to their ground dispensers this time.
Wednesday promises to be a blast – up at an ungodly hour, out the door by an ungodlier hour,
and at work by God knows when to run a lovely big stone train down to the CSX
interchange. Good ol’ Crash Smash Xplode…can’t wait to see how many
hopper cars we have to repair when they’re through with ‘em…