I Used to be a Gandy Dancer Bill Scheller

and held in a sling at the other, so we could make the turns,” he recalls.

Odd cargos, and odd sections of track: A couple of miles west of Ludlow, Rod announced that “this is the only railroad in the country that goes through a ski area.” Sure enough, we were soon passing an Okemo chairlift, and ducking under an overpass that carries a ski trail.

‘Hamburger Hill’

Just before we reached the Summit, we saw a doe and fawn browsing alongside the rails. “Moose, bear, turkeys, coyotes – we see a lot of wildlife,” says Rod. The deer kept a safe distance, but many animals aren’t so cautious. Cattle sometimes come to a bad end when they wander through broken fencing. Modern locomotives don’t have cowcatchers – and even if they did, they would be a cow’s last catch. There’s a stretch of track north of Rutland that railroaders call “Hamburger Hill.”

Wildlife and livestock aren’t a train crew’s most nerve-wracking encounters. Just as bad are people who think they can share the track. Rod recalls an ATV rider heading towards him, and, another time, a Jeep – “the guy was either on something he shouldn’t have been on, or not on something he should have.” Fortunately, the freight’s slow speed and a good line of sight ahead kept things from playing out badly.

It can be a different story running wide open on a Class 1 main line, where speed limits are a lot higher. “When you’re going 60, things can happen fast,” says Rick Wool, a veteran of CSX and its 21,000 miles of track. “One thing I always worried about was going through an ungated crossing just before another train heading in the opposite direction. Drivers would see me go by, and then think the coast was clear.”

“You wouldn’t believe how many people try to run a crossing,” says Rod. I told him about my own experience with a duel between car and train – a duel that the train always wins. I was riding on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, clocking 60 or 70 through rural Ohio, when the train inexplicably slowed to a halt. Passengers asked the conductor why, and he gave the grim answer: a teenage driver had tried to beat the Lake Shoreto a crossing. The two halves of his car ended up 100 feet apart. He and his two passengers were dead. A train that size, going that speed, takes a mile to stop.

We won the fight with the greasy leaves and topped out at a place called the Summit, in the town of Mt. Holly. This is the height of land on the route. From here, our progress required Rod’s fine touch on the brakes rather than the throttle. “Train handling,” he told me, “is all in the brakes –and knowing your terrain.”

“The leaves are bad enough,” Rod maintains, “but some of the diciest situations involve winter weather. Years ago I was working this route as conductor. It was snowing, and the brakes weren’t grabbing on the way down from the Summit into Bellows Falls. When you get deep, fluffy snow blowing around the wheels and brake shoes, they cool down and you lose braking ability. The speedometer showed us doing 28, in a 10 mile-an-hour zone. Snow was blowing all around us, and we couldn’t see. I knew we’d be OK, though, when we stopped picking up speed. When we hit flat track, the brakes caught and we started to slow.”

On this run, the leaf mash on the tracks didn’t get us into anywhere near as bad a situation. East Wallingford, Shrewsbury, and Clarendon slipped by, and dusk had turned to darkness as we slid into the Rutland yards. Two-thirty a.m. is a beastly time for a wakeup call, but the northbound RDBD, the freight run to Burlington, was leaving at four.

I climbed into the warm cab of another GP38-2, one of a pair heading 53 cars – 29 filled with fuel, livestock feed, and plywood, and 24 empties. Engineer Aaron Hahn drew back the throttle and we started off in a light

rain, passing the sleeping Amtrak Ethan Allen as we inched out of the Rutland yards. Rob Silva, our conductor, was at his flipdown desk, doing paperwork by the light on his hard hat. Rob was a 19-year VTR veteran; Aaron had just passed 20 years of service – “this is one of those jobs where once you do it, you don’t want to do anything else,” he says. Aaron does do something else, when he isn’t at the throttle. He plays guitar and sings in a country duet called Two Bit Cowboys. One of their albums is mostly train songs.

An owl coasted low above the track ahead, seeming to pilot us as we left Rutland. We picked up speed through Proctor, and at Florence, we stopped so Rob could throw a switch, letting us back in to drop off 16 of our empties at the OMYA plant. OMYA, the railroad’s biggest shipper, produces calcium carbonate from Vermont marble. An average of 30 to 35 rail cars a day enter and leave its Proctor plant.

I asked Aaron where all that calcium carbonate goes. He answered that it “goes everywhere” – as a calcium additive in baked goods, in polishes, and, as a slurry, for coating glossy magazine stock.

As we sliced through a meadow north of Brandon, Rob shared a deer season memory that could only be a railroader’s. “Here’s where I shot a big buck, years ago,” he told me. “I got him from the locomotive, and that’s how we brought him in. They don’t let you do that anymore.”

Clearing Middlebury, we were on a welded section of track where we could run at 30 mph. We even hit 40, zipping through farmland near the border of Chittenden and Addison counties. We slowed as we slipped behind the Shelburne Museum, tracked through suburban South Burlington, and slid alongside Burlington’s bike path on the approach to the yards. The northbound RDBD had finished its run.

Monstrous repair shop

As Aaron and Rob decoupled a car, I walked over to the locomotive repair shop. Imagine a garage that makes your car mechanic’s place look like something out of Legoland: here are 35-ton jacks, four of which – one at each corner of a locomotive –can lift body, cab, engine, and generator off the trucks, so workers can replace wheels, and service brakes and electric motors. I saw pistons the size of wastebaskets, wheels over a yard in diameter, brake shoes and connecting rods of mammoth proportions. A young welder named Ethan Lawrence showed me around, explaining that engines are rebuilt after burning through a million gallons of fuel (that’s nearly 600 fill-ups, at 1,700 gallons to the tank).

The shop is a world of iron and oil and monstrous tools, the farthest thing imaginable from e-this and i-that, yet just as important to the way things work. I left Ethan standing alongside one of his locomotives, like a proud stableman with a big coach horse. Smiling, he left me with a remark that explains why this hard, heavy, vital world keeps working. “Every day,” he said, “is a good day on the railroad.”

Just north of Brandon on that Rutland to Burlington run, we lumbered along a section of track that I knew well, because I had helped put it there more than forty years earlier. Working on the railroad wasn't the kind of thing you'd do, in the words of the old song, "just to pass the time away." I did it for a little under three bucks an hour.

I Used To Be A Gandy Dancer

It’s more a matter of the body simply knowing what to do . . .

As we hit a stretch of track near the town of Brandon, I recalled my brief career as a gandy dancer. No. I wasn’t part of a Chippendales-style dance group. A gandy dancer is a member of a track repair crew on a railroad. If the term has an archaic ring, there’s a good reason – gandy dancers are extinct, their muscle power having been replaced by machinery. But on the Vermont Railway and other small roads, fifty years ago, they were still indispensable to keeping the tracks in shape and the trains running safely.

There’s no sure answer as to where the term came from. The “dancer” part probably has something to do with the rhythmic motions of the men who levered the rails into their 4’ 8 ½” parallel position -not part of my job -- but "gandy" could have originated with anything from Gaelic slang to a Gandy Tool Company, of which no one can find any historical evidence.

In the fall of 1971, newly married and freshly located in a tiny Vermont town, I needed a job to tide me through till I could qualify for the resident grad school tuition rate at the state university. Our landlady’s father, who lived next door, solved the problem. He worked for the railroad and got me a job on a track crew. Just like that, I was a gandy dancer – and I worked the same