General Discussion (Model Railroader)

 "Come with us tonight for a journey few men take today.  Out where there's few roads and fewer people, only the twin steel ribbons trace a route between high mountain and deep valley... where, under the gleam of headlights and in the thunder of massive machines,  strange events may happen, and what is seen is often not possible..... "

(Original title and intro by georgev)

Intrigued yet? Several of us weere telling ghost stories for Halloween, and having a blast. I want to open the floor to a wider array of topics, and see if we can drag in a new set of posters as well. Most of yas have set the back stories for yor towns and places, just add people, and bring the world to life! It might make your next running/ops session more fun too. Or, you can go completely in a new direction and focus on something you haven't modelled

One request: To save space, let's use titles, and quote the title and/or author only when referring to a story, not to the whole story itself. 

The original thread by Darth Santa Fe is here

Need some motivation? re-read Bill Henderson's tales from the Coal Belt Or, here's a few prompts

• Follow a train
• Railfan a location
• Spend a day as a crew on
• a through train
• in a yard
• on a work train
• surveying
• be a passenger on your crack streamliner
  

Got any ideas now? Go! Write free!

This probably comes under the heading of Horror Stories.

In 1968 I was 18yrs old. I hired on with the New York City Transit Authority as an electrical helper and was assigned as a Signal Maintainers Helper. I didn't like it and wasn't going to stay there as it was a dirty and dangerous place to work, but my work location was just a few blocks away from where I was living with my folks, so I said what the hell. After about 6 months my work location changed to lower Manhattan and it took about 45 min and two trains to get there. To top that off the Maintainer I had to work with  was an old black guy who didn't like white people very much. He always had trouble with people who were assigned to work with him and they didn't stay with him very long.

All went well for a couple of months. Each morning at 8 am we would go down to Hudson Terminal Station which was the last stop on the 8th Avenue Local to sit in the tower for the rush hour and be ready in case of signal or switch problems. This station was renamed WORLD TRADE CENTER after the WTC was built. This tower had a GRS lever type interlocking machine that was converted to an automatic plant, but the interlocking machine only had to be operated in case of trouble so the towerman had nothing to do there. Approaching trains initiated a route selection sequence that would line them up to an empty track. The Dispatcher filpped a switch to line up a train to leave. The dispatchers office was in a separate room from the tower separated by a knee wall so the two men could see and talk to each other. I usually sat in the tower watching the modelboard and the Maintainer sat in the dispatchers office. After the rush hour we had to walk back to canal st and make a visual inspection of all the switches in the area.

One morning after a train had just left the station the maintainer came in to the tower and said to me "get your stuff and lets go". I asked why as there was no trouble and there were no phone calls. He then said "we have to get out of here" and went out the back door down to the tracks. The towerman asked what's up and I said he probably has to use the restroom back at canal st. I went out the door and followed him across the tracks. The motorman of an approaching train saw me and blew the whistle a couple of times and the maintainer moved his lamp up and down for the train to procede. As the train crossed over to the track that the previous train had left the brakes went into emergency and the train stopped. The maintainer began walking away from the train in the opposite direction and i asked him why he wasn't checking why the train stopped. He said "it doesn't concern us" and kept walking.  We walked back to canal st without looking at the switches which was unusual. When we got there he said he had to use the restroom and went up to the mezzinine. Just then our phone rang and it was our supervisor asking if we were ok as there was just a passenger accident at Hudson Terminal. Canal st also had a tower that was not used very often and I went there so I could see the model board. another Towerman came in and said "you guys got out of there just in time", a passenger was dragged down the platform by a train and he fell to the tracks when he hit the wall at the end of the platform, then the next train in ran over the body. I put two and two together and questioned the maintainer when he returned and he said he didn't want to get involved as a witness in an accident report. I said how could be so stupid and other things that were not so nice. He REPORTED ME to our supervisor as being abusive to him and had to go to see him right away. When I related this story to him he did nothing but tell me to be CAREFUL. Nothing was done to the maintainer.

The next day we returned to Hudson Terminal. When the maintainer left to use the restroom there, the dispatcher came in the tower and stood over me, the towerman rolled his chair close to me and the dispatcher asked if "your BOY new what happened here yesterday". I said yes, he knew it all. The following day the division Trainmaster banned the maintainer from the tower. I could sit in there but not the maintainer because of what he didn't do right. This went on for a couple of weeks before he was allowed back in.

This is a true story. Since it happened over 40 years ago I am Probably the only one alive anymore who was there.

I guess I could call this "A ride in the cab."

This happened back in 1978, give or take a year. At the time we were living in an isolated northern community in the middle of nowhere. The nearest city was about 150 miles away (also in the north), an 8 hour trip by train. In case you're doing the math and it doesn't add up, most of that area is muskeg which is like laying track on Jello, and the train stops at a few First Nations settlements along the line and also stops anywhere in the bush for trappers and hunters to get on and off. Because of the rough track on the muskeg, the trains are limited to 30 mph.

Anyway, I was waiting on the platform to take the train back home, a voice behind me asked what on earth I was doing there. It was a friend of ours who was a CN engineer. After a little chit-chat he asked if I wanted to ride home in the cab. After debating for all of 3 milliseconds I said, "Yes!" We climbed into the cab and he took me back into the engine compartment and we walked all around the engine. I'm not exactly sure what type of locomotive it was, but it was one of the F-units. I remember the engine and everything else in there as being gigantic and extremely noisy.

I got to sit in the fireman's seat all the way back. When we pulled slowly out of the station, what struck me was the feeling of raw power coming up through the floor and the seat. It wasn't just the sound, it was a feeling, a sensation of sitting on an incredible amount of raw power. It's hard to describe as it's just a feeling, an emotion, but I think that anyone else fortunate to have ridden in a locomotive will understand. On the trip back my friend explained quite a bit about the operation of a passenger train, how the engineer has to control the slack in the couplers so as not to spill the passengers' drinks, and so on. He explained that the 30 mph speed limit was due to the track shifting on the muskeg--and he felt that 30 mph was even too fast. Looking out the window at the track in front of us, it looked to me like two pieces of wet spaghetti thrown on the ground. The track seemed to bend left and right and up and down. Considering what the track looked like, the ride was not as rough as one would expect. He showed me where a bunch of hopper cars had jumped the track and gone off into the bush and told me that the reason we were delayed over a half hour at one of the First Nations stations on the trip out was because of a broken coupler.

That 8 hours went by very fast and I was back home all too soon. For me, that was a memorable trip and one that I'll never forget. Opportunities like that are rare, probably more rare now than 30-some years ago, and even more rare in the populated areas of the country than in the isolated north. And it helps to have a friend who is an engineer.