SIXTEEN! What a wonderful age. I can now drive a car, I'm interested in girls, next year I'll be a senior, and I'm old enough to get a job with pay!
I wasn't sure until I arrived in the logging camp that a job was available. I had spent many summers up there before, where my father worked, just fooling around, and now I was told I'd be on the steel gang. This is the crew that lies down, and sometimes, picks up the steel. There is already a main line from the camp to Pino Grande, the sawmill; the line we will lay is a spur to a landing where logs are loaded onto cars .
Four vehicles are involved: the locomotive, a Climax wood-burning narrow gauge engine; a steel clad, large, flat car that carries a load of rails; another flat car carrying ties; and what we called the mulligan car (though it had nothing to do with food), a flat car with benches to carry the workers. A crew of twelve and a boss, plus the engineer and fireman on the locomotive are the personnel... The roadbed has already been prepared, so the train approaches to the end of the existing line, led by the rail car, followed by the tie car, and the mulligan car behind the engine.
The first procedure is to take the ties off of their car and lay them on the roadbed. From both sides of the car, workers carry the ties on their shoulders, past the steel car, and toss them to the ground where other men properly position them. If the ties are new ones, they are quite wet and heavy, requiring two men to a tie. If the ties were previously used, they are dry, weigh half as much, and can be carried by one man.
After a hundred feet, or so, of ties have been placed, the rails are unloaded. Most of the crew stand atop the rail car, lift a piece of rail with two-man tongs and drag it to the front of the car where they lift it onto a roller that spans the end of the car until the front end of the rail extends far enough forward to fall to the ground. Several pieces of rail are so moved. Then the engine pulls the car back, allowing the rear end of the rails to fall to the ground. Rail is measured by pounds per yard, and rails are ten yards long. The rails we were laying were sixty pound rail, meaning one piece weighed six hundred pounds. Twelve men were each lifting fifty pounds. (Compare this to main line, current standard gauge track, of one-hundred thirty six pounds).
With the ties and rails on the ground, the rails are bolted together by "fishplates" on each side of the joint, one rail is spiked, and then the opposite rail, after having been gauged at three feet. One third of the ties are spiked at this time, leaving it up to the section gang to later spike the rest.
I had one principal job: water boy. Before leaving camp in the morning I would fill about eight one-gallon wicker covered jugs with water. As those were being consumed I would take four of them, slip down the canyon to a creek, fill them, and trudge back up with my thirty six pound load. Sometimes I would find a spring where the water was colder, but the creeks were great, even though they might be deep in a canyon. Giardia hadn't been invented yet, so we didn't worry about purity, and if no creeks were near we could drink from the locomotive water tank.
When not chasing water, I filled in with other duties of the crew. The crew was mostly older men, who worked in a steady pace. We dressed in denim jeans, long sleeved shirts, and felt Stetson hats that once graced restaurants and dance halls, but were now floppy, dirty and lined with sweat The boss, on the other hand, dressed nattily, and had little to do since the men were well versed in their duties. Three other men stand out in my memory. Two were brothers, Matt and Mike Uric, Slavonians, who could neither read nor write, and signed the payroll with an X. Matt, was tall thin and quiet. Mike was huge, talkative, and inclined to shout out "tarandala" or something similar, ever so often. No one knew what it meant other than "OLE". Mike took me under his wing, literally, with his two hundred pounds and my one hundred thirty pounds, and made sure I didn't work too hard. In a later year, I heard he had gone somewhat crazy and was tied down to a logging car, transported to Pino Grande, then to the cable crossing, on to Camino, then by auto to a hospital in Placerville.
Another worker was "Frenchy", a small, wiry, impatient French Canadian., who ate his lunch in a hurry, then found some clean-up, or distribution job to do, while the rest of us relaxed for an hour. Frenchy claimed to have once had a job in New York teaching taxi drivers how to drive around Manhattan efficiently. He also lectured us on the science of "drafts" with relation to improving fire in a furnace. He learned this from a correspondence course he had once taken. I think he had a poor basic education, but I admired him for his pursuits.
Well, when the middle of August arrived, I went back to Sacramento with money from my sixty cents and hour job, and the feeling that I was now a man.
Unless you were familiar with railroad maintenance you might wonder about this gang; maybe a particular section of town monopolized by a rowdy bunch of men or boys, or the tenor section of a choir. But, no; it's the crew responsible for maintaining a particular length of railroad track, keeping it level and smoothing the curves.
The next summer, 1936, when I arrived in the logging camp, I was assigned to this crew, consisting of only four men and a boss. Our job was to spike the ties that the steel gang had skipped, shift the track into its proper alignment, shovel dirt in between the ties, and then tamp it under the ties for a solid roadbed. To spike the ties, two men would pry the tie up flush with the rail with crow bars, using a block of wood as a fulcrum, while the other two, standing on each side of the rail would drive a spike on the opposite side of the rail.
Railroad spikes are rather blunt pointed, with a head that extends broadly to one side to clamp down against the rail. If the ties were new and wet, the spike was fairly easy to start, and with just a few blows could be put away, but watch out for the water that would spurt out of the tie. If the tie had been previously used and was dry, we didn't start a new hole, it was far too difficult, so we used the old hole. The spike maul was long and slender so that it would clear the rail and had a small head surface. After a few days I became quite proficient at hitting the spike, and I rather enjoyed this part of the job.
The boss did no work, but carried a 1 X 4 board with a level attached, and had steps cut out toward one end so as to get different elevations. On curves he would place it over the two rails and determine how much the outer rail should be raised. We would then shovel in more dirt and tamp it under the ties.
There is no consensus on the origin of the term "gandy dancer", but when tamping ties, you felt like you were dancing. The shovel we used was square pointed, had a short handle and a grip wide enough to put both hands on it. As you pushed it down with one foot, you also pulled the handle toward you, so that the blade pushed the dirt under the tie. It worked! Of course, on main line railways the ballast was small rock, held up better, and drained rainwater away better than the soil we used.
I spent quite a bit of time, two years ago, watching rail being replaced around the Burlingame train station. One-hundred thirty six pound rail, heated to expand its length, and then welded to the next rail. Gone, alas, is the "A-whooee-ah-whooee ol'clickety-clack's a-echoing back, those blues in the night&. Everything is now done by machine, no more gandy dancers.
Our boss, Louie Long, was very quiet, did not converse with us, and sat alone during our breaks and lunch. Some of the loggers claimed he was a communist, but since he never talked to us, we had no opinion on this, and didn't care. Three of us workers were young guys, and one, Milt, who claimed to be a union man, was elderly (relatively) and was annoyed if we didn't take a full fifteen minutes for morning break. He was the one whose special hammer we hid, to keep him out of the way when we were building bridges the next summer.
All in all, it was a decent job, quite physical and dusty. Just keep your eyes on those lunch bags you left behind along the track as you progressed. Go retrieve them before the bears smell them. And when five o'clock came, why wait for the steel gang train, which was working ahead of you, for a ride back to camp. We young ones often ran through the forest, down the canyon, across the creek and up into camp and got to the showers ahead of the rest.
