Oral History Program Allen Kulicke Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 10 May 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Allen Kulicke Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 10 May 2019 Copyright © 2024 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Railroad Sesquicentennial Project. In 2019, the joining of the railways at Promontory Point in Utah celebrated its 150th anniversary. This oral history project was conducted at the Union Station in Ogden, Utah, on May 9 and 10, 2019, and captured stories from individuals and their family members who worked on the railroad throughout the intermountain west. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Kulicke, Allen, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 10 May 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Allen Kulicke conducted on May 10, 2019 at the Union Station in Ogden, Utah by Lorrie Rands. Alan talks about his time working on the railroad for the Union Pacific and the different jobs he held during that time. He also talks about how his positions and the railroad changed during his time working. Charlesa Byrd, Alan’s wife Lynn, and videographer Alyssa Dove are also present. LR: It is May 10, 2019. We're at the Union Station in Ogden, Utah, and we are talking with Alan… AK: Kulicke. LR: Kulicke, thank you, about his time working on the railroad. I'm Lorrie Rands conducting the interview. Alyssa Dove is on camera and his wife is present. LK: Lynn Kulicke. LR: And… CB: Charlesa Byrd. LR: Thank you. I am so bad with names. She's learning how to do oral history, so that's why she's here. All right Alan, when and why did you start working on the railroad? AK: I have a family history of railroad workers. I have three uncles that worked for the railroad previous to me. This is Union Pacific Railroad. I was looking for a job in 1976 and decided to talk to one of my uncles who was then working for the railroad as a clerk in Salt Lake. He linked me up with the employment. What do they call, like… LK: HR nowadays. AK: …the human resources guy for the Union Pacific in Salt Lake at the Union Pacific Depot in Salt Lake. That's where the human resources office was. I went and talked to him and he said, “Well, what kind of background do you have?” 1 I said, “I have an electrical instrumentation background from Idaho State University.” He said, “Well, why don't you work for the signal department?” because they do the electrical work along the tracks. So my first job with the railroad was in the signal department. I worked from Ogden to Evanston, up Weber Canyon on the double main line, putting in CTC—which is Centralized Traffic Control. Being a new employee, I did pick and shovel work along the tracks, since I didn't have any education having to do with the signal department at that point. LK: He was young; 23, 22, whatever. AK We were digging trenches along the tracks, between here and mostly up Weber Canyon and Uintah over here. Just to pass the time, we goofed off a lot on the railroad. LK: He's retired, he can tell the truth now. AK: We had belts that we would use to climb the poles. We had gaffs. There were hooks that went on the inside of your boots, and we would climb up the poles and have races. LK: We're talking telephone poles. AK: Telephone poles, big H-rame telephone poles up Weber Canyon. My fellow employee would take one side of the H-pole, I'd take the other side, and we would race up to the top of the pole. Well, I was going up my side of the pole, and I had a crack in the pole with my gaff, and I started sliding down the pole. All I could do at that point was grab the pole, and I slid all the way to the bottom, putting slivers in my chest, arms. LK: It's kind of a reflex. I mean, you know, what else would you do but grab? AK: Yeah, that was my first—actually, my only injury on the railroad in my 38 years. I came close to getting injured, but that was it. 2 LK: And then it was our first date shortly thereafter. I said, “What happened to you?” It was terrible. AK: She helped me pick the slivers. LK: There's some love for you. AK: That was our first date. LR: That's crazy. AK: After that I put a transfer in to go switching with the railroad, and they picked me up in 1978. June 8 is my seniority date in 1978 as a switch man. That happens to be our first son's birthday. LK: I was in labor. He was born that day, and he was testing. AK: I was testing with the railroad. LK: He was doing signals with his lantern, and I was quizzing him as I lay there. AK: My second job with the railroad was a switchman and I worked in the Salt Lake yard. When I could not hold because of layoffs, I came up here to Ogden and worked. My memories of working in the Ogden yard: we didn't have radios at that point, and so we had to use lanterns to pass signals at night. I would stand under the Riverdale overpass down here, and the switch engine was clear on the curve there a half mile away. You do backup signs, which is a big circle with my lantern, or ‘go ahead’ would be straight up and down. I did that for eight hours straight