I've Been Working On The Railroad Part 10

17^th St Yard office

At 17^th St.  adjacent to the stairs to the Yardmaster’s tower was a large room where the manifest desks sat. They were enclosed somewhat by a counter. Also in that room was the Superintendent’s secretary with her desk just outside the supe’s door. You needed to be a Stenographer for that job so it wasn’t often that her vacations got filled.  Restrooms were to the side, with the men’s being larger of course. Ladies was just a small one stall room.  Across from the ladies room was the door to the north room where the Chief clerk, rack clerks, keypunch operators and all their equipment was housed. At the far end of the north room was a pass through window that the Carmen could put their reports.. Their offices were in the next room although they didn’t spend much time there. On the other side of the building, was the traincrew and switchcrew locker and lunch room which was quite large. Also on the south side of the building was a East west oriented room that housed 4 desks. My memory fails me as I only worked in that room once but two of the jobs were the Bill Clerk and the Demurrage Clerk.  And of course the Tower was the Yardmaster’s domain where the windows allowed him to oversee what his crews were doing.

The whole building looked like it hadn’t been painted in years, the walls covered with memos and job instructions. Early on the atmosphere was always blue with smoke because everyone smoked then so second hand smoke made me sick and many nights left work with a pounding headache. There were a couple of cigar smokers as well. I tried to combat that with incense and of course was shut down.  I was so happy when they passed the workplace clean air act and made sure the superintendent knew about it as soon as it was passed. It did clean up the air a little but took a long time and never did get the smoking out of the crew vans completely which again just added to my headaches.

17th St Yard Office 1983 Photo by Jeff Lemke