Re: “Son, It was your idea to be a railroader…” (the inside the cab story of #168’s incident)

The ending:

We were now stuck in the Narrows around milepost 341 with the dinner train somewhere behind us. Jeff tried raising dispatch in Chama and found we were in a radio dead spot. Dylan set out a lantern behind us to warn the approaching train and Jeff walked around until he finally managed to contact Dispatch to have them hold the dinner train at Lobato. Dylan then managed to use his cell phone to call Stathi who told him the eccentric strap that had failed was for the reverse motion and then instructed him over the phone how to remove the eccentric rod by pulling two cotter keys and then knocking out two pins.

While Dylan was halfway under the locomotive removing the eccentric rod, I decided to see if I could find the strap and began walking back behind the locomotive and looking along the ROW for it. I found the eccentric strap about 150 feet behind us just on the edge of the ties. One of the studs was bent into a “U” shape while the other looked like the nuts had been stripped off of it. One of the nuts was located just a few feet from it. Luckily the strap had not tumbled off the grade into the brush and even more luckily it hadn’t come off while crossing Lobato trestle. Dylan (a young man with a good railroad future ahead of him!) managed to manhandle both the strap and the eccentric rod on to the back of #168’s tender and after a 45 minute delay we once again set of for Chama. We finally arrived in the yard where the shop crew lined the locomotive directly into the shop. It was now 2:30 am Sunday morning.

At 2:34 am Jeff and I left Chama for the 2 hour drive over La Manga Pass to his house in Taos. We managed to dodge all of the 50 plus elk on or near the highway (not seeing a single other car) and arrived at Jeff’s house at 4:33 am. After a quick shower I was lights out and sound asleep at 5 am and didn’t wake up until 10 am. As Jeff did not have the required 10 hours of rest, he was taken off the schedule for the following day (we ended up having to go back to Chama as Jeff had accidentally left important items in the trunk of his Maverick). Chris DeWitt helped Stathi put the #168 back together so it was ready to pull the overnight train 18 hours later on Sunday night.

It was the kind of day where your dad would have said: “Son, it was your idea to be a railroader…”

Now you have a small idea of what it takes to be a railroader…