First Days -Tough Days -Learning Days

These are the locomotives I remember seeing when I first started working on the railroad.

The gang was made up of an oil spray machine pushed on a cart by one man with two men out in front walking and spraying oil on each joint. Behind the spray operation was two bolt machines that would tighten the bolts or remove them if the bar was broken and replace it with a new bar and bolts. Naturally, being the youngest of the gang I was one of the oil sprayers and got to work on the downwind side so I was pretty well lubricated by the end of each day.

Things were going pretty well my first day up to the point where my Foreman hollered out that it was break time. I had just sat down to rest when the Foreman told me that we were going to need one more joint bar and he wanted me to walk back to the road crossing, about three quarters of a mile back, and bring a bar from the supply stack. I walked back to the crossing and picked up a bar, each bar weighed about fifty pounds, threw it up on my shoulder and walked back to the gang. As I dropped it to the ground the Foreman hollered "Damn Beck, we needed an outside bar and you brought an inside bar. Take this bar back and get the proper bar."

So, I threw the bar back up on my shoulder and walked back to the crossing. As I dropped the bar to the ground, shoulders aching, I looked toward the stack of bars -- they were all the same. The light bulb came on, there was no such thing as an inside or outside bar. I picked up the bar once again and carried it back to the gang and without saying a word, threw the bar to the ground at which point the Foreman yelled "Break's over back to work."

In an hour or so we stopped for lunch. We found a large shade tree just off the right-of-way with plush green rye grass and settled in for some lunch and much needed rest. It was just going to be rest for me because I hadn't brought a lunch. I suppose I had thought we would eat at a Dairy Queen or something. Oh well, I would know better the next day.

Thirty minutes later the Foreman hollered it was time to go back to work and everybody gathered up their stuff and walked back toward the track. I got up, stretched and started to walk out of the shade when the Foreman walked over to me and handed me a sandwich and a cup of water and said - "Here, take my extra sandwich and this water and take another fifteen minutes. You're going to be alright Beck."

And so it went as we walked from Brownwood to Sweetwater,Texas over the next month.