August 11, 2005

• And so my love for GE locomotives has naught but mushroomed in the last three days. (Yeah, right, Ronald…)

  The other day I ran the 531 up the full length of the line pending its
  92-day inspection; thankfully that butt-ugly engine isn’t leaking oil
  as badly as it was a few months ago, and it’s responding in Run 2
  again, but still. When you go over a grade crossing in the 531, in all
  its GE-designed, Union Pacific-painted ugliness, you can’t help but
  wonder if the motorists are thinking, “What the hell is he doing
  running THAT piece of shit??” I wouldn’t put it in quite those terms,
  though, if only we’d just knuckle down and repaint the damn
  thing…but, feh. Small wonder that we keep it at the south end of the
  line, out of the tourists’ sight.

  Got to the north end of the line, collected the 7087 and a hopper car,
  and got set up for a stone train on Wednesday. Sat around twiddling my
  thumbs for nightmarish amounts of time in between truckloads as always,
  despite a passionate plea in my IM away message for people to “CALL THE
  FREAKING CELL!!!” En route to the interchange, my boss and I couldn’t
  help noticing that the engine was taking an awful lot of power for
  eight cars…

  …and today we found the answer.

  We did a little switcheroo in the morning and then headed northward ho
  to top off 7087′s radiator (another symbol of my sarcastic fondness for
  GE engines). We were only a few miles up the line – hence I was
  sweatslicking the independent brake even more than the throttle – when
  my boss, always on the tack, suddenly hollered at me to STOP STOP STOP!

  No wonder we were pulling so hard yesterday – we’d been passing over a busted rail.

  God only knows what happened, but one of those loaded hoppers somehow
  spread the gauge, derailed, and then rerailed itself as we passed over
  a handy switch (shearing off a half-dozen spikes, skewering the rail
  joint, and breaking the head of the rail in the process). That switch
  is a nightmare to begin with, but as of yesterday, it has effectively
  cut off the south end of the railroad from the rest of it, until we
  muster a repair crew at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

  I haven’t had that much fun since I rode lead on the ballast car for about six miles.
  

  • 10:59 pm
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