underneath that overpass, freezing to death because it was winter when I would be cut off; couldn't work at the Salt Lake. My memories of the Ogden yard are that it was a dangerous yard because it was on a hill. We had several runaway equipment boxcars that would get away from us and they would roll down the hill at a high rate of speed, hit the other equipment, derail, cause all kinds of problems. My first experience on a caboose—actually, my first experience as a head brakeman on a train was out of the Ogden yard. I went from Ogden to Pocatello on 3 a train called the Triple S, and it was a Fruit Express train that went back east, came to Salt Lake, Ogden, went to Pocatello, went up into the northwest to get fruit and come back. It was a very expedited hot train. I was the head brakeman on that train, and that was my first experience as a brakeman. The head brakeman responsibilities are to line the switches and get the train out of the yard. On the way back, I was the rear brakeman, and that was my first experience on the caboose. The conductor on the caboose doesn't do anything. That's his job, to do nothing. LK: Now, at that time, how many people were on a crew? AK: There were four people on a crew at that time. LK: On a train? AK: There was actually five. There was an engineer, a fireman, a head brakeman, and then a rear brakeman and a conductor on the caboose. We had radios. LK: And this is all freight train? AK: This is all freight train. I didn't do any passenger work at all. My memories of being on the caboose were, we'd have to stand out on the rear platform and roll trains by, as a train would be going the other way. If we were on a double track, we would be sitting on this track, it would be going the opposite directions [using hand motions]. I'd have to stand out on the platform, look at the train as it goes by, being sure there's no sparking or problems with the equipment on the train. His brakeman would be out on the platform of his caboose, and we'd give each other a highball signal with our lanterns, which is, you take the lantern and go like this [motions] straight down. That's a highball signal. In other words, that means there's no problems with your train. That means there's no problems with my train. If you gave us a stop signal, which would be back and forth, that means, “You better stop. There's something wrong with the train.” 4 Shortly thereafter, in the Salt Lake yard, a fellow employee of mine was in a terrible accident and both of his legs were cut off. That got me to thinking about how dangerous of a job that I was doing, so I decided to apply for a yardmaster position in the Salt Lake yard at that point, and I spent the next 25 years working as a yardmaster in the Salt Lake Yard. I brought the trains in and out of the yard. LK: He sits up in a tower. It's like an air traffic controller. He isn't down there with the trains. AK: I would run the switch crews around and call the trains out. We would build the trains. We ran trains to Pocatello, to Los Angeles, to back east. LK: What year was that? Was that ‘79? AK: No, that was 1981 that I became a yard master. LK: Well, it was not… Cristy was a baby. AK: I was a switchman and a yardmaster for several years. LK: On call. Do you want to hear what I think? It's rough. Carry on, carry on. AK: She had a rough life. LR: I married into a railroad family. I know what you're talking about. LK: No schedule. Yeah, on call or working midnights like he did for 25 years. LR: Sorry. I'm done with my interjections. AK: It was tough on our family, but I spent 25 years being a yardmaster. Towards the end of my career as a yardmaster, they started ‘command centers’, it was called, where they used cameras and radios and had it consolidated in Salt Lake. We ran the Ogden yard from Salt Lake using cameras and radios. It was all done in Salt Lake. At that point, we had merged with the Southern Pacific Railroad—Union Pacific did, in 1996. So Ogden became part of the U.P. system more than it was before, because they had the Ogden Union Railway Depots Company here in Ogden that the Southern Pacific, the Rio Grande, and the Union Pacific offices 5 participated [in]. Union Pacific bought S.P. Rio Grande; all of that went away and this became a strictly Union Pacific yard here in Ogden. My memories as a yardmaster… LK: Do you have a limit to how long you want him to talk? LR: Unless I'm told we have another one, and I don't think we're going to… AK: Okay. Well, my memories as a yardmaster in the Salt Lake yard, the switchmen, their main job was to do as little as possible and get paid the most amount of money. LK: Well, that's what they thought the job should be. That's not what they were hired to do. AK: It was not their job description, but that's what they thought their job entailed. So, my job was to continually coax them to do their job. LK: Tell about their eight-hour shift, how it would start. AK: Well, if they went, for example, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., the first hour they would sit in the shanty and shoot the ball, and then they would