To Hell on a Handcart

Edvard Munch could have been inspired by Sully’s silent scream as he surveyed the looming bloodbath on the other side of his windshield. His shrieks were muted by the deafening hum of his diesel locomotive.

Plaid clad grunts from an extra gang were on a handcar on the main rail line, headed toward his freight train. They had just finished a day of cutting down trees growing beside the tracks. It was done to prevent sparks train wheels produce from starting a forest fire. After a day of preventing one kind of tragedy, they were on the verge of death by another.

Sully laid on the train’s horn before he hit the brakes. He knew he couldn’t stop in time.

The plaid lads knew it too. It takes a mile to stop a train. That was hammered home time and again during their less than extensive twenty-minute railway orientation. 

As the horn blared, the workers dragged their feet in the rocks between the rails to try to stop the steel hand car and trailer.

Sully didn’t want to be at the controls that day, but he had used up all his sick leave. 

Back in the seventies there was no long term disability plan. 

The blast of the air horn and squeal of the brakes revived nightmarish memories. Sully had been the engineer earlier in the year when his diesel killed a family of four trying to beat the train at a railway crossing near Creston. He had just gotten back in the saddle after seeing a psychologist for nearly three months. Now, another tragedy was unfolding in the same diesel he had been driving the last time.

Sully wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to be on the track that day.

I had been a relatively carefree 18-year old Catholic boy with an attention deficit working part time as an evening radio announcer at a small town in British Columbia. I had dreams of becoming a well-paid rock jock, like Dr. Dan at C-FUN in Vancouver.

At that moment, sitting alone in a darkened room speaking out loud to no one in particular was perfect for a small town boy prone to panic attacks.

Well, almost.

The minimum wage job included playing elevator music. The Living Voices Sing the Beatles or James Last’s Polka Party. 

Not exactly C-FUN after dark.

Dad’s vision of my future was decidedly different. He saw me doing manly work for a living. Not as a jack-of-all-trades for a logging company, like him, but as a labourer for the railway. That way I could pay rent and eventually get out on my own. A part time radio job wasn’t going to do that. But, being a working stiff with the railway, well, that was a job with a future! 

“The CPR is hiring guys for an Extra Gang. You can apply tomorrow.”

That meant you will apply tomorrow. 

I had no idea what an extra gang was. All I knew is that it paid twice as much per hour and Dad thought it would make me more self-reliant.

I reluctantly accepted my ticket to independence.

“Okay kid, you want the job, it’s yours,” announced the man in the CP hiring office.

The railway’s search for the ideal candidate wasn’t exactly exhaustive. Any young man with steel toed boots and a beating pulse would do.

“Train leaves tomorrow morning at nine.”

Being on the Extra Gang was back breaking work. But, it shouldn’t have been. Cutting down trees and brush is easy if you have a chainsaw. The brain trust at the railway was apparently not familiar with that tool. They were, however, acquainted with technology popularized by the Grim Reaper, developed more than 2000 years ago.

Scythes!

A good Catholic boy looking for absolution might be eager to use a tool created around the time of Christ and endorsed by the Angel of Death. 

The five-foot long curved wooden handle attached to a 16-inch blade was used to slice through shafts of wheat, not trees. I had only seen pictures of them in history books.

I wasn’t working on the railway as some sort of penance to atone for my adolescent carnal fantasies. I was hoping get enough money to make those dreams a reality. 

Accommodation for this anachronistic assignment was equally antiquated. We lived in rail cars parked beside the main track in the middle of nowhere. Box cars had been converted into large bedrooms that slept several workers. Some snored. Others who cried out in the night. Worse, was the lack of appropriate plumbing. Morning constitution breaks converted the fragrant forest into an open air outhouse.

We travelled to work on the rails using a handcar. It looked like a small railway flatbed with a teeter totter on top. We would take turns pushing up and down on each end of the miniature see-saw to make the wheels turn. Character building. And exhausting. Thankfully, a small motor would kick in so it could easily pull a trailer. It was worth every penny of the two dollars and two cents an hour we were paid.

The foreman’s job was to make ours even less bearable. Or, so it seemed. He was an older man who would unleash a barrage of insults at anyone who couldn’t cut through a sapling on their first swing of the scythe.

“Come on, you fruits. Swing harder! You’re a bunch of little girls.”

