AMARILLO, Texas — As restless children across Amarillo lie stuck in their beds in the dark, locomotives shrieking in the distance and train cars bumping in railyards capture some of those young imaginations and tempt them into dreamful sleep with the thought that somewhere beyond the window, action still goes on, the Amarillo Globe-News reported.
Trainmaster Shawn Moore and assistant trainmaster Brandon Massey ride a narrow elevator up the watchtower overlooking Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway’s south yard, where they will spend the night mixing and matching train cars before sending the completed chains on to destinations across the country.
The 26-track yard runs under Interstate 40 at the interchange. About 85 trains come through each day, many of them at night, said Bob Gomez, terminal superintendent.
“The thing about the railroad is it’s 24/7,” said Moore, who works the 6 p.m.-6 a.m. shift. “There’s no such thing as weekend or holidays. Nights are the same thing as days. We walk around here like vampires.”
Moore’s and Massey’s jobs are to monitor the trains coming in and direct crews to check for mechanical problems, separate the cars and reconnect them.
A normal train might carry 10,000 tons, have 110 cars and be 7,000 feet long, or 1 miles, they said. Just because the cars come in on one train doesn’t mean they go out together.
A single train coming in from Waynoka, Okla., for instance, may have cars that go to Lubbock; Clovis, N.M.; Enid, Okla.; Barstow, Calif.; Temple; Galesburg, Ill.; and Provo, Utah. They carry coal, lumber, acid, pumice, fertilizer, gas, grains, cement, shelf products, automobiles, auto parts, military equipment, beer — “anything you can put in a box,” Massey said.
Computer screens in the tower display diagrams that show which tracks have trains on them and where each train’s cars are headed.
The crews move a group of same-destination cars to a small track until they fill it up. Then they move the chain to longer and longer tracks as they add more cars, until they have built up a full-length train.
Sometimes loose, 130-ton cars roll around on a track until they ram into each other and lock up.
“Being in the way of one is very unforgiving,” Moore said.
In addition to directing crews on the ground, Moore and Massey constantly communicate with dispatchers in Fort Worth and Topeka, Kan., through telephone and radio.
Forty to 50 rings an hour is common, Moore said.
“It’s never quiet,” Massey said. “Even when it’s quiet, I’m preparing for an onslaught of trains that’ll be here about 3 a.m. Sometimes I get a minute to regroup.”
When he gets a chance, he escapes to the catwalk for a quick smoke.
“It’s almost like vacuuming,” he said, looking out at the yard in the quiet air. “You start something and try to finish it. We’re all real driven. We all have a common goal and fight like hell to do it.”
Meanwhile, street cleaners see a darker side of the city.
Driving his street sweeping routes at night, Ralph Amparano sees beer bottles on medians, left there by drivers waiting at traffic lights.
The other day he passed a woman hitting her son similiar to the woman in the recent parking lot video.
“You have to be on your guard all the time. You can’t let up at night,” said Amparano, who has swept Amarillo’s streets for eight years.
“Around the bars, people are out messing around,” Amparano said. “If one happens to fall in my path … sometimes they get up pretty close, and I have to stop and turn the brooms off.”
Amparano and two other Street Department employees work the 4:30 p.m.-3 a.m. shift four nights a week. Up and down Sixth Avenue, Northeast 24th Avenue, Western Street, Grand Street, Plains Boulevard, Soncy Road, all the residential streets, downtown, along the interstates — they do them all.
Averaging between 30 and 40 miles a night, the sweepers pick up 90 percent of the dust and debris they go over, and the drivers empty them in a dump three or four times during a shift, said Storm Wardwell, street program coordinator.
When Amparano empties his, he sees peculiar items such as syringes and CO-2 cartridges from paintball guns mixed in with the usual trash and aluminum cans, he said.
It takes patience to drive a street sweeper because “to sweep good, you sweep slow,” he said.
But other drivers don’t seem to like his 5- or 6-mph pace.
“Some people are always rude to sweepers,” Amparano said.
“They’re always in a hurry. They’ve got their middle finger out to you if you cut them off or if there’s too much dust.”