finally come out after much coaxing from me. “When are you going to work? Come on, let's go.” As a matter of fact, one of the big officials for the railroad was up in the tower one day, and I was on the afternoon shift, and it was 3 to 11; 3:30 they had to come out of the shanty to go to work. He says, “Well, what are your crews going to work?” I said, “When they want to.” That was a huge mistake, because he said, “They're paid from 3 o’clock on and they need to be out of that shanty by 3:10 at the latest. I don't want any more of this coming out of the shanty when they want to do stuff.” So that was a big mistake. Anyway, the railroad… LK: Well, what did they do after they worked for like a half an hour? 6 AK: They worked for half an hour and they have to have a coffee break. So, they badger me, “When are we going to coffee?” Okay, so they go in the shanty, and an hour later they decide to finally come out. Then about an hour later, they have to go to lunch. Okay. So they go to lunch, and they go to lunch where they want to go to lunch. Sometimes they leave their switch engine sitting right in the way of everything else. As a matter of fact, one time Amtrak was coming out of the Salt Lake depot, and the stupid engineer left his engine sitting on the main line because he was going to dinner after five hours. Five-and-a-half hours by contract, they are required to get off their engines and go to dinner, whether I say so or not. Okay, here's five hours and 30 minutes; his engines, they're on the main line. They were going to get off the main line. He says, “I'm going to dinner.” He stops his engine right there on the main line, and he goes to dinner. Here comes Amtrak, and Amtrak had to wait 20 minutes for them to decide they were going to come and move their engine. I got yelled at for that. LK: And then the early quit. AK: Then they have to have an early quit. “Let's go.” This is good for posterity, isn't it? They had to have an early quit because they've done so much work. LK: If he doesn't give them an early quit, then they hate him and then they won't work very well for him the next day. AK: For the next day. LK: Then in the meantime, he was a switchman half the time. He'd be a switchman part of the time, because he was on call for both. He was their boss and then he was one of them, and then next time he could be the boss. It was awful for him because you know… AK: I was working back and forth, switchman or yardmaster. LR: That seems complicated. 7 AK: It was just the way that they did it because… LK: To hold a job. AK: I was a switchman, but I was trying to be the yardmaster until I could get a yardmaster date. I was both. LR: Okay. Did you ever get a date? AK: Yes, I did in 1981. I got a date, and I was a dated yardmaster until 2004. LK: Tell about your test that you decided to be a conductor. AK: In 1979, I decided that I wanted to be a conductor. You have to take a test to promote to a conductor. I failed that test by one question the first time. I thought, “I'm not going to do it,” and then I decided I would do it, and I passed at that time. But then shortly thereafter, I became a dated yardmaster, so I just had that conductor seniority in the background. LK: See, I said to him, “Why are you doing this? You just got to be a yardmaster.” He says, “I've always wanted to be a conductor.” Then he never was a conductor, and I forgot all about it. AK: I know it was in the back of my mind. LK: It was a miracle that he had done that. It saved us. It was such a blessing in our lives that he had done that down the road. AK: Down the road, because in 2004—oh, I should talk about the Olympics and the railroad. LR: That'd be great. You worked that? AK: Yes, I did. In 2002, the Olympics came. The railroad was a big sponsor of the Olympics. LK: Well, they gave all that land. AK: The 4th South yard there in Salt Lake had a bunch of tank cars underneath it. I kind of bounced around as a yardmaster and a manager of train operations there when 8 they needed somebody for vacations or something, because I had more summers. George Bush was coming to the Olympics. President Bush and his motorcade was going to go over the 4th South overpass to get to where he was going and all these tank cars were over there. Because of security, they wanted to move all of those tank cars out. LK: Because they were filled with, what, flammable oil? AK: Oil and propane and all kinds of flammable things. It was a security issue for his Secret Service people. There was a crew that was supposed to get moving all those tank cars out of there. There was another very inexperienced yardmaster, and his crew had gone to dinner on him. They left the engine sitting there and the tank cars are still there. Here comes my big boss, and they had cameras at that point. They swing the cameras around to the 4th South yard, and those tank cars are still there. He says, “When are you going to get those tank cars moved?” Just like me saying, “When they want to,” he [the yardmaster] said, “When they come out of dinner, they'll move those tanks.” He [the big boss] says, “When's it