Switching

This post comes at you from eastern Montana!

Last Saturday, I made the LONG drive from Utah County to Glendive, MT.  It took 13 hours, and I covered 927 miles.  Along the way I made exactly three fuel/rest stops, in Idaho Falls, ID, Bozeman, MT, and Miles City, MT.  It was a very long drive, although shortened a bit by the ability to drive at relatively high speeds for most of it.  It started out in the snow, but that only lasted as far as Ogden, UT, which was fortunate.  I really did not want to drive in the snow if I did not have to.

On Sunday, I managed to find the ward here, the Glendive Ward, and get to church.  The church is located right next to the railroad tracks, so it is actually a pretty noisy place at times.  At least it does not shake whenever a train goes by!  The ward is well attended, but it also covers a huge area!

On Monday morning, I began my first day at work with the BNSF Railway.  Several of us met in a conference room on the second floor of the Glendive station building.  The class was supposed to have eight students, however one did not show up, which is a bit odd, because apparently he called our instructor and talked about coming, and he formally accepted the job last week.  But when Monday came around, he was missing in action.  Since then he has not called or emailed or made any contact.  At this point he has lost the job even if he does turn up somewhere.  We have covered so much stuff that catching up would be difficult.  We began class as normal, despite the absentee.  Monday was a lot of very general safety information.  We started reviewing the rule book, which is the size of a toddler, and going over safe practices around trains.  We learned about the "Eight Deadly."  They are eight things that pretty much guarantee a very serious injury or death of you do them.  We reviewed a lot of rules, and watched some short safety videos.  Most of the stuff we covered on Monday was pretty obvious, and it makes you wonder how stupid someone was to get such a rule in the book!

On Tuesday, the coldest day all week, we decided to go outside.  It warmed all the way up to -2.  We learned some basic operations such as setting hand brakes on cars and coupling air hoses for the brake system.  We also learned how to disassemble the couplers and replace the knuckles if they break.  We were probably only outside about an hour, but it doesn't take long to want to somewhere warm when it is that cold!  The rest of the day was spent indoors, with more rulebook stuff.  Wednesday was even more rule book stuff.

Photo from www.trainpix.com

On Thursday things worked out such that we could go outside and actually use a train.  Not only that, it was the warmest day all week!  The switch engine had a crew, and they had an hour to work with us in between their regular duties, so we all got to work around a moving train.  There were three freight cars we found laying around, which were not being used, so we decided to practice coupling the engines to them.  Of course, being conductor trainees, we were not be operating the locomotives, but rather spotting for the engineer.  We took turns using hand signals to instruct the engineer to pull away from the cars left on the siding, and then we would guide him back to make a joint, or coupling.  Once the coupling was made, we would give him a signal to indicate that we would be stepping between the locomotive and car to couple the air hoses.  Once that was done, it was the next person's turn to start the process over again.  We were also instructed to go to the cab of the locomotive, so we could see the hand signals from the engineer's perspective.  We had a pair of locomotives, and so the engineer was sitting well over 100 feet away from the coupling, in the far locomotive.  He was also facing away from the coupling, meaning  he was watching these hand signals in a small mirror outside his side window.  We felt like we were giving huge signals, but from the cab, they did not look quite so huge!  We all got to ride back and forth a couple times to get an idea of what he sees and how he reacts up at the head end during such an operation.  After about an hour, we all had a chance to do that, and so we headed back inside.  The locomotives and cars we were using wandered off with the switch crew, and we picked up where we had left off with rules and practices.

Today was a very short day, but it did involve more rules.  We spent a couple hours studying the rules for conducting different types of air brake tests on the trains.  Those rules and exceptions and really complex.  Not only do we have to know when to conduct such tests, we have to know how.  Typically it is the conductor who takes charge of such tests.  On Monday we have to be back at work, and we will be putting ourselves on a call board for trains.  Starting next week, we will be doing on the job training.  We will mark up with a crew and ride the trains with them to get an idea of what operations are like outside of the classroom.  We will have three weeks of on the job training before we return to the classroom again.  This job is a lot of fun, but I think it will be better in warm weather!

That locomotive above is one of the pair we were using yesterday.  I did not take the picture, but it is the actual locomotive that someone else spotted out there.