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3 “You girls are going to quit the first time it really rains,” conductor Wiggins told us railroad women as we were reporting to work one night. It was 1979, one of the first years that women were hired to work as brakemen/switchmen on the Southern Pacific Railroad. About fifteen years later, I went to his retirement party. It had rained a few times since then, and, that first year, never as hard as it did in Houston, Texas. I hired out in July in Watsonville Junction, California, but I soon found out railroading was not a year-round job. A conductor I trusted told me to follow the work because I’d never learn the job on thecut-offboard.Andso,whentheylaidmeoffinNovember,Iwent booming to Los Angeles, but I soon got cut back to a few yard shifts. There was one place, however, that was going strong, and that was Houston. It was the last year of the oil boom, and Southern Pacific was scrambling to make repairs on its newly acquired Cotton Belt territory and keep the business rolling. When the railroad wants something,thereissuddenlyalotofmoneytobemade.InFebruary, Mary Alsip, one of the women who hired out at Watsonville, called meinLAwiththeboomernews.Therailroadwasofferingfreeplane tickets, free lodging, free transportation to and from work, and all the shifts you could handle. I looked up Houston in the newspaper. It was 84 degrees. I packed my summer gear and got on the plane. The South was unknown territory to me—so unknown that I even thought of Texas as the South. Outside the Houston airport I gave the cabbie the name of the boomer hotel and settled into the back seat, feeling like the dangerous stranger who just rode into town. The Center City Motor Hotel was the establishment the railroad put up trainmen in. Caste distinctions were important here, apparently,fortheengineers ratedthe HolidayInn.Itwasone ofthe quirks of railroading that although the conductor was the boss of the whole train, engineer included, the engineers considered themselves superior because their job was less physical. Trainmen’s feet actually touched the ground during a shift, whereas the engineer sat in a chair and related to a machine. In terms of the evolution of civilization, they were on a higher rung. Trainmen, conversely, were fond of pointing to their lanterns and saying to the engineers, “See this light? Well, it’s yer brains,” referring to the fact that, when switching, the engineer’s job was to follow signals and not make any independent decisions to move. It was an old controversy, not likely toberesolvedhere,althoughnowthetwounionsareunderpressure to merge, kind of like an old cat and an old dog trying to share the same bed. In Houston, however, engineers had considerably better beds than we did, the Center City being located in a downtown whose streets were inhabited by hordes of homeless, also drawn to the city by boom times. The seedy lobby was full of trainmen with their grips, waiting for rides to work, women in hot pants in the bar, looking as if they B O O M E R I N A B O O M T O W N 1 RailroadNoir.indb 3 12/17/09 2:01 PM R A I L R O A D N O I R 4 were working, and new arrivals like me waiting to check in. I called the crew dispatcher from my room and he marked me up immediately . The phone rang six hours later—on duty for a drag to the port, reporting at Englewood yard. Englewood was an enormous hump yard, meaning that, in addition to receiving and departure tracks, it encompassed about a hundred bowl tracks at the base of a classificationhill .Atrack-fullofcarswithoutairwasshovedtothecrestofthe hill and disconnected in various groupings by a switchman walking alongside the cut. The foreman in a tower overlooking the yard gave the switchman the car counts, as well as unsolicited advice. Today, since we were a drag, our only problem with Englewood yard was figuring out how to leave it. With eight months of railroad experience , I was surprised to find myself the foreman. The other switchman , Lloyd, had even less time than I did, although we both had to technically hire out again to work here. He was a boomer from El Paso,andhehadarrivedattheCenterCityafewminutesbehindme. The engineer was from Oregon. None of us had any idea where the port was or how to get there. The yardmaster, another boomer who had been promoted for getting hit with a puzzle...

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