going to be?” The yardmaster says, “When they want to.” He just hit the roof and he said, “Do you think the President of the United States is going to wait for your crew to come out of dinner to move those tank cars?” He really got into a lot of trouble. I was just up by myself looking in at all of that. But the railroad, I might say, is a militaristic organization. General Grenville Dodge was one of the big [wheels]; he was a Civil War general. He was a big wheel in the early railroad, and they had this militaristic style of management which has come right into today's railroad. It's, “Yes, sir. No, sir.” Very abusive leadership 9 style. I often wonder how people that work for the railroad can be abused verbally like they are and still work for them. LK: You did it. AK: Well, I did it, but I did it because I liked the job, not so much the people I worked for. I didn't like them at all because they'd belittle their employees, and they do it consistently. LK: Without any praise for a job well done. AK: Very little praise, just like you said, for a job well done. That night, there was a very hot Z train on the railroad. LK: Is this the Olympics you're talking about? AK: I should get back to the Olympics, but a Z train has the designation of being an expedited train. So if it's got a Z on the end: LADZ, Los Angeles to Denver Z, that means it's an expedited train that you shouldn't mess with, delay or anything, because it has UPS or some commodity on it. One night, I delayed that train by 15 minutes because of some stupid switch crews on the way. I got yelled at pretty bad for that. Well, the next night, it spent three minutes in the Salt Lake yard and took off, and nobody said a word about it. You only get recognition when you mess up. That's the way the railroad is. So anyway, back to the Olympics. We had to secure the rail yards from any hazardous cars. We could not bring trains in and out of the Salt Lake yards when the award ceremony was going on because it was right downtown around 4th South, where the railroad tracks went. We had the whole trains out of Salt Lake on both ends, and nothing could happen railroad-wise when those award ceremonies were going on. Our trains would stack up outside of Salt Lake either direction, five and six trains deep, and when it was all over, we had to start calling crews and getting the trains in the yard one at a time. It was just a huge mess. So for two weeks, the 10 railroad officials had a great time with the Olympics, but the crews and the yardmasters were [under] a lot of stress and pressure. LK: Yardmasters are officials, and so we were actually given a couple of perks. We were invited to go to a couple of events, to the bobsled, and they gave us some VIP badges. That was nice to be able to go to Park City and attend that, and we went to something on a train right there at the Gateway. What was that for, the Olympics? AK: Well, right behind the Union Pacific Depot in Salt Lake, all of the passenger tracks used to be there where the Gateway Mall is, so they brought their special Olympic train up into those tracks. LK: You should tell about the circus. AK: Oh, the circus, yes. The circus came to Salt Lake, the Barnum and Bailey Circus, every year. LK: Did they try to arrive in an evening when you were, like, in the middle of the night because it was less traffic? AK: No, it just came when it came. LK: Because he was working 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. AK: Up in those passenger tracks behind the Salt Lake Depot, we would have to separate the circus train so they could get their animals off, the elephants and everything off of that train. We would just have to take the train apart and put it in various tracks so they could move it. Then they built the Gateway Mall and the circus had to go over towards Rose Park. In Salt Lake, they had some old abandoned tracks over there that they took the circus train in. Now they don't have to worry about it because the circus doesn't exist anymore today. LK: Talk about the caboose; when did it go away? I thought that was interesting that he said he was on a caboose because those don't exist, if you notice. LR: I absolutely hadn't even noticed that. 11 AK: They went away in 1985. LK: The little red caboose, you know; you don't ever see one on the end of a train anymore, and that's kind of a historic thing. AK: They have a rear-end device on the rear end of all trains. Now, that projects a signal up to the engineer and that lets him know if there's a continuity of air pressure through the train. The rear car is moving; hopefully it is. If the engine’s moving, you'd hope the whole train is moving. But if there's some inconsistency in the air pressure in the train, the rear-end device will let the engineer know that on a screen in the engine. The railroad wanted to get rid of all these positions for many years, and wanted to get rid of the brakeman, the fireman, and just have an engineer and a conductor. LK: Remember? He said there were five at the beginning of his career? It got down to it where there were two. AK: An engineer