About the Author J. D. Santucci (a.k.a. "Tuch") began his railroading career in 1978 as a trainman on the Missouri Pacific. After a round of lay-offs in 1985, Tuch embarked on a railroad odyssey, working in many different situations for different roads. This column tries to explain some of the nuts and bolts of the job and also demonstrates what we have to deal with on a regular basis within and without the industry. Tuch currently works through freights out of Chicago for Canadian National/Illinois Central. ©1999, 2003-2007 JD Santucci. Logo ©2002 The Railroad Network. By J.D. Santucci

July 9, 2003
Before we begin today’s lesson, a correction from the last column. For whatever reason, I made reference to the AAR as the American Association of Railroads. It is actually the Association of American Railroads. I looked at it numerous times thinking there was something wrong about it, but the mistake was not registering. I guess that happens on occasion. Call it brain freeze. The beautiful bride calls it getting old, but with age comes wisdom (or so they tell me), so that cannot be the case.

There is a great deal of concentration involved in the job of railroading. There are numerous tasks and responsibilities of which to keep track, no pun intended. As the Engineer I really have a great deal to do, although when you see me rolling past I am not looking like a font of intense concentration. To this day, the beautiful bride still thinks all I do is sit there and look out the window. However there are often times when the fullest of concentration is not required. While you still have to keep track of everything, you are not doing it with any degree of great difficulty.

Whenever we are sitting at a signal waiting to proceed, or things are rolling along pretty good, you can relax a bit. The Conductor and Brakeman (should we happen to have one) and I may engage in some interesting conversation. We’ll talk about family, friends, life experiences, on the job experiences, cars, motorcycles, women; the topics are endless. Sometimes though, depending upon who you are working with, you can really have some fun.

Myself, I enjoy good comedy. I have recall of lots of jokes, gags, one-liners, anecdotes and the like. I also enjoy good wacky songs and comedy movies. Sometimes I’ll work with somebody who also enjoys such material and we can swap lines back and forth. I have been known to even incorporate some of them into the radio conversation. A prime example of that would be using a line from a Cheech & Chong character called Blind Mellon Chitlin. Those of you that have heard this know the line, but for those that don’t whenever asked anything he responds “Uh, yah.” Sometimes I will use this on the radio when responding to certain Conductors I work with.

There are some guys that are just a riot to work with. There will be a barrage of jokes, anecdotes, stories, and one-liners flying across the cab of the engine. We may perform imitations of fellow employees, former employees, supervisors and the like. We may also make up our own little games. With the lifestyle the industry provides us (or lack thereof on many occasions) the stress we are exposed to on a regular basis, the noise, heat, cold and sleep deprivation that are constants in our lives, we need something to do to vent and keep our minds and wits sharp. It also makes the day go by a little quicker and the job much more fun.

Way back in my MoPac days, I fired for this one Engineer that connected well with my warped and demented sense of humor. We got along well enough that in a left handed way he fixed me up with one of his daughters. If I had a daughter, the first railroader that came near her would be dragged out into a corn field, beaten with a baseball bat then shot, but then that is just me. I suppose when the word got out about this treatment, no other railroader would dare tread in that first guys footsteps. Sorta reminds me of that old song “Wolverton Mountain” where Clifton Clowers intends to shoot anybody that goes near his daughter. But I digress.

This Engineer and I used to laugh and joke about some of the characters with whom we worked. As I have mentioned many times before there is a very diverse and colorful bunch that comprises the work force of the rail industry. With the nature of the beast that is railroading, it is probably more of a diverse culture than in many other industries. That diversity leads to many colorful and unusual characters. And it seems there is a cast of thousands of interesting folks supplanting the rail industry workforce.

We came up with different categories for the various guys we worked with. We took these categories and broke them down into crews. This would be a crew of four or five guys which was the standard crew size back in those days. We would nominate candidates to these categories and then discuss their qualifications to be a member of a specific crew.

Some of our categories included the unclean crew (for those that didn’t bathe on a regular occasion), the all incorrigible crew (for those that seemed to strive to find new ways to get into trouble on and off the job), the all worthless crew(those that seem to underachieve on a regular basis), the worst dressed crew (those who looked like they stole their clothes from the reject pile at the Salvation Army store), the heavyweight crew (those whose fondness of culinary pleasures tended to broaden their waste bands), the all maniacal crew (those who ran around like wild men or perhaps like chickens with their heads cut off), the whiners also known as the piss, bitch and moan society (for those whose main function at work seemed to be to perform any and/or all of the PB&M activities over just about anything they were instructed to do in their tour of duty) and of course the all frugal crew. Frugal is a very kind way of calling those in this category, cheap. This category needs no explanation.

These are some of the better ones that come to mind. There are a few others, but we will leave them out of this discussion as it is a family forum.

