LITMIR.BIZ

       Time Between Trains

      FIVE DAYS A WEEK, the track inspector checked the rail line from the Superior waterfront up to Chub Lake. During summer and autumn dry spells, he worked weekends looking for fires set by sparks from train wheels. From the cab of his rail truck, he spotted undercuts, washouts, and fires in the tinder-dry grass, reporting them to the radio dispatcher at the railyard in Superior. Joe Rubin extinguished small fires himself. With a track warrant for every portion of his trip, he went along in the special truck that had rubber tires for road and highway travel and flanged, locomotive-style wheels for railroad travel. To switch from one to the other mode, he would center the truck at a railroad crossing, climb down, grab a metal pole to insert into the wheel mechanism, and raise the steel, flanged wheels, leaving the rubber tires resting on the track. Backing up the truck, he would stop, turn the steering wheel, drive forward, and be back on dirt or pavement.

      In his fourteen years with the Burlington Northern–Santa Fe, Joe Rubin looked for sun kinks, broken rails, broken bonds, wooden ties left on the tracks, and other potentially deadly defects or impediments on or alongside the way to Chub Lake. When Joe Rubin reported a sun kink (when the sun expands a steel rail, bending it out of place), the section crew got after it. When he reported a pull apart (in bitter cold, railroad tracks contract and can pull apart), the section crew came to lay kerosene-soaked ropes next to the rails and waited for the heated track sections to snap together.

      Along the east-west tracks before the Crawford Creek signals (where flashing yellow means a track inspector can move onto the main line at Saunders) were the broken ties he reported one day last November. West of there was a section of track ballast to keep an eye on near that boggy run before the Vet’s Crossing. Farther along, past Boylston, almost to the signal lights at Milepost 15.9 where the tracks converge, was the hair-thin rail fracture in the right rail of eastbound track he reported last December. How important this work! Thank God for the track inspector.

      Naturally, his job required keen senses. In a noisy diesel locomotive pulling twenty-two thousand tons of taconite from the Hibbing, Minnesota, plant down past Kelly Lake terminal to the Superior dock, sometimes a railroad engineer can also sense discrepancies in a track. But Joe Rubin was supposed to be first to identify when a track sounded off. He was regional Employee of the Month twice during his fourteen years. The award meant much to him, for unlike many employees, he lived for the railroad. Mornings, he cleaned his BN hardhat of grease or dirt, whispering absent-mindedly to himself about a section of track he had to examine. Friday evenings, in the kitchen of his apartment by the railyard, he reviewed his week’s performance. The work week over, he was likely to talk aloud to his parents’ pictures on the walls of his rooms. On the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month, he got a haircut. All of these were solitary activities, for he wasn’t one to say much to a barber.

      His week, his life, was made solitary in other ways. He’d had very few girlfriends over the years, which meant no one to telephone about meeting for a drink or going to dinner. He was probably the only Jewish track inspector in a vast BN-SF railroad network stretching from here to Fort Worth, and he drove the truck eight hours a day through such long stretches of uninhabited country that he might as well have been in Siberia. BN section hands called him the Wandering Jew. Wanderer or not, this was lonely work. The tracks ran through miles of speckled alder rising black against the snow—through aspen and pine forests, past tamarack bogs and cutover hayfields, out over trestles where you saw frozen rivers meander below. Here and there appeared farmhouses and railroad crossings, but once he had his track warrant on a winter morning and was passing under Tower Avenue westbound on Number 1 main track, he pretty much said good-bye to everyone but the dispatcher. When he was stopped at a crossing or off on a siding while a 170-car taconite train came highballing down Saunders’ Grade on the mainline, he’d wave to the engineer; but there was no talking, no laughing with a fellow employee, just Joe Rubin in freshly pressed work clothes standing on the shaking earth or sitting alone in his truck as the brown rail cars thundered past, trailing steam from taconite so hot from the mill that, even parked in the yards, unloaded boxcars steamed for three days.

      With the last cars flown by, blinking safety light gone out of sight around a curve, quiet returned to the track inspector. Chickadees sang in the aspen trees. Crows circled above. A flock of snow buntings in a quiet cloud rose out of the stark gray branches of a mountain ash. After the train’s passing, which probably disturbed Joe Rubin less than it did the wildlife, he called the dispatcher. “What you got going west? Number ninety-two BN-SF is by me now. Can I get a warrant to Chub Lake?” To which the dispatcher might reply, “I’ve got a tac train coming out of Allouez dock. I’ll be holding a coal train at Chub Lake. You got an hour. Get coffee if you have a place nearby.” More often than one might imagine, track inspectors have time between trains.

      Though from certain mileposts, Joe Rubin could have raised the flanged wheels and made it to a country café and back, he generally brought a thermos of coffee and a sack lunch to eat. With his windows rolled down, what things he saw on mild winter days as he waited dreamily for the through freight: a spider made its way over the snow by his front tire; an ermine popped its head from the white earth; a snowy owl perched atop a paper birch, looking at the curious world. The delicate, beautiful bird and animal tracks he saw after a fresh snow reminded him of his own work on the tracks. When Joe Rubin drove his truck into the silent void after a train passed, it

Скачать книгу