and a conductor. That's the way it is today, so far. They're still trying to get rid of the conductor on the trains today. LK: You imagine having one person on the train, like, what if he had a heart attack? What if… AK: Anyway, in 1985, they had what's called a ‘crew consist’ where through the union negotiations, they got rid of the brakeman positions and they paid 385 guys a trip allowance to make up for those positions not being there. So for every trip I had, I got a trip credit. LK: When you became a conductor. AK: When I became a conductor. Well, I was a conductor; I left the yardmaster tower in 2004. The last 10 years of my career I was a freight train conductor. LK: That's when it came around to where it was a blessing. AK: That's where it was. In 1979 I took the conductor... 12 LK: Because he had that date as a seniority. LR: Oh, wow. AK: Everything is seniority with the railroad. LK: Everything. LR: I knew that. Having that is a great date. AK: You're right, that was a good date. LK: All of a sudden, he materializes as this conductor, and everybody knew him and they're like, “You're no conductor.” He's like, “Yes, I am,” and he was able to bump all of them, which is what they call it. You can bump anybody if you have more seniority—which I felt so bad, but yet we'd been bumped forever and ever and ever. He could just bump in and get the very job he wanted because by then he had so much seniority and he could choose this route. AK: [In] 2004, I became the freight train conductor and left the tower. I took some student trips in Provo, and then I took some student trips, jobs that work around the Kennecott mine. Then I went from Salt Lake City to Milford, Utah. That was my trip, and I had many experiences on the freight trains. I had a fairly bad accident where no one was killed, thank goodness, but three seconds, somebody would have been. We were going on this in the afternoon, leaving Tooele area, going down to that area. There was a truck and a trailer that was coming around a road crossing there. I had a student conductor with me, my engineer, and me, and we were going about 50 miles an hour. Here comes this truck and camping trailer around, and he slammed on his brakes, and that big trailer shoved the truck right into our train and shaved the whole front end of the truck off right to the firewall. It took us about a mile to stop, and when we hit that, it was just a bunch of metal and dirt and rocks and dust up all around. We thought those people were dead for sure. 13 I grabbed my stupid little first aid kit. The engineer is required to stay on the engine, so me and the student conductor walk back there. Here's this guy just walking back and forth, drinking Sprite like nobody's business. He had been drinking, and the cops had been notified, and he said, “Oh, man, I'm in so much trouble.” I said, “Yeah, you're in a lot of trouble, buddy.” “No, I don't care about this.” He said, “That's not my truck.” LK: The one he was driving, borrowed from his neighbor. AK: Borrowed the truck from his neighbor, and it was a brand new truck with a sticker still in the window. LR: Oh my God. AK: The whole front end was shaved off, and… LK: The airbags hadn't even gone off, and the glass in the windshield was not broken. It was his wretched trailer that he... AK: He bought the beat-up old trailer and borrowed his neighbor's truck to go camping. LK: And he's drunk. AK: But I swear, if he would have not put on his brakes when he did, we would have broadsided that and killed him and his wife. His wife was there in the trailer. I also hit a car once on the tracks, an automobile, but they had abandoned the car and just were standing there watching us hit it, basically. LK: See, that's what I think is awful, when people choose to throw rocks on the tracks or to leave a vehicle or choose to end their life by doing that. That's really awful to think. They're so thoughtless when they don't consider what that's going to do to the person who's sitting there in the engine. LR: That makes sense. 14 AK: As a matter of fact—I should just wrap this up. I guess I've got to say, though, I enjoyed the railroad as a career. It gave me a great retirement. I enjoyed the people I worked with very much. LK: When you were on the road, mostly. AK: Right. Very solid. Good railroad family that you worked with. We look out for each other, take care of one another. Now, we go to each other's funerals, you know. Very, very close. But having to do with Big Boy here in Ogden today, my second-tothe-last trip, we pulled into Milford going to Salt Lake. LK: Tell the date. AK: The date? Well, it was 2014. LK: He retired the very last day of May. AK: I retired May 30, 2014. They had brought it up from Los Angeles. They had an engine on the rear of it and the engine on the head, pushing and pulling, trying to keep the rust bucket together because it was just a rusty piece of metal. They could only go about 10 miles an hour with it, and then they have to stop and grease the wheels and everything and make sure everything was turning. I followed that my second-to-the-last trip up towards Salt Lake, and they had pulled it into a siding called Jericho about halfway between Milford and Salt Lake. We got around it and we were on a stack train that goes 70 miles an hour. At that point, we could open it up and get going. Every corner we came around [had] people hanging out of the sagebrush just thinking we were the Big Boy coming, but no, they were thoroughly disappointed to see a freight train. But there were thousands of people along the railroad between Salt Lake and Milford watching, waiting for that Big Boy steam engine to come. They finally got it to Cheyenne, and it took them five years. Here we are in 2019 to restore that. That was a new experience, that particular engine. 