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2 5 In Salinas Valley, beet season is in the spring. Trucks move the turnip -shaped sugar beets to trackside loading centers, where they ride conveyor belts up to funneled loading chutes, filling up old rusty gondola cars that are never used except during beet season. These ancient cars have rotting wooden slats along the sides of the cars, and the beets inside soon start to ferment, filling the already humid valley night with a sour intoxication. They tried to improve the cars once, by making them out of metal, but the beets rotted so quickly that they couldn’t be transported. So the old cars remained in service .Theirhandbrakesweretheoldkind,calledstaffbrakes,andthe torqueonthemcouldliterallythrowabrakemanoffthecar.Youhad towindthebrakewheelupwithyourhandoutsidethewheel,always hangingontoaladderrungwithyourotherhand(hencethesaying, one hand for you, one for the company), and when it was wound tight, you used your foot to apply the metal stop, called a dog, that kept the wheel in its groove. My friend Mary Alsip was untying one of these brakes one time and the torque pulled her into the brake and knocked out her two front teeth. Of course, she kept on railroading. Mary kept railroading after a broken neck in a car accident and until she was nine months pregnant. We joked her kid would be the first person to be born with a switch key in his mouth. It was the spring of 1987. I had just come back from a stint workingfirstAmtrakandthenthecommutetrainsthatranfromSanJose to San Francisco on the peninsula. Now I was back home in Santa Cruz, working out of Watsonville, where I had hired on in 1979. To the home guard I would always be the clueless blonde who couldn’t figure out which way a track was lined, in spite of the fact that as a no-seniority boomer I had seen more of the railroad than anyone working there. First impressions. The beet hauler went on duty at 8 at night in Watsonville. Its job was to pick up all the loaded beet cars that other jobs had left on sidings in the districts and haul them down the valley to Santa Margarita , the last siding before the grade over the summit at Cuesta, a run of about 150 miles, not counting the return trip with the engine. At Santa Margarita, a job from San Luis Obispo would pick the cars up and continue the shuttle down the coast. The hauler was an easy job with a lot of miles and it drew a high-seniority crew: the oldest hoghead,McCarthy,conductorJohnnyJensen,andbrakemenJessie Flores and Jim Bassman. There was a problem with the run, however. Since the cars were in such dilapidated condition, the dispatcher had slapped a 35 mph speed restriction on the train and required that a “beet inspector” position be put on to follow the crew in a truck and roll the train by, making a visual inspection of the brakes at certain specified locations, checking on the speed and making sure the old brakes weren’theatingupandsparking.Kindofanextraappendixposition. Atypicalrailroadsituation.Carstoodangeroustouse,butusethem B E E T I N S P E C T O R 4 RailroadNoir.indb 25 12/17/09 2:01 PM R A I L R O A D N O I R 2 6 anyway and if anything goes wrong, it’s your fault. Of course, the crew wasn’t going to run 35 mph from Watsonville to Santa Margarita because if they did, it would take them twelve hours and they wanted to be going home light engine way before that. So that put them in an adversarial position with whoever was so unlucky as to be called off the extra board to be the said beet inspector. There was so much wrong with this deal that I couldn’t quite fathom it when the fat trainmaster handed me the keys to a beat-up Datsun and said, “Follow that train.” The crew, meanwhile, united andtransformedfromacongregationoffourperfectlydecentpeople intoajuvenilegang,hadalreadyheapedmoreabsurdtasksuponme. “Hey,” Jesse Flores said, thoughtfully, “she can get our siding switches for us.” “Greatidea,”Bassmanadded.“AndwecouldhavecoffeeatSanta Margarita.There’sanIHOPopenallnight.Youcouldstopthereand get it for us.” McCarthy, a hoghead of the women-belong-in-the-kitchen persuasion , merely snarled my way, before adjusting his baseball cap. No girl beet inspector was going to tell him how to run his train. Jensen, a rather courtly cowboy, merely looked bemused. Now there are several things wrong with the idea that a truck can follow a train. First of all, trains run on tracks and trucks run on roads and the two are...

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