>>> Too bad you guys didn't get to grow up on a short line railroad like the
>>> HY&T and the RPL&N. <<<
Growing up on a small Burlington branch wasn't bad, either - to the age of 4, I
lived a block and a half from the old B&NW (see Burlington Bulletin #30 or
"Rails to a County Seat" - thanks Dave Lotz & Charles Frantzen) in Mediapolis,
IA, then from 6 to 10 about the same distance from it in Washington. Somehow,
it made a big, important railroad more friendly.
>From 10 to 21, I lived 2 blocks from the Q main line in Mt. Pleasant, IA -
>during the last of steam - and though it was much busier and more spectacular
>then the B&NW, I missed the homey aspect of a puttering daily mixed train!
Marshall Thayer
On the RPL&N we used "poison" weed killer right up until the end. Anybody
old enough to remember when the application of "poison weed killer" required
the posting of signs along the right of way indicating danger to cattle and
other live creatures including human beings? I'll never forget the smell of
that stuff. If I ever get another whiff of it I'll recognize it instantly.
It came in 50 gallon drums and we mixed it in a tank mounted on one end of a
flatcar. There was a spray "boom" across one end and the tank was
pressurized from trainline air. We backed up spraying behind the engine
rather than in front of it.
The stuff worked pretty good..usually. I have among my grandfather's
correspondence a letter from the president of whoever the manufacturer of the
"killer" was a letter to my GF inquiring when he was going to pay for the
most recent shipment. Someone in his accounting department had notified him
that the RPL&N hadn't paid for their last shipment.
The letter said something along the lines that "I knew there was something
wrong when old Pete Hedgpeth doesn't pay his bills". My GF wrote back and
said that the most recent shipment produced "all the results we wanted...if
we had wanted hay"...In other words..it didn't work.
We had a row not unlike the HY&T which was sod ballast, but the weeds were
kept under control and we even had a weed mower purchased from the Q, pulled
by our Fairmont Motor car. It was not the motorized version that we saw in
later days, put was actually powered by a gear arrangement off the
wheels...consequently the machine had to be moving forward in order to
activate the sickle blades.
Our one big trestle was completely rebuilt in 1943 using a Burlington
Carpenter. My GF apparently had hopes of keeping the line going even at that
late date, but gave it up on Armistice Day 1945.
I'll bet John Mitchell remembers "poison weed killer"...how about it John.
Pete
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