15 But it's a good, good career. Enjoyed it very much. I am the end of my family that has worked for the railroad, my three uncles and me. I do have a brother that retired as an engineer. He worked at… LK: And a brother-in-law that just retired as an engineer last year. AK: A brother and brother-in-law that were engineers, and I was a conductor. LK: Then your nephew. Here's one of the things that's kind of weird: Allen is colorblind, so is his brother, and so is his nephew. You kind of should know your reds and greens. AK: There are signals. I'm red-green colorblind. In other words, I can’t tell red and green. Then when I look at the test that has the circles that have the dots, I can’t pull the numbers out. That's what red-green colorblindness is. Of course, working for the railroad, I never knew that until I went out on the trains. In 2004, I didn't know. LK: If you can't pass that test, you know, there goes your career. There were some scary times. Every year he had to have an eye test. AK: I'd have to have a field test, it was called. I'd have to go out and look at the signals, and they would run a series of signals and I would have to say what they were. I passed that. LK: Our nephew lost his job because he couldn't pass that. The field test is run in a really unfair manner and nobody could have really passed it. It was unfortunate. But his wife works for the railroad, so we still have a little bit of railroad. AK: Yeah, she's an engineer as well. LR: So, I have a couple questions, if you don't mind. You talked about—I just have to know—the pole. Was there a reason you were climbing up the pole, or was it just…? AK: Just to have fun. LK: Well, it was part of the railroad. Explain what the poles were for. 16 AK: Well, the poles had the communication lines along them, and also the electrical lines. Back in the day, there was telephone lines on the railroad tracks. LK: See, girls don't know all this. AK: There was lines that ran the signals. LK: I didn't know it. AK: Well, that was basically at the signals and the telephone lines. LK: Going along the tracks, there's all these telephone poles, but they're strictly for the railroad. AK: Right, they have nothing to do with the non-railroad world. They have all of the electricity on them that is needed to run the railroad, signal-wise and switch-wise, where they would have the electric switches. They were all controlled by dispatchers that were in the Salt Lake dispatching center back in those days, which is by the Vivint Smart Home Arena. There used to be a dispatching center right there, right underneath the North Temple overpass, actually. LK: Did you have to do some work at the top of these telephone poles sometimes? AK: Yes, we would get up there and we put transformers up there. We would wire the railroad on the poles, the wires that went down into the tracks. LK: Because he had some experience with electrical instrumentation. AK: That is why you would climb the railroad pole, to put up a transformer or some wire to the railroad. LK: And that's why they had the belts and gaffs. LR: Okay, thank you for that. Then historically, the fireman was used to…? AK: Put coal in the steam engine. LR: What was their purpose after steam engines went away? AK: They were engineers-in-training. If you were a fireman, you would have a fireman’s date, and you would be like an assistant engineer. After seniority came into play, 17 somebody would retire, then you'd get an engineer's date and become an engineer. They were kind of the pool in our day and age for engineers. Back in the day, though, they shoveled the coal in the hopper to fire up the steam engine. LK: Explain the difference between a switchman and a brakeman. AK: Well, a switchman works in a yard, a brakeman works on the trains. Now, of course, the brakeman job historically was the most dangerous job in the country because [of] the brakes on a railroad car back in the day when they were using steam engines, before the Westinghouse air brake came into play. The brake staff, which is the wheel, was on top of the car, and then they had a rod coming down into a gear that, as they would turn the wheels, would apply the brake on the wheels. They had a walkway along the top of the cars, and when they had a runaway steam engine, for example, the head brakeman would have to get up on the first car, the rear brakeman would get up on the last car ahead of the caboose, and they would start tying these handbrakes. That's a railroad term, ‘tie a handbrake;’ it's apply the handbrake, turn the wheels. Well, if you've got a runaway train and it's going like this [hand motion] because the tracks are not smooth… LK: And you're running along at the top. AK: Running along the top, trying to slow the train down, your chances of falling off and getting killed are pretty good, and so that's why the brakeman job is a very dangerous job. LK: Tell about the tower and how it changed. It used to have how many people in it? Three? AK: No. When I started as a yardmaster we had, let’s see… LK: And how many towers? AK: One... two, we had two towers, and the… LK: There were three. 