What a day, what a day, WHAT a DAY!

When I got to work, it was 67 degrees. When I left work, it was 90.

When I got to work, I was clean as a whistle. When I left work, I was covered in soot and coal dust.

When I got to work, I had two gallons of water on hand. When I left work, I had consumed, and probably sweated out, every drop.

When I got to work, I was just a snotty student. When I left work, I was a full-fledged locomotive fireman.

An awesome week ending with a terrific day…there’s little more I can
ask for right now (besides a warm shower and a cold beer ).

FANTASTIC birthday yesterday. The
folks are in town, so we went out to breakfast, hit the Army-Navy
store, and then headed over to the railroad. Funny thing – I’ve been
there for almost seven months now, and this is the first time I’ve ever
actually ridden on the train instead of the engine. Pretty weird
feeling looking out to the side instead of directly ahead.

And so begins the 26th year of my rollercoasting life…in a recent
chat with Jenny, I realised just how similar my life is to running a
tourist trip on the railroad. It starts out on a nice, level surface,
slowly, smoothly, crossing a few roads along the way. About a half-mile
in, it starts to cant uphill, going up a 1.15% grade for almost four
miles. After another crossing, it gets rough. There are spread rails,
bumps, low spots, a great boneshaking ride for a couple more miles
through two more grade crossings, until it finally reaches the top of
the hill and starts to coast downgrade, rolling free on a smooth, even
slope into the next station. My life’s like that – EXACTLY like that.
The thing is, it’s a long, rough uphill battle; and if I ever slow down
or stop pouring on the coal, the train will never make it to the top of
the hill. I’ll tell ya now, if I can keep that up for seven trips in
one day, fifty years down the pike is gonna be 115-pound welded rail.

Well, the birthday’s over, and now it’s time for trial by fire -
literally. Tomorrow’s my qualification run. Much obliged if you can
spare a prayer!

Another mess of a stone train
to-day. This time there wasn’t enough red stone to go around, so I
wound up waiting three extra hours while several truckers ran off to
another quarry to get some uglicky volcanic-grade timberlite…nasty
stuff to work with. Needless to say, I timed out again.

But how can you complain too hard after your first time running a
200-ton diesel locomotive over the entire length of the railroad???

I sure couldn’t. If ever there was a time when I could experience exhilaration and trepidation simultaneously, that was it.

“I’ve been working on the railroad all the live-long day.”

Well, according to the Federal Hours of Service Act, “all the live-long
day” is twelve hours, not to be exceeded except in extreme
circumstances. Guess who almost did?

Yep, nine hours loading a stone train and the other three conducting a
switch job. Ideally, it’s supposed to take no longer than an hour to
load each hopper car – that is, unless the dipshit at the trucking
company didn’t furnish a driver with paperwork and sent him on his way
as such. Try as I might to keep the cars within their weight limit, I
can’t accept the load unless I’ve got the paperwork, sooo….this poor
guy had to sit in his truck at the loading site and wait for one of his
cohorts to bring his paperwork down to him. On a Friday. In
eighty-degree weather plus humidity.

Amazing how one random act of idiocy can throw the entire world off
schedule, isn’t it? The guy had to deliver three more loads afterward,
and with the quarry over an hour away, that means he didn’t deliver his
last one until 3:00. (Those of you wondering, we typically start stone
trains at 5:30 AM.) On top of that, I usually have to wait an hour or
two between arrivals with nothing to do but listen to the exhaust
quietly popping unto the heavens from the locomotive – okay, so I
worked a little bit on my latest Star Wars fanfic, so it could’ve been
worse. Still, when the cars are supposed to be loaded in six
hours and it takes nine, try to imagine all the fun you can have (or
lack thereof) while you’re waiting. I’ve been working on the railroad
just to pass the time away, but that’s a hell of a way to do it.

In the meantime, we’ve got three loaded tank cars, one of which is a
haz-mat, and two covered hoppers awaiting us on the interchange and
we’re already pushing the envelope. They’ve already been sitting there
for two days, ever since the shit hit the fan on Thursday and I had to
go out to run the passenger trains instead of the freight. By the time
we reach the interchange…nope, not a chance. Have to tie down the
hoppers, shove the rest of the loads up on the industrial siding and
then go replace one car at a petroleum plant, which itself never takes
less than 45 minutes. Since the lady who supervises rail shipments at
said plant doesn’t know her ass from her elbow, I seriously expect at
least one car to be still connected to the dispenser after she
desperately wailed for us to pull out the empty one. Ah, but Fortune is
smiling upon us, and we get that empty down to the interchange and
return the engine to its siding with ten minutes to spare.

Gotta say, though, I vastly prefer a twelve-hour limit to the fourteen
or fifteen that I was typically on the clock at my last job. I swear,
some driving jobs will push you to illegal limits if there’s a
snowball’s chance in hell that they can. Some railroads probably do,
too – can’t say with certainty that CSX would have told me to suck it
up if I was about to exceed twelve hours, but if the shoe fits, they
will never shed “Crash Spill Xplode.” I’ve told more than one FRA guy
that I’ll stick with my short line, thank you very much. Dinah, blow
your horn…