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1 1 1 In the twenty years that I’d worked for the railroad, I had rarely held a regular job. I was a boomer, never a home guard. This was partly circumstance and partly inclination—in the years after I hired out in 1979, Southern Pacific eliminated three out of five jobs on a crew, so I followed the work and returned home to Watsonville Junction where I could hold the extra board for beet season in the spring and fall. Being the baby on extra boards all over the Southwest gave me certain skills, such as working with different types of equipment, seeing how more experienced crews did things, seeing different operations like mines, petrochemical yards, agricultural districts, and city jobs. A boomer quickly sizes up new track layouts, bowl and hump yards, and main line track systems. But you never get really skilled at one particular job and you never develop the rhythm of working with the same people year after year. You are always the awkward person on the job, the one who slows things down and reminds the regular crew how very talented and brilliant they really are. It wasn’t until I abandoned the booming life and became a switchman in the San Jose yard that I could hold a regular job. San Jose only had four regular jobs a day, no midnight shift, and a fourman extra board. The morning jobs made up the Hollister local and the pickup for the San Jose turn. Then they switched out Granite Rock and a few industries up the Agnews branch. The afternoon jobs switched the San Jose turn’s setout, made up the Mission Bay’s pickup, and set the Broadway local. Then one job went to places we called 5 Zone and 3 Zone, and one job, the Lawrence switcher, went up Amtrak’s commute corridor to switch the butter house and the paper house on one side of the double main line and a rock house on the opposite side. The foreman’s job on the Lawrence switcher was demanding because Amtrak officials would yell at the foreman if a commute train got a yellow signal when the switcher was late going east. The foreman was the one the crew would blame if they didn’t get their early quit. “Toomuchpressureonthisjob,”theforemanwhoheldthenumber one spot on the seniority list told me one day, waiting at Lawrence . “It’s a nice June day; it’s not raining. Why split a gut worrying about getting back to the yard?” I admired his attitude and even shared it, but the macho crews wouldn’t let a foreman take that stance. They were all out to prove they could run within that window and get back to the yard early. They expected the foreman to go with the flow. When I first came into the San Jose yard, I was rarely the foreman, since all the regular jobs were bid in and I was the baby. But all that changed when our unpopular yardmaster bid in the afternoon shift. Suddenly, you couldn’t give that job away. It went to the extra board every day. T H E L A W R E N C E S W I T C H E R 16 RailroadNoir.indb 111 12/17/09 2:03 PM R A I L R O A D N O I R 1 1 2 Soon,thecompanyforce-assignedthejuniorswitchmantotheforeman ’s spot and the junior switchman was me. Luckily, though, I also acquired a decent regular crew when my old friend John Payne came in the yard. He was also a refugee from thetwenty-dayaway-from-homebrakeman’sboard,butunlikemost of us, he seemingly had nothing wrong with him. As a matter of fact, John, at 51, still had a runner’s body. He brought a cooler of juice and healthy snacks to work and really hated going to beans when he could trade the hour for one at the end of the day. He looked like an aged 19-year-old. And he had been my first conductor on my student trips when I had hired out eighteen years ago. “I stood up for you,” John told me, “when the other guys wanted to run you off. I told them, ‘Look, she has never been in a railroad yard before. It is all new.’ I told them you could do the job.” “And you were right,” I said, since he was looking as if he didn...

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