18 AK: …depot yard behind the Salt Lake depot, so there's a yardmaster there. There was three in the main tower and two in the top end tower, so we had six yardmasters per shift. LK: And there's three shifts. AK: Three shifts. When I retired, there was one yardmaster doing it all with cameras and radios. So that's how through technology, jobs went away. LK: He never progressed to be able to get off the midnight shift. AK: Never progressed. LK: See, because they would eliminate one of the yardmasters out of the tower. One person had to do two people's jobs, so he wouldn't be able to move up because there weren't so many yardmasters here. Might be 20, and he was number 18. They’d retire, but then they'd eliminate that position, so he would never be able to get anywhere off of those midnight [shifts]. AK: I never went anywhere in 25 years with my seniority. LK: He had like Wednesday and Thursday off. When he decided to become a conductor, he said, “I refused to retire on the midnight shift.” He could see that that's where it was going. AK: I decided to go out on the trains, and I had a great 10 years out on the trains. LK: No stress. AK: I enjoyed that thoroughly; riding the freight train is fun. LK: He says, “Did I really do that?” Tell about the animals. LR: Oh, yeah. I've heard stories. AK: We ran over sheep, a lot of sheep. LK: That's not what I was thinking you were going to say. 19 AK: Because where one sheep goes, they all go. If one gets up on the tracks and starts running towards you, 30 of them get right on the track and start running towards you. LR: And it's not like you can stop. AK: You can't stop. It is a sad thing, but we would hit elk on occasion. Cows. One time, there was a golden eagle on the track ahead of us. We could see it sitting there and we've come in at 70 miles an hour. I was a conductor on the left side. The engineers were here on the right side. I had my window open about that far. We hit that eagle; the cow catcher lifted it up. It broke the mirror off the side of my engine, and that bird came in under my conductor's desk right there, and it was a bloody mess. I grab it and just shove it back out the window. LR: Did you have to report that? AK: No. LK: Well, it was probably quite illegal, but what can you do? AK: What can you do? LR: Yeah. You can't stop. LK: It is what it is. AK: It is what it is. LK: And then when you would be out walking around… AK: Oh, rabbits and what not. When a freight train goes into ‘emergency’, it's called, in other words, it just comes to a grinding halt. The rules require that you walk the entire train, both sides, to be sure that all the wheels… LK: The conductor has to. AK: The conductor has to do that, and freight trains today are long. They're over almost two miles long, and you're walking on a slant ballast along the tracks inspecting the train at night. And I tell you, the jackrabbits in the west desert stand that tall. They 20 are big jackrabbits. I saw one, one night, that was just sitting there staring at me, and I thought, “Well, that is weird,” and he just watched me. He was sitting there. But part of my job as a freight train conductor would be to inspect the train and be sure that all of the rolling equipment could still roll. There's no broken wheels, no things hanging up. A lot of times, air hoses would just come apart. LK: And that's the brakes. AK: When the air hose comes apart, the train stops. You know, that's what kills me about modern movies because you see air hoses come apart on trains and they're still going like Silver Streaks. You know that old movie? LK: That's from the 70s. They're too young, they don't know. AK: They're too young, yeah. But when an air hose comes apart, the train stops. That's all there is to it. So if you see a movie with air hoses coming apart, the train's still moving... LK: I don't know what it would look like to have an air hose come apart, but… AK: Well, they're just apart. LK: There's a lot of stuff that can't possibly be… We'll say, “There's no way that could be happening. That's not physically possible.” AK: It's impossible. But we would have to replace knuckles. Knuckles would break; you know what a knuckle is between cars? They're like this [shows what they look like with his hands] and you have an open knuckle that hits and locks. That's the coupling between the cars. It's called the knuckle because it looks like that. LK: But he didn't go to school to learn how to do any of these things. They didn't teach him when he became a conductor and on one of his very first trips, he had to replace one of these knuckles. They weigh like 70 pounds. AK: Ninety pounds. They're pretty hard. LK: And you have to hope there's one on the engine. 