Freight car tracking was done on paper back then. Mistakes were hard to retract. The railway freight office got one started and I completed it for them with some help from the vegetarians.
Going out in the dark dampness to check what we called the beef track, track number six, there was this big graffiti down both sides of a string of livestock cars. MEAT IS SHIT, in letters fifteen feet high. I couldn’t see the full serial numbers I needed to see for the spray paint. I released the movement tags to the night supervisor anyway.
Because I guessed at the car numbers, the plain brown hamburger cows showed up at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in the morning. The prize-winning, hand-raised dairy cows from Quebec were shunted to a west end slaughterhouse.
My daughter learned to swim then, while I was sleeping off my first dozen night shifts. I could have been fired, some jobless young guy taking my place. That was number one, the cows.
Then, I helped to trepan a drunk with the deflector on a locomotive. I’d gotten out of freight yard work and onto a transfer crew. An engineer and I were taking 801 and fifteen black tank cars to Kodak. The condemned man was out drinking with his buddies. Police said he’d started at lunch time. Eventually, he took a shortcut home from this little bar near the tracks. Blacked out, he was lying on the right of way. Stopping 801 in less than a mile was impossible.
Now, he was outside the gauge, head clear of the left hand track by a good foot. We should have missed him but as we rumbled forward, whistling and grinding thirty eight pairs of brake pads, the man was roused enough to try and sit up. His temple aligned with the corner of our deflector, a curved rectangle of steel under the front coupling. As good as a gun. That was number two.
Railways are worse than armies. All rules, hearings, demerits and discipline. We were found free of blame.
Going out in the dark dampness to check what we called the beef track, track number six, there was this big graffiti down both sides of a string of livestock cars. MEAT IS SHIT, in letters fifteen feet high. I couldn’t see the full serial numbers I needed to see for the spray paint. I released the movement tags to the night supervisor anyway.
Because I guessed at the car numbers, the plain brown hamburger cows showed up at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in the morning. The prize-winning, hand-raised dairy cows from Quebec were shunted to a west end slaughterhouse.
My daughter learned to swim then, while I was sleeping off my first dozen night shifts. I could have been fired, some jobless young guy taking my place. That was number one, the cows.
Then, I helped to trepan a drunk with the deflector on a locomotive. I’d gotten out of freight yard work and onto a transfer crew. An engineer and I were taking 801 and fifteen black tank cars to Kodak. The condemned man was out drinking with his buddies. Police said he’d started at lunch time. Eventually, he took a shortcut home from this little bar near the tracks. Blacked out, he was lying on the right of way. Stopping 801 in less than a mile was impossible.
Now, he was outside the gauge, head clear of the left hand track by a good foot. We should have missed him but as we rumbled forward, whistling and grinding thirty eight pairs of brake pads, the man was roused enough to try and sit up. His temple aligned with the corner of our deflector, a curved rectangle of steel under the front coupling. As good as a gun. That was number two.
Railways are worse than armies. All rules, hearings, demerits and discipline. We were found free of blame.
My wife came back, ending a trial separation, the same week. She said she liked that I still had about seventy-five percent of the hair I had in high school. My seniority was pretty high by then and I was around the house more.
Number three and I took early retirement. I’d been on passenger service for a decade. Better than freight service: good hours, cleaner, quieter.
I was eastbound in the cab car of an extra at 2210. Because of a baseball game and a Metallica concert the railway had put on more trains. We were doing fifty through an old industrial area by the lakeshore as the headlight swept onto a woman, about twenty-five, kneeling naked in the track.
There was no point as I lifted that red handle and threw the emergency brake. Her hands were clasped like she was praying and her eyes were closed.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
Number three and I took early retirement. I’d been on passenger service for a decade. Better than freight service: good hours, cleaner, quieter.
I was eastbound in the cab car of an extra at 2210. Because of a baseball game and a Metallica concert the railway had put on more trains. We were doing fifty through an old industrial area by the lakeshore as the headlight swept onto a woman, about twenty-five, kneeling naked in the track.
There was no point as I lifted that red handle and threw the emergency brake. Her hands were clasped like she was praying and her eyes were closed.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
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