June 11, 2005

• “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…
  

  • 9:18 am
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