Training for a Race or Racing for a Train?

 I spent a challenging year as a switch tender and brakeman on the Great Northern RailRoad in 1969.  It was a year of extremes - I stood  atop a boxcar careening through the urban night in 30 degrees below zero weather, forwarding the star-prick lantern signals of the caboose brakeman's faint light to the engineer in his heated cab just a few feet ahead and below me.  No handrails to steady me against the curves and wobbles of the urban grade, no windscreen to keep my cheeks and nose from the punishment of air that had teeth.

In the spring I requested a few shifts in the switch shanty, an oil-burner heated wooden box.  Temps dipped into the nethers then before climbing above freezing.  And wow did the returning prodigal Fahrenheit bring a surprise home.  Grain (which had spilled every time a switching boxcar's door bounced slightly with the impact of one lumbering car knuckling into the fixed rump of another) covered the long aisles between tracks in the switchyards.  It wasn't enough to economically reclaim, but it was enough to begin fermenting and rotting in place with the advent of warmer weather.  The yards were transformed into a massive barroom floor after a particularly Dionysian debauch, and you would stagger to encounter the stench, and swoon to sit in it.

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