What Does a Railroader Do During Furlough?

Every so often someone asks what I do for work. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, this has been a tricky question! In my mind, I am still a railroader, but the reality is that I have not had anything to do with moving a train in over two years now. So, what does a railroader do with a furlough?

The answer to that question would be different for everyone. Initially, I was subject to seasonal furlough as business dried up at the end of 2019. This was expected and anticipated. My plan, as it is every year for seasonal furlough, was to enjoy the time off. Think about it, how many other places can you take four months off every year? I set aside money while I was working to cover my expenses while furloughed. Then I planned some activities to use up some of that free time. I booked a trip to Europe, planned to spend some time with my parents, and planned on spending the bulk of the time in the Lower 48 visiting friends around the west.

When my furlough started, I figured I would be back to work in March or April 2020. I started off furlough by working on a few projects around the house. None of them were major, but things that needed to be done. I got rid of the old, worn-out laundry machines at the fourplex and installed newer, more efficient machines. There were a few other small projects, but it was all easily accomplished pretty quickly, even just working on it a few hours per day.

When I was not working on the house, I caught up with some friends in Anchorage, whom I had not seen all summer, while in Skagway. Towards the end of the summer, I had also started dating L, and we made plans to get together a couple of times. My plan was to enjoy the time off, travel a bit, visit friends, spend time with L, then go back to work in the spring, and I started on that plan anyway.

In December 2019, I went to Idaho to live with a friend for a few months, and to put me a bit closer to L. She was living in northern Utah, just a couple of hours away. That may seem like a long way to drive just to see her, a couple of hours each way every time, but compared to the time it took to get there from Alaska, it was pretty quick! I made that drive a couple of times per week. In just a couple of months I managed to put 10,000 miles on my car, just driving back and forth between eastern Idaho and northern Utah!

As we all know, the world started to change at the beginning of 2020. Still believing a regular summer season was only a two-week quarantine away from being reality, I continued with all my planned furlough activities. L met my parents, then I took my mother and grandmother to Germany, where they are from. That was a wonderful trip, and despite COVID-19's increasing threat on the world, we saw little to remind us of what was happening. Why didn't I also take L? I planned the trip before she and I started spending time together, and while I later invited her, she felt it would be awkward to spend time in Germany with my family, whom she had only met a few days earlier.

In the few short weeks I was there, everything seemed to change. Being on vacation and just enjoying a part of the world that was new to me, I paid absolutely no attention to news or current events. So I was quite bewildered about the extensive questioning at US Customs about whether I had been in Italy and whether I had been ill at all during my trip. As I got caught up on the news after returning home, it became apparent that it would take more than a two-week quarantine to return to normal.

Shortly after returning from Europe, L and I got married. It was not the wedding we had been planning or hoping for, COVID-19 made sure of that, but we still felt like it was important to do, even if it did not turn out at all how we originally envisioned.

Around that time, the railroad extended the furlough, through late June. There was hope that a partial summer season may still happen, if things turned around soon with respect to COVID-19. I decided I had better look for another job, just in case. Ultimately that took us back to Alaska, where I took a position as the manager of a lighting store. My experience was neither in management nor in lighting, but I accepted it as a new challenge, and figured it would be temporary anyway, just until the 2021 season on the railroad. As it turned out, the 2021 season was not to be either, and so it has been a blessing to have a job I can stay at indefinitely until the railroad calls.

In early 2022, the railroad did finally call, and it seems that this is the year I get to go back! Furloughs are all different, and as I have learned recently, they do not always go according to plan. I am looking forward to more seasonal furloughs in the future and fewer prolonged ones. I intend to make a habit of filling furloughs with visits to family and travel overseas again, as I have in the past. L is also interested in doing that, and we are hoping to go to Europe together next winter.

Bucket List: Around the World

Sometimes I think there is a very fine line between a bucket list item and a completely crazy idea. Which side of that line something falls on is largely the determination of the beholder. What are bucket list items to me may seem like crazy ideas to someone else. With that in mind, here are a couple of my bucket list items.

Many people are familiar with the Jules Verne novel, "Around the World in Eighty Days." There was even a (lengthy) movie made of the book several years back. In case you are not familiar, the title of the book fairly concisely summarizes the plot. The main character, Phineas Fogg, believes that one can travel all the way around the world in eighty days or less. He proposes this belief to his peers at a wealthy men's social club in London, and most of the members consider such an undertaking to be ridiculous. Eventually a wager is placed, and to claim the prize, Phineas Fogg must travel around the world and return to that club within eighty days.

