Recently, blog reader John Moenius recommended Railroad Man by LA-based Santa Fe switchman, Richard Paseman. Meant to be a series of entertaining short stories about life on the rails, the book goes into a level of detail about switching operations that I’ve never come across before. Employing these practices stretches the length of an op. session in a plausible way. It also makes your sessions more interesting because you understand the backstory of why things were done a certain way.
Here are some samples from the five page chapter on “The Patch”, a switching district several blocks north of the LAJ.
“The other helper and I went out the back door of the locker room to where the galloper (aka the switcher) sat idling on Passenger 7. We rattled to the bottom of the yard. A few passes in and out of Track 6 and we had our spot cars lined up.”
Railroaders name everything. Passenger 7 and Passenger 6 are yard tracks in Santa Fe’s First Street Yard. He’s explaining that a) the yard job put its own train together and b) they put the train in car-spot-order before leaving the yard. They don’t sort out a mess of cars out on the road.
“We left our spot cars on Jesse Street and went light into The Patch. On the left was a trucking warehouse. They always needed a switch. I walked with the foreman as he compared his list with the empty cars on spot.”
Jesse Street is pretty easy to find on a map.
“The grocery warehouse was our big switch. There was the towering “old house” and several tracks over the one-story “new house.” We left the galloper in the shade and walked inside. The dock foreman was in his office, marking the list of cars to pull and the doors where he wanted inbound cars spotted. We got some soda from a vending machine and stood around shooting the breeze. Gotta give ’em time to break down, meaning the workers had to finish loading and unloading freight and remove the ramps between the building and boxcars.”
There’s a lot to unpack in those few sentences. First off, note the slow pace of their “op. session” as they wait for the customer to carry out their steps in the process. Note the interaction between the customer and the rail crew. Note that the customer dictated where he wanted the cars spotted.
“At the doors alongside the warehouse, a few of the cars were only partly unloaded. We called them baby loads” and gave a sign with our hands like rocking a baby to let our engineer know to go slow and be gentle on the throttle. A loaded car was indicated by moving your hand from mid-chest to waist level, suggesting a “fully loaded belly.” For an empty car, you crossed arms to make an “X.”
Reading between the lines, he’s saying that cars that weren’t completely unloaded needed to be pulled and re-spotted.
Here’s a quick sketch showing where some of the key locations are.