The West Pool
My first call was a Sunday night . My first week was to be spent working the West Pool , working from Trinidad to Pueblo . I was assigned to J.S. ,a conductor who had 30 years on the railroad . Jimmy ,the engineer ,likewise has a 1971 seniority date . We were billeted in a new La Quinta Inn ,on Pueblo's north side ,with a choice of restaurants ,a mall and even a movie theater complex nearby.
The business was 90 % Powder River coal ,being trammed down by the trainload to huge power plants in Texas . The Powder River Division ran from the mines in Northeast Wyoming to Houston , incorporating the old Fort Worth and Denver ,Coloroado and Southern ,and western end of the old CB&Q. It is one of the most profitable divisions of the BNSF system . The power was mostly SD70 MACs and occaisonally GE dash 9s . These cabs were relatively quiet and comfortable .
Westbounds were empties ,and the 84 miles between Trinidad and Pueblo could be covered in only 3 1/2 to 4 hours . Even a night call was easy to handle . Eastbounds were ,loads, of course ,and it was upgrade from Pueblo to Walsenburg ,and 15 mph all the way .The BNSF was currently on an energy-saving campaign ,so trains tended to be underpowered . It was doubletrack and "dark territory"(running on track warrants only) to Walsenburg. The West Main belonged to the UP .There was a lot of talk that the UP wanted to sell it to the BNSF.The Alamosa line was part of the deal .
JS was a great conductor ,and good guy , tall and easy-going . He picked up right away that I knew my way around railroad equipment and let me do switching and other hands-on stuff .He trained me how to "punch out" at the end of the run ,which involved filling out 12 pages on the computer . He saw that I was intimidated by the amount of paperwork ,and detail to the conductor's job ,but gave me a lot of confidence ,telling me "You'll get it ,John !" .JS owned a ranch about 50 miles from Trinidad , and made the commute .I figured out later that his family had been in the area since the 1860s ,but JS was not the kind of man to boast about that . JS was one of the few railroaders I met who was still married to his first wife . Jimmy the engineer was on his third wife .He looked like a hipster ,with long black hair , black clothes , ear ring and thin build . Like most of the men worked with ,Jimmy was very smart and was interested in the fact that I had been somewhat successful as an artist(his wife was an artist) .He was very contientous engineer .
My impression of the railroaders I met was very positive .A good many of them were my age or a little older. Most had been railroading for three decades . Many had transferred from Denver, and some had come from other parts of the BN system .They took the job very seriously .They bitched about the railroad (as all railroaders do), but what they bitched about was interesting . Uniformly ,they felt the job got worse with every merger . More rules ,more technology to deal with , smaller crews and changed work rules had taken much of the interest out of the job . Nearly all said the job was no fun anymore ,but I accounted that to middle-age .They seemed only mildly interested in me working on the Narrow Gauge , but I didn't make a big deal about that anyway .
One morning at Ludlow I had to throw aswitch into the siding at Ludlow .It was a matter of opening a box and pressing a button! JS described as "poor man's CTC" . The line from Walsenburg to Trinidad was honeycombed with abandoned grades to the many mines along the way .This included some parallel D&RGW lines the had long since been pulled up . On my time off I would explore some of these "ghost railroads" but that could fill another installment . After working a week with a great conductor on a great run ,it was time to switch over to the East Pool ,and work to Texline ,on the most obscure of Colorado's main lines.
