As most of you know I prefer to discuss the human side of Q railroading.
>From time to time when the economy turns down life on the RR can get tough.
My uncle Ray was a carmans helper at Eola,IL. He preferred the yard
inspector jobs rather than the RIP track itself. Even though Ray had decades
of
service,when slow times came he would get bumped from job to job until he had
a
choice between the coach cleaners job on 4 o'clocks at the Aurora depot or
commute to Cicero and work on the RIP there.
He always chose the depot coach cleaners job. Ray was also a Korean vet and
had received a hip injury while in the service.He actually was receiving
partial disability payments from Uncle Sam each month.
Climbing up and down all those double deck stairs all night was hard on this
hip. So........... about the mid 60s whenever he was forced to the depot he
would stop by our house after dinner and my brother and I would head for the
depot with him and become coach cleaners each night for a few hours. Rays job
was to clean(sweep.mop,pick up all trash,papers,flip seats,wash windows,
etc) in a set number of coaches each shift. I recall more than once being told
not to do the next coach as that was the midnight guys car.
Here we were maybe 10-14 years old and hoping between live tracks with the
depot engine shoving cuts of cars around ! How things have changed.
It was during this time that I learned first hand how quiet a string of cars
being shoved down a track really is. The yard was away from the platforms
and their lights, all "ballast" was cinders so it was dark except for the
reflections of lights off the stainless sides of the cars. We were taught how
to
look for movements and double check before moving from one track of cars to the
next. The operating rule requiring a man on the leading piece of equipment
while shoving a track wasn't adhered to very closely in those years.
We would do the upper decks while Ray did the lowers. This was when there
were still three or four going newspapers in Chgo and every car was full of
newspapers that went into a huge canvas bag that was then dragged to the
"burning barrel" that was between the power house and the turntable. In later
years
Ray loaded all the papers in the bed of his pickup and they went to the paper
recycling company that actually paid by the lb. for clean newspapers.
Needless to say the $ didn't go to the Q. Back then there were "smokers" on
each
end of the consist and they were always the dirtiest cars.
Funny how things you long thought were forgotten will just jump into ones
head.
Leo
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