These days, the people in human resources would be appalled. Back then, we endured the disdain. For days!

Most of my railway gang cohorts were from my high school graduating class. But, one guy had worked on the track for years. Gerard was a lifer. He was the only guy the foreman didn’t attack. Like my dad, Gerard had grade six. He was a stocky man in his thirties with a tattoo on his knuckles that spelled h-a-t-e. It could well have spelled j-a-i-l. because, back then, that’s the most likely place he would have gotten it. He was married with a kid. But, because of his record for petty crime, and lack of education, this was the best job he could find.

Initially, some called him Gerard the tard. 

But, that started to change as we got to know him. He gave me advice that I still consider relevant nearly 50 years later. After the foreman chewed me out for something trivial, Gerard told me to “show some ass,” to stand up for myself. As I wondered how I might do that, he was about to take centre stage.

Without Gerard, we all might have died that day.

It began routinely enough. We were cutting brush in the high country, enduring abuse along a wide picturesque bend in the tracks. Blinding sunlight bounced off of the Sundance Glacier. Lakes dotted the lush landscape below. At quitting-time we piled onto the handcar and trailer and began travelling along the ribbon of track on the CP main line.

Gerard was working the teeter totter looking in the direction we were travelling. I was facing him. We reached cruising speed around a corner that overlooked a steep incline of shale down to a lake. The motor had just kicked in. 

I saw Gerard’s mouth drop. In an instant, I knew the reason. The whistle of a train coming from the direction we were headed! I whipped my head around to see a diesel and dozens of box cars chugging toward us. We knew a train on the mainline would take forever to stop.

“Kill the engine!” Gerard yelled. “Drag your feet in the ballast.”

He hit the brakes. Everyone dragged their feet in the sharp rocks in the middle of the tracks in a desperate attempt to stop.

The hum of the diesel engine was intense. Getting louder. I glanced up at the saucer-eyed engineer pointing and yelling words I couldn’t hear. Finally, we stopped. Gerard barked out orders for us to muscle the car and trailer off the tracks. 

“Okay. One guy on each corner! One. Two. 

HEAVE!

Four of us lifted the handcar. Four others grabbed the trailer. We shoved them off the rails and down the embankment. They skidded along the flat pieces of shale like a toboggan toward the lake. We all dove after them as the train lumbered past. 

Incredibly, the only injuries were scrapes and bruises. 

Is that you, Angel Gabriel? I thought.

The most difficult part was lugging the cumbersome steel handcar and trailer back up the shale to the tracks. But, our adrenaline was pumping. Once we got the them back on the rails we all gathered around Gerard, slapping him on the back.

“Holy crap!”

 “You saved us, man!”

Gerard’s status of outcast was recast.

Our hero heartily led the herd in an inharmonious version of We Are the Champions as we punched fists in the air and chanted our new nickname, “Team Track, Team Track.”

Even the foreman was impressed.

“Jeez, you guys done good! They told me on the radio it was okay to head home! Jeez you guys done good.”

Gerard was immediately made assistant foreman.

We were all well worth the foreman's praise that afternoon. We certainly had earned his respect. Perhaps even admiration. At least, that’s what we expected. 

The next day he was again calling us fruits and little girls. All except Gerard.

But, Team Track would not be trifled with. That morning, we huddled together during the coffee break and talked about walking off the job. We knew if we quit we would have a gruelling five-mile trek along the sharp ballast to the nearest town. But, at noon, a team of high school educated former railway workers was trudging along the train tracks, singing and chanting, hoping our parents would understand why we had voluntarily become unemployed.

Despite dodging another calamity, Sully didn’t fare so well. The combination of a near miss with the previous catastrophe convinced him to retire early.

Our boss was fired after that. Not only did he have a history of bullying his workers, he lied about calling in to dispatch to get the all-clear for us to take the handcar back home on the main railway line that day. 

His mistake could have killed us.

We all knew that. Somehow, it didn’t bother us much. We were bullet proof boys from the back country. Refugees from monotony in the British Columbia wilderness. Danger was the antidote for boredom. Bravado would blunt any fear.

Well, almost. 

For years, in my dreams, I would see the horror on Sully’s tortured face through the locomotive windshield.

I still won’t travel by train. 

Not the CPR. Not Amtrak. 

Not even the subway.

However, I’ve had a rewarding career in radio.