We would go over the qualifications and if an individual met up with our rigid standards they were then added to a crew. Now if it there happened to be a category that already had a full crew, we might have to create an afternoon or night trick job to accommodate them. Or we would just decide there would be a heavy assignment which required an extra locomotive and/or caboose to carry these guys. And there were a few that qualified for several categories, so they did double duty.

Being that we were both normal (hold your tongue), we never found any categories for ourselves. Now if others played this game, they more than likely had us in some kind of category. And I’m certain after I broke up with this guy’s daughter he probably created a new category just for me.

Then there is the “stir sh*t" game. This is where you concoct some sort of outlandish BS story and then practically swear it to be true. You have to pick your targets carefully for this one though. You want those that will believe what you are telling them without too much resistance on their part. The story is created, crafted and then reveled to this individual. This is frequently referred to as “stirring the sh*t.”

There was one guy we really started to stir it up with. We created a story that in the next contract, the Trainmen would not be getting back pay with their settlement. Both the Engineers and Trainmen had gone almost two years without a settlement to their respective contracts. So we decided to have some fun with one particular guy who was really aggravated about the entire affair. We kept telling him the back pay was gone and that the wage increases would be very small, if there were to be any at all.

In short order this guy was flying off the handle going into quite the rant. He was threatening to quit the railroad and go down to West Lafayette. He figured he would get a job at Purdue as a custodian. Everyday when we came to work one of us would just mention the back pay issue and he would immediately go into his ranting and raving. He had gone around and told just about anybody who would listen that we worked with about it all. Of course we were telling them the truth, that there was no talk at all about losing the back pay, after he left the room.

Finally after several weeks of this stirring the pot up, we came clean with him. He called us all sorts of names at first, but within a few minutes agreed that it was a pretty good one and how we had him going. He quickly got over it and things were back to normal again.

Over the years there have been other topics and people involved in stirring up the pot. Some folks are just prime targets.

In my Wisconsin Central days, I worked with a Conductor named Brian Kruger. Brian was (and remains to this day) an excellent railroader. We are still friends and talk periodically and as the strange ironies of life go, now work for the same railroad again, only in different locations. Brian was a riot to work with and we had lots of fun together while on the job.

In those early days of the WC, we had some forty ex Burlington Northern SD45’s as part of our motive power fleet. The lion’s share of them were still in the paint scheme of their former owner. From a distant view or from the front, they still appeared to be BN units. This is what set the stage for this game.

We used to operate across the Belt Railway of Chicago, CSX and Conrail trackage in Chicago. Crews of the BN also used this very same trackage to reach the very same connections as us. It was not uncommon for us to meet and pass some of these BN trains in our journeys. Normally, when meeting or passing another train we generally acknowledge them with a wave or some sort of greeting. Should it be somebody you know, perhaps a comment or greeting on the radio will take place as well. It might just be a simple “Howdy boys” or maybe something more elaborate.

When we met or passed a BN crew, we would wave and greet them like we knew them and like they should know us. Oftentimes they too, would give us a greeting like they knew us. Once they got a close up look at us, they would look bewildered as they were trying to figure out who in the world we were. They hadn’t looked at the little “WC” initials stenciled over the blanked out BN logo under the cab windows.

This is where the fun began. One day without any advance planning, Brian and I just started having a discussion about the guys on that train like we knew them; and not just conversation, but the creation of characters and situations about them. Something to the extent of, “Hey wasn’t that Charlie Evers from the old south end pool?” Brian would respond something like, “Ya. Wasn’t he the one whose wife slept with everybody in the terminal when he wasn’t there?”

Or perhaps it might be something like “Hey look, there’s Eddie Clark. I see they finally let him out.” And then we would create some sort of goofy crime that this individual committed to get him sent up the river in the first place. Unbeknownst to them, many of these BN crews had been given some sort of past. It was fun and interesting to see just how creative we could get.

W made some guys out to be big drunks, womanizers, freaks, bums, weirdos, tightwads, criminals, nut jobs and the like. You know, just like real railroaders. We established a wide range of old assignments like freight runs and locals and long since abandoned or consolidated terminals. Sometimes if we didn't have a quick story for a crew we just refer to them as some of those "west end boys." And we had already established the fact that the gang from this pool was not a friendly bunch.

This really became a fun game as we tried to come up with more outlandish “tales of the dark side” as it were for people we didn’t even know. The more bizarre, wild or strange it was, the more fun we had. Makes me wonder why we were railroading instead of being the writers of some sort of cheap novels.

Some of other the fun and games include water tricks. Over the years, more than one railroader has been blasted with a stream of water. We get these little bottles of drinking water on the locomotives. This isn’t Dasani or Aquafina, but rather water out of some city water supply or what is pumped off from a coal mine somewhere. Judging how some of it tastes, I think it was pumped out of a landfill somewhere. On occasion when passing somebody you might have a bottle of water prepared for such and simply point and squeeze. A nice stream of water shoots out from the top and the unsuspecting soul gets a sudden and unplanned shower.

