Track Maintenance

After enlistment in June of 1962, I rode the train from my western Massachusetts home town down to Grand Central Station in New York, where I got a bus to Fort Dix for basic training. Three years later upon returning from a two-year post in Germany, I asked for a ticket home only to get a strange look. "Son, that line no longer has passenger service," he said. So my father and wife had to pick me up in Hudson, New York, about 45 minutes west of home.
Our retirement cottage in the next town south is about two houses away from that old line, now serving only a freight train consisting of two diesel electric locomotives and about 25 cars headed north in the morning and returning in the evening. We and our grandkids enjoy watching it go by with its diverse freight cars and friendly engineers.
For a week or so a work crew has been cleaning up and reshaping the road bed in our area, this morning at our road crossing, so I took my camera to take a photo or two of the operation for the grand boys.
The efficient cleanup was run by three men, an engineer, supervisor, and excavator operator, who expertly groomed the sides as he dumped excess dirt and saplings into a side-dumping car attached to the 1,300-horsepower 1953 locomotive. After introducing myself and chatting with the super and engineer for a bit, I was invited for a ride up the tracks to their dumping site, a swale between the roadbed and an abandoned adjacent trolley roadbed perhaps a mile north.
I was surprised by the simplicity of the cab, which held two seats, one for the engineer beside just four levers: an engine throttle, forward and reverse lever, locomotive brake lever, and train brake lever for any attached cars. The engineer simply put the shift lever into forward and nudged the throttle a bit, and without apparent effort the engine and dump car soon were up to 25 miles an hour and sounding the horn before crossing the next roadway.
At our dumping site, the engineer eased the throttle and applied the brake so that the huge locomotive and car stopped precisely past the previous dump. He then sent air back to the dump car, which dropped its long side and tipped up, dumping the dirt into the swale. He next reversed the process and we quickly were back beside the waiting excavator.
When almost a half century ago I last rode south on that line into the rest of my life, I had no reason to think that today I would be invited to ride with a work crew improving the same roadbed near our cottage. Retirement has its charms.