Tales from the Rails: Part 2

With the Dogcatcher Crew

In which I meet the Train Goddess, I see some Graduates, a Crew Dies, I learn what "Dogcatchers" are, and We are Attacked by a Tree...

February 4, 1998

It all began on Monday, February 3 when the phone rang at 6:15 in the AM. "Yeah?" I croaked wittily.

"Amtrak Crew Control. We need you to go out on Train 714 TODAY. Report time is usually 7:45, but can you be there close to that?"

"How about 8:15?" Yeah, that's it Paul--demand an extra thirty minutes. That'll teach them to call you last-minute.

"Okay." He'd agreed pretty readily. "You'll be working with Lela Janushkowsky. She's the LSA."

I attached no importance to the name--how was I to know that I would be working with the one and only Train Goddess?

It was raining pretty hard when I got to the Oakland Crew Base, a place that I have yet to see in the sunshine. Were I to see it on a sunny day, I would probably fail to recognize it at all. The rain wasn't all that bad, modified as it was by a chill 30 mph wind blowing right out of Valhalla, so I looked at my upcoming two days on the rails with something approaching optimism. As it turned out, I had no idea that we were going to be affected by the much-dreaded El Nino.

Train 714 is one of the San Joaquin runs. It ostensibly leaves Oakland at 10:05, goes out to Martinez and then to Stockton, then to Fresno and finally to Bakersfield (BFD is the Amtrak code for Bakersfield, by the way). There are stops along the way. All in all, a nice seven-hour run, after which we are driven to the very exciting Super-Eight Motel. There are many fast food places in the vicinity, and a Barnes and Noble right around the corner (so much for my tip money). At the hotel we watch HBO and sleep. After this night of sophisticated dissipation, at 8:15 AM we board a van for the station, whereupon we run the train back the way we came, ostensibly arriving at 3:55 PM At Oakland.

Amtrak always arrives ostensibly.

Well, the trip down went as planned. I didn't serve that many lunches, but we did okay. My guests all enjoyed themselves, and some enjoyed the food (it's not bad). I enjoyed the company of the LSA I worked with--the one and only Lela Janushkowsky, better known as the Train Goddess. She's Polish and Russian, so we got along great. She kept me entertained with her stories of life at Amtrak. She used to be a dining car steward on the California Zephyr. She's been in two derailments. She taught me the nicknames of the freight railroads we encounter: "Uncle Peter" (Union Pacific), "Slow and Pathetic" (Southern Pacific), and "Better Not Start A Family" (Burlington Northern/Santa Fe). I kept her sort of entertained too. It was a great trip.

That night we had a drink and tried a Mexican place around the corner. It was pretty good. The people were nice, the prices were incredibly low, and the enchiladas were almost as good as my mom's. All in all, a pleasant evening. Gourmet it's not, but I'll eat there again.

I was on my way back to my room by 8:00 PM. By this time the wind was picking up. I had to grab my glasses twice--the wind had snatched them off my head on the way back to the hotel. Windy, but not raining--that was scheduled for the next day.

That night, apparently, Bakersfield got smacked by heavy rain. You couldn't have proved it by me--I was out cold.

The next morning, Tuesday, February 4, was wet and rainy, and things did not bode well. On the way to the Amtrak station we saw huge puddles and blocks of town without power. I saw a bus stop flooded, with only the top of the bench showing. The Amtrak station itself had no electricity. Worse yet, the buses that connect all Southern California with Amtrak were not arriving. Finally, about half of them did show up. We waited for the rest, but finally we were told that they had been turned around; the roads were flooded and impassable. We left Bakersfield over an hour late. Little did we suspect that this was just the beginning.

The first three stops after leaving Bakersfield are Wasco, Corcoran, and Hanford. The most interesting thing about this stretch is that there are seventeen different penal institutions along this route. For example, Corcoran State Prison was until recently the home of Charles Manson. Both ways we get people we call "graduates" boarding the train. They're easy to spot; they usually have extremely short buzz cuts, fluorescent-lamp pallor, and immediately head for the lounge car to buy liquor with fifty-dollar bills we have to break. They almost never get lunch in the dining room. Usually they are no trouble; they are just glad to be heading home. I saw several, and they had still another distinguishing mark: ugly, crude tattoos on their faces and necks. I wonder what kind of future a man has with "Fuck the Law" tattooed on his cheeks. He isn't exactly every father's dream for his daughter.