21 AK: You always wear a belt as a conductor because the pin lifter has to be held up to put the knuckle in. So you take your belt off and hook it around the pin lifter and tie the pin lifter up with your belt. Then you can pick up the knuckle, put it in, and usually, the pin will break. It's a metal rod about that long that fits in a hole and holds the knuckle in the coupler housing. Then you can let your belt off and let the pin lifter down. LK: Tell about the barbed wire fences. AK: I had a pair of clippers that, if I had air hoses that wouldn't stay together or something, I cut a wire off the farmer’s fence and wire up the air hoses. LK: They don't give you anything. LR: Oh, wow. AK: They'd give you very little training as a conductor, actually. LK: I'm going over to use part of their barbed wire fence with my little Leatherman tool and repair something. AK: But it's a good job. I didn't enjoy the management on the railroad, but the people I worked with were great. LK: He wouldn't hang the railroad calendar on our wall. Every year they mail one, and he throws it in the trash. He'd say, “What's that dastardly sound I hear?” when we'd be in bed if he'd ever was home at night. He would hear the train whistle, “That's the worst sound I've ever heard.” But now it's romantic to him. Now it's like, “Oh, the railroad.” AK: That's why I'm here today. I guess I just… LK: We live in Hurricane now. AK: We live down by St. George. LR: Okay, that's a nice drive. LK: Yeah. We came up for this this week. 22 AK: Do you have any other questions? LR: No. [To Charlesa] Do you have any? CB: I just have a couple about the terminology, about a couple of the words. Could you explain what a shanty is? AK: A shanty is a small building where the switchmen go to work. LK: No, they don't go to work there. They don't work in there. AK: Well, that's where they show up to work. LK: It's where they have their coffee break. AK: It's a building where they take their coffee breaks and lunch breaks. LK: It's like their break room, but it's a little shack by the tracks. It's not attached to anything. It's just like a little shed-type thing. AK: So, it's where they sign up to go to work and where they end to go to work. Back when I hired out, you'd have a stamp with your name on it with a number and an ink pad, and you would stamp the time slot and write a time in there. That's when you went to work, and then when you ended your shift, you'd sign. LK: Like a time clock kind of thing in there. AK: Yeah. We never had time clocks. You'd stamp it again, sign it that your shift is over. These time stamps were about like that, and then you did all that in the shanty, and the shanty was just a break room for the switchmen. LK: Just a little building. CB: Then I have one more. It might be a little self-explanatory, but what does it mean to get a date? Like, you were ‘dated?’ LR: That actually makes sense that she wouldn't understand, cause if you don't know what the… LK: Right. 23 AK: Everything on the railroad is run by seniority, so when you hire out with the railroad, you get a date. LK: Once you pass the test. AK: Like May 1, 1978 would be your start date as a switchman, and all of your seniority runs off of that date. LK: But to get a date you have to pay union dues, because the union is the one that controls that. So you don't have any choice but to pay union dues every month. LR: I didn't know that. LK: Yeah, cause that's all they do for you. AK: Select a date and the union protects that date. They verify it and all of that. If you have a seniority dispute with somebody—because 30 or 40 people throughout the whole railroad system could have your same date because they hired on with the railroad at the same time—you'd have to figure out who was first with that date. LK: That's what was really a bummer, because he hired out at the same time as three or four others right in Salt Lake, but he got put on like the fourth of the four of them. That matters a lot because he couldn't hold an afternoon job or a day job. AK: I came out of the tower, and so I had the last seniority of that date with the other people that had hired out. LK: They just laughed and laughed. “Oh, we got the day shift, and you get midnight because we have more seniority than you by two hours.” It puts you in a bad mood for 25 years. Just look at me. I mean, when do your kids get sick? AK: At night. LK: When do they throw up? LR: At night. It's true. LK: They don't come home for their day. It's like I'm the one that's there. AK: Anyway, everything runs off of that seniority date with the railroad. 24 LR: Well, thank you so much. This was interesting. I like it when I learn things and I actually learned a lot, so thank you for your time. AK: Thank you. 25