29 Quirks of the Railroad

And L- LA to San Diego is kind of a rollercoaster.

You're going up and you're going down in short bits and everything.

And, uh, two of the places that are really rough to stop with a heavy passenger train, I mean, that's the big, heavy paying s- 12, 14, 16 passenger cars, and, uh, and to spot those at the depots and everything just right, Pasadena and Pomona on the second district of the Santa Fe are, were particularly hard no matter which way you were going.

And those were the two stops, naturally, between San Bernardino and Pasadena.

Another thing we have to realize, that at most of the time until Amtrak came along, we did have, did not have radio communication with each other, or certainly not with the dispatchers and stuff.

That was all handled by operators and stuff along.

So y- uh, you don't have any radios in these situations to try to make it any easier in most of them here.

One of the things that we had to put up with, I was a fireman during a lot of this period, and, um, we had an old engineer, well, I called him Old Henry.

Henry was a pain in the butt to work with.

He thought or was trying to bu- promote that he was one of the best engineers we had on passenger service.

He had a lot of seniority, and he didn't, he, he didn't rough 'em up bad, but he was not a good engineer, and he complained about everybody else and everything that was happening.

And when you're firing for him, uh, going out to Barstow, and then he was already complaining when we left Barstow 'cause it coming back the next day.

So I was working with him one night, one morning, leaving at f- 05:00 in the morning.

That set me back right there.

He complained all the way into San Bernardino from Barstow that morning, and we started down the second district, and we had two stops, Pomona and Pasadena.

We left s- San Bernardino, and we were a little late, so he's gonna show me really how to do this job now.

Now, the speed limit at the time was, uh, well, sometimes back at that period, the basic speed limit be- f- from San Bernardino to Santa Anita Racetrack was 100 miles an hour.

And then they dropped it to 90, and later years, the LA County put a 65 mile an hour limit on any kind of trains anywhere in Los Angeles County, which really kind of aggravated the Santa Fe 'cause they'd been a high wheeler ever since, uh, 1905 when they ran a record to Chicago from, uh, Los An- Angeles with the Death Valley Scotty special train.

But we don't want to go to that.

So anyway, leaving San Bernardino, we were a little late, and he was huffing and puffing, and as you go down the second district at a speed limit like that, one of the things that they learned is the f- point of no return if you expect to stop your [laughs] passenger train at Pomona is that you go by Claremont Tower, which is just a little east of Pomona, n- not exceeding mi- 90 miles an hour, and then you set a big gob of air to get that train under control, or you're gonna maybe not make it s- that stop at there.

So Old Henry went charging in, and he's went right by at 90 miles an hour s- reducing the throttle and everything like that, but he didn't set any air And he had, this was not a new run for him, but I think he was preoccupied with telling me how good he was because I had never been his fireman before.

Well, he made, went charging in to make a grandstand stop and show me how good he was, and we went by the depot at 50 miles an hour and finally got the thing stopped.

A n-nice stop, he didn't ruffle the people up, but he was about four train lengths past the depot, and we were kinda looking down the track at the next station [laughs] which is not very far away.

And so Henry looked over and he says, "Well, is anybody over there giving a hand sign to back up?" And I said, "I don't know.

Nobody's out in the field far enough to get a, [laughs] get a signal that I could see," 'cause there was a curve there.