The rain had been heavy, so they sent a work train out forty-five minutes ahead of us to check track conditions. In the meantime, we had to go at only 20 mph (our normal speed is 79 mph). It took us a long time to get anywhere. Finally we were given the okay to hit top speed. People clapped (we were almost two hours late at that point). Lela, the Train Goddess, announced that in celebration people could come up and get a free soft drink or coffee. Many did. It set people in a positive mood about the lateness that lasted the rest of the trip (and a good thing too). She was smart, but then, she is the Train Goddess.

I went about serving breakfast and lunch. Not much business, but it kept me busy. Before long we had to resume our previous pace--20 mph. We saw a lot of strange things out the windows. Homes and fields were flooded. Roads became long waterways with nearly drowned stop signs poking out. Santa Fe Avenue, a miles-long road paralleling the tracks, kept disappearing and appearing. I saw one car in a ditch, with only its trunk at back window above water. It was bad out there.

The train got later and later. Remember, we were supposed to get to Oakland around four. It was nearly eight by the time we got to Stockton. This is where it got interesting.

At Stockton, we were connecting to lots of buses. They were there, five hours or so after the train was supposed to have come. The big question was what to do with us. There was some talk that we would have to get off and spend the night in Stockton. There was another train, the 716, coming down from Oakland, and it was decided that it would not attempt to make the rest of the trip to Bakersfield. That train was attached to our train, and the new, longer train was either going or not going to head back to Oakland

At the same time, our crew "died." This was a new piece of rail lingo for me. Federal Railroad regulations require the train's operating crew--engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors--to work no more than a certain number of hours. When this time elapses, the crew is "dead on the law" or has simply "died." When this happens, another crew has to come aboard and relieve the first; the train can't go anywhere until that happens. Members of a crew that takes over a train after the original crew has "died" are called "dogcatchers" or a "dog-catch crew."

So there we were, me and Lela the Train Goddess, on with a dogcatcher crew and about thirty comatose passengers. We had completely sold out of liquor and beer and were almost out of soda. I had closed down, cleaned, and sanitized my galley. Our car was finally closed down . We encouraged the other lounge car to open, because they were fully stocked. It was about 10:00 PM when we finally reached Martinez. We would be home soon--and we were only going to be seven hours late.

But then, about 5 minutes out of Martinez, we heard a thump, and there was the sound of our wheel going over something. The train stopped. What had happened?

Well it seemed there was a mile-and-a-half-long freight stopped on the tracks, so they had switched us to another track close to a big hill. Part of that hill, including a big tree, had slid down and hit our train. We stopped, and the conductors walked the train. The mud was about ten inches deep. Sure enough, there was mud and a tree piled up against our poor train.

We opened our doors and looked out. Not only was there collapsed hillside and a tree piled against us, there was a lot of steep hill looming over us and fixing to slide down.

"You know," said Lela, "That hill has a cemetery at the top. The hillside keeps sliding. One of these days it'll get to the graves and then we'll have coffins coming down on us."

"Great," I replied. "All I need is for somebody's grandpa to come tobogganing down on us right now."

The train behind us, also very late, caught up to us, and the passengers were awakened and moved to that train, which went ahead and left us behind. It was only me, Lela, and the Dogcatchers left.

Eventually, a track crew with a front-loader/back hoe came and dug us out. We were free. The train started slowly, then went more quickly. We went without further mishap right back to the Oakland yard, where we unloaded and signed out. It was 3:45 AM.

Lela the Train Goddess was planning to go back to Sacramento, but she ended up sacked out on my sofa in Berkeley. I had gotten an extra twelve hours of paid work, and an adventure I won't soon forget.

I make my first "Fun Train" run starting tomorrow, Friday the 7th. The destination is Reno.

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