When Jules Verne wrote "Around the World in Eighty Days," in the 19th century, such a journey was not impossible, but was certainly a major undertaking. Today, with jet transportation, such a journey could easily be accomplished in far less than eighty days. But the question is, just how much less? I think, with a lot of advance planning and a bit of luck, one could travel around the world on commercial flights in just eighty hours. Now, to make it just a bit more challenging, such a trip should stop in the same major cities as Phineas Fogg did on his journey. His trip started in London, stopped in Cairo, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco, and New York, before ending back in London. Coordinating the flight schedules to make that possible in eighty hours or less would be the challenge, and then it would take a bit of luck not to miss any connections along the way.

Now, I do not live anywhere near London, and Alaska is nowhere on that route, so it is not the greatest starting point. But getting from Anchorage to San Francisco is relatively easy, and the circumnavigation could begin and end there. From San Francisco, there are numerous direct flights to New York everyday. There are numerous flights from New York to London everyday as well, and there are several per day from London to Cairo. So far so good. But getting from Cairo to Mumbai is a bit trickier. There is only one direct flight each day. From there to Hong Kong is not great either, but there are a few more options. Hong Kong is pretty well connected with Tokyo, and Tokyo with San Francisco. Despite having several daily options on each leg, they are not really designed to connect with each other in the way that would be needed for a quick trip around the world! There are direct flights available for every leg of the trip, but the trick would be to find the overall fastest, even if it meant a stop instead of direct flights. Individual legs might be slower to allow for a faster trip time, and that is where planning all this gets really complex in a hurry!

Because of the complexity of planning all of this, I think the best way to do it would be as a promotional trip for a major airline. Airlines have buildings full of people who specialize in scheduling, and to have the ability to use their expertise would make the planning process an order of magnitude easier! That said, with or without the assistance of an airline, I would like to take a shot at such a trip! Sure, it is not the best way to really see the world, but that is not the point of such a trip either.

On a related note, I would like to take a more leisurely trip around the world, but in a small airplane. And that trip could start and end in Alaska more easily. The Federation Aeronautique Internationale has specific guidelines for what constitutes a circumnavigation of the world. For an eastbound trip, requirements include crossing all meridians, a course distance of 27,000km or more, and the trip must be completed within one year. Many people have crossed oceans in small planes, but not many have flown all the way around the world. I intend to do so.

Of course, in a small plane one does not simply set out across the ocean the same way the airlines do. Most small planes will either require modification to extend their range significantly beyond their normal maximum, and even with that, most small planes will require fuel at least a couple of times while crossing the ocean. That is where things get tricky. Crossing the Pacific is easier than the Atlantic, even though it is bigger, because there are islands scattered all over the Pacific. In the Norther Hemisphere, the Aleutian Islands make crossing the Pacific relatively simple. The islands have airports all over them, most dating from World War II. The Atlantic is a different story however. There is not a long chain of islands stretching most of the way across the ocean. The most practical place to cross is from Canada to Scotland, with stops in Greenland and Iceland. Even on that route, there are long legs with nothing but ocean for hours. Because of the lengthy water crossings, there are more logistics that go into planning and preparing for a trip like that. More survival gear is required, and it has to be rated for some cold temperatures no matter what time of year the trip happens. Of course, all that gear adds weight to the plane, weight which cuts into the useful load of the plane. That useful load is a limited amount of weight the plane can carry, which includes people, gear, and fuel. It is important to plan so that people, gear, and fuel can be balanced in such a way as to make the trip possible! Crossing an ocean requires a lot of fuel, which also weighs a lot!

Those are my two bucket list items, which to most seem crazy. I have told a few people about them, and usually get similar responses from everyone. To the idea of flying around the world in eighty hours, most people lament the fact that it is not enough time to see the world. Most people do not understand that the point is not to see the world, but rather circumnavigate it. To the idea of flying a small plane around the world, most people have almost nothing to say! The usual response is usually something like, "oh, that's cool." I can always tell that people just have no idea how to respond to something like that, because it is so unattainable to most people that it has never even crossed their mind as something that is within the realm of possibility. I might as well be telling people I want to walk on the moon!