120 days- Answering the call to the Iron Range.
The magical
number to earn a vacation per our union contract was 120 days worked. I hired
out in mid-June and was placed on a non-rotating seniority based extra board. I
knew it would be tough to get the 120 days in before the end of the year.
Ed Gregg called from the crew office and said he had a job for me that
would be 5 weeks long. The catch? It was at the Grand Rapids depot! I could
have commuted back and forth as it was only 90 miles but that would have meant
being on the road by 5 am for the 7 am job. I decided that Lobo, my
malamute/Samoyed cross and I would do some camping. The rational was we could
always find a motel later. I packed my pup tent and other camping gear after I
phoned to find a campground only 6 miles from the depot and reserved a spot.
Lobo and I headed up Sunday afternoon so I could get the tent pitched and
settled in before nightfall.
The next day Lobo stayed at the campsite while I went to work. I was to
be the yard clerk. Small town depots didn’t have the number of employees as
Superior and I soon found the yard clerk’s job entailed much more than in
Superior. In addition to verifying trains as they rushed by, enroute to
Superior or west, I also was the industry clerk and needed to verify cars at
the Blandin Paper mill and other industries by writing a list on the cardstock
cards. Coming back to the office, I had to make sure the cars were reported
properly, were they spotted for unloading or were they ready to be pulled? The
Grand Rapids Local was a regular train out of Superior. The train crew would
take care of spotting cars for unloading and adding the cars that were released
from the industry to their train for further movement. Records at Grand Rapids
were kept on paper as there were no computers. It didn’t take long for me to learn
where the industries I needed to check were and I spent the next few weeks
enjoying the small-town life. My shift was over at 3 so I had the evenings at
the campground with Lobo and other campers. It was nice not to be on call. One
of my camping neighbors felt sorry for me in the tent during the rainstorms of
the first week and at the weekend when his family was packing up to return
home, offered me the use of their camper as they left it there for the summer.
I gratefully accepted.
At the end of the 5 weeks, I returned home and received another call
from Ed Gregg at the crew office. This time I was being sent to Hibbing MN
where I would be a demurrage clerk. Lobo and I were off on another adventure. I
found a motel that had kitchenette rooms just a couple of miles from the depot.
The BN did pay a per diem for expenses but anything I didn’t spend was a plus
for me. The Hibbing depot was actually
the old freight shed so was a fairly large building a couple blocks off of main
street. There wasn’t much foot traffic nearby so I asked the agent Howard
Linser if Lobo could spend his days tied to the dock. Granted conditional
permission (Lobo had to behave) I settled in at my job. I had no idea what a demurrage
clerk did or even what the concept of demurrage was. Fortunately, Brundo
Marinucci had worked the job before and was generous with his help in
explaining the job duties. One of the
ways a railroad makes money is to charge for the usage of the cars in addition
to charging for hauling freight. The receiving industry or consignee was
allowed a certain amount of time to unload a car once it was spotted. If it
took the company longer to unload and release it back to the railroad, the
industry was charged a daily fee or demurrage fee. There were no computers at
the Hibbing depot so all the records were kept on paper. The demurrage sheets
were on a large tablet with the pages about 11 x 17 inches. Each industry had
their own pages for the month. On the page
I needed to record the car number, contents, date and time spotted, date and
time released. The page was set up as a spreadsheet with a column for each day
of the month so the time would just need to be filed in. Once the car was
released back to the railroad I needed to look at the dates to see if it was
released within the allotted time. If not, I would charge the demurrage rate
for any additional dates and put the total in the far-right column. At the end
of the month, I needed to total up that far right column and send the industry
a bill.
Many of the smaller
industries would call to release the cars back to us but every morning it was
my job to take a walk to Hibbing Public Utilities and check to see which coal
cars were emptied. A more experienced person probably could have been sure just
by the location where they were spotted, or even by looking at the springs of
the car to see if they were compressed. Giving them a bang on the side of the
car was also a good clue as was climbing up the side of the cars and peering
inside. Not wanting to be on a car in case it was going to move and ever
mindful of my safety, I chose to climb a tall stairway overlooking the cars so
I could see inside several at the same time. This worked well and I was able to
bring back the information to my demurrage sheets and also to the agent who was
in charge of a crew that would do the switching later in the day.
I quickly settled into
the routine of being a demurrage clerk at Hibbing, enjoying the job and my
coworkers. Evenings were spent exploring the town on bicycle with Lobo at my
side. All too soon, Wesley Ranta’s 5 week vacation was over and I was released
back to the Superior Crew office and on call again. A few weeks later I
answered the call to find my way back up to Hibbing, this time covering
Brundo’s job as yard clerk. I didn’t spend much time in the office as I needed
to verify the coal trains in and out of Hibbing. As the coal cars were pulled
from the industry a train was made up on the tracks a few miles from downtown.
Coal cars also went to the public utilities plant in Virginia but as we didn’t
have direct tracks there we gave the cars to the DMIR railroad to haul to the
final destination. We called this process of turning cars over to another
railroad Interchange. I was sent out to
the tracks to verify the cars going to Virginia and to verify the cars the DMIR
had left us during that interchange. I got to the tracks and of course they
were empty. I drove to the other end of the tracks, thinking that was where
they were but to no avail. I looked but could find nothing that resembled a
coal train, much less two trains. I was forced to go back to the office and
tell Howard I had lost two coal trains! Embarrassing!! Howard chuckled at me
and told me not to worry, (Whew!) what had probably happened was the DMIR had
come to pick up the cars we had left for them and our crew had already picked
up the cars the DMIR had left during the interchange. A few phone calls and I
was able to get the needed times.
I settled in to
the small town life of a railroad clerk, using my spare time to explore the
area and the history. My coworkers were great and I have many fond memories of
my times on Iron Range. Of course, best
of all was that I had fulfilled my 120 days and I would be getting paid
vacation time for the following year.
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