There is one guy I work with now that always closes the windows on his locomotive whenever he sees me coming. I always tell him he is paranoid. Gee, you blast a guy three or four times and they get all weird and strange on you.

Another water game involves loosening the top of a water bottle and then tossing it to somebody on the ground. They reach up to grab it, normally squeezing it as they catch it. The loosened top then pops off and they get their clothes washed. Of course in the summer when it is blazing hot this can really feel good.

Sometimes we get some fool who decides to play chicken with our train. When it comes to this game, I will always win. I do not perceive this game as funny or even slightly humorous. One mistake and you are injured or dead. But people do it just the same. When I get some idiot that decides to test my nerve, they often get a blast of water from me when I pass them after they have bailed from in between the gauge of the rail.

One bitterly cold (-20° F) night in Wisconsin, some smart assed adolescent learned the spoils of playing chicken. We used to operate on the streets of Oshkosh (literally) and crossed people’s driveways and front or side yards as well. We were restricted to 10 MPH for the street and yard operation. Knowing that we weren’t going very fast, motorists and cyclists as well as pedestrians frequently darted right across in front of us. Some people would play chicken with us, normally getting out of the way well in advance though. Others didn’t and waited until the last second and then cleared out.

On this particular night, there was a group of kids congregated along the tracks. As we approached them they decided to test my nerve. We were poking along at our 10 MPH pace and they just stood there in the gauge of the rail. One by one they started to move out of the way as I closed in on them. I gave them several blasts of the whistle and a few more cleared. One though, stood his ground and decided he was going to show us. I told Brian to give me a bunch of water bottles quickly. He did so opening them up as he handed them to me. I slid my side windows open and made ready the water bottles.

At the last second this kid stepped aside moving (as luck would have it) over to my side as he did so. As I passed him he gave me that familiar “number 1” signal and smiled. I then proceeded to pour six bottles of water onto him. I drenched him pretty thoroughly too. At -20° I’m pretty certain he wasn’t feeling refreshed from his impromptu shower. I’ll also bet he never played chicken with a train again either.

Moving back to my days at the Chicago Central, this one involves water but in a frozen form. One afternoon when I was working the Markham Transfer run, we got stopped at Clark Street, the crossing between the Illinois Central Gulf’s Chicago District and Metra’s Rock Island District. It was getting to be evening rush, so we wouldn’t be going anywhere for at least an hour and a half. It was also snowing like crazy and the weather was fast becoming a factor in railroad operations.

There is a printing house located on the south side of the right of way just east of the crossing. It was either the Conductor or Brakeman that noticed two guys in the parking lot next to the printing house having a snowball fight. We decided to join in on their fun, although we did not ask to be invited, and we did it in a really sinister sort of way. First we got off the engine and proceeded to make a bunch of snowballs. Then we began to bombard both of these guys from our perch up above. Were they surprised!

These two guys rethought their battle, teamed up and decided to engage us in a battle of frozen water balls. We played this game until they realized they were outnumbered, outgunned and out supplied. They called for a truce after about fifteen minutes and we let them head on home.

Our next topic is bombs. As I mentioned in the column about flagging rules, torpedoes were a regular part of the supplies included on a locomotive. One evening the crew of a train we were meeting at a siding placed several of them on the rail. We hit them, not expecting the booms and were quite surprised. We immediately took this as a call to arms.

“Anything you can do I can do better.”

And so the battle began.

If we were the first train at the meeting point, we would set up the trap. Instead of placing the torpedoes right at the meeting point, we walked ahead of the meeting point placing a bunch of them about a quarter mile before the signal. This crew countered by placing about twenty of them really close together the next time we met. Hmm, very good but we must counter with a bigger and better measure. We would do one thing and they would do something else to counter the next time. Then we decided to really do something really big. It took careful consideration and planning.

For well over a week, we did nothing. The crew we were waging battle with probably thought the war was over and they had won. But they were wrong. There is something to be said about that element of surprise. One evening we were headed into the siding at Vernon, WI for a meet. We had ascertained they were quite a distance away so we had time to really set this one up.

As I headed into the east end and ready to roll into the siding, I stopped the train. We took every torpedo we could find on all three units and placed them all on the rails at the east end on the main track for about a quarter of a mile. We staggered them on each rail so that they would go off alternately. Then we pulled into the siding and down to the west end and waited for the meet. They arrived; we rolled them by, exchanged pleasantries and waited. A couple of seconds later they were complementing us over the radio on our skills in setting up this little surprise. It was bigger and better than they had planned as they were somewhat shocked as bombs were still going off while talking to us on the radio.

A couple of days later though this battle was brought to an unplanned and abrupt end by a company official. This guy asked us about the sudden surge in torpedo use. It seems somebody from the roundhouse noticed they were suddenly having to completely refill the all the torpedo containers on inbound power coming from Chicago. So we decided rather than taunt those that can discipline us, we would immediately cease and desist. Of course we never did fess up to anything though, we just played possum.

We’ll go back to the radio now. There used to be an Operator at the MoPac that made far too frequent use of the word “uh.” It was just about every other word out of his mouth whenever he was speaking to anyone be it on the radio or face to face. We used to play games and count the number of times he said “uh” on the radio in a single transmission. One time he actually said it thirty-seven times. This could easily make one want to go postal.

Well instead of losing it, one afternoon I decided to have some fun instead. This Operator had to issue us a track permit to operate against the current of traffic out to Chicago Heights. We had to copy the instructions and repeat them back. It went something like this;

“OK, uh, MP 1579 you have a uh, track permit to operate against the uh, current of traffic uh, on the uh, northbound main between, uh Thornton Junction and uh, 12th Street from uh, 1247 until uh, 215pm uh, over.”

I repeated back these instructions;

“Uh, MoPac 1579 has a uh, track permit to operate against the uh, current of traffic uh, on the uh, northbound main between uh, Thornton Junction and uh, 12th Street from uh, 1247 until uh, 215 pm uh, over.”

My crew was in hysterics as they could not believe I would and did do something like this. Several others picked up on my prank and pulled the same stunt off as well. I don’t believe this Operator ever caught on though.

Another Operator was sort of a cantankerous old sort who was always crabby about something. That job alone could do it as it was a very busy office in which to work. This guy would about bite your head off on the radio sometimes. One evening, after trying to call him repeated times he just yelled back into the radio “I’M BUSY!” With that I just got up really close the mike on the radio, depressed the “press to talk” button and yelled “AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!” at the top of my lungs. Yell at me will you?

He could really make things miserable for you when he got mad. That is, until I figured out how to use his anger to my advantage. I might call him for a signal and say something like “B Yard to Two Yard as soon as possible John.” With his West Virginia drawl he would yell back something like “I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU WHEN I’M GOOD AND READY!” Of course, we were usually on overtime by this point. And with his angry demeanor, it usually meant you would sit there for fifteen or twenty minutes or more while the big money meter was running.

The last one is one of my personal favorites. I was working some afternoon assignment at Yard Center in 1982. I was hanging around the Crew Caller’s office during our coffee break as the Caller on duty happened to be a girl I was dating at the time. She had gone off to take care of something when one of the phones began to ring. It rang about eight million times without stopping. I finally got sick of listening to this annoying ringing so I decided to take action. I simply picked up the phone briefly, and then hung it right back up. About two seconds later it began to ring again, so I repeated the process. And then it rang a third time and yet again, I did the quick hang up thing. Finally, the party at the other end gave up. Good, that’ll shut ‘em up.

Just a couple of minutes after that, the car of Assistant Superintendent Al Welch comes barreling up to the front door of the building, which was right next to the Caller’s office. I quickly got up from the chair in the Caller’s office and stood by the door leading in to it. Mr. Welch comes storming in and sees me standing there. He yells out “Where’s the caller?” I told him I had no idea. He then asked how long I had been there. I told him I had just walked in right ahead of him as I had just come up from downstairs after getting a cup of coffee.

He then asked if I had seen anybody in here when I got in there and I told him something to the effect of seeing some road guy here but he had left right after I walked in. I was then told about some “wiseass” who kept hanging up on him when he was trying to contact the Caller. I was not about to give my wise young ass up to him as it most likely would have involved a “fair and impartial” investigation resulting in some sort of disciplinary action to be imposed upon me. We couldn’t have that now, so I simply told him that it was stupid on the part of whomever that individual was to do such a thing. What I was thinking though was that it would be stupid on the part of the wiseass that pulled this stunt to give them self up. He agreed with what I said and then waited for the Caller to return to tell her whatever it was he needed her to know in person. I quickly exited the office after our conversation for fear I might break out into laughter and indeed give myself away.

I never did tell the Caller what I did either. It was probably a good thing as she likely would have given me up when I broke up with her sometime later. You know what they say about scorned women.

Uh, And so it goes.

About the Author J. D. Santucci (a.k.a. "Tuch") began his railroading career in 1978 as a trainman on the Missouri Pacific. After a round of lay-offs in 1985, Tuch embarked on a railroad odyssey, working in many different situations for different roads. This column tries to explain some of the nuts and bolts of the job and also demonstrates what we have to deal with on a regular basis within and without the industry. Tuch currently works through freights out of Chicago for Canadian National/Illinois Central. ©1999, 2003-2007 JD Santucci. Logo ©2002 The Railroad Network. By J.D. Santucci