(The following article by Bill Sontag appeared at SWTexasLive.com on July 5.)
DEL RIO, Texas — One of the most sprawling, coast-to-coast, border-to-border bureaucracies is America’s complex, fiercely competitive railroad industry. Intense competition has been the hallmark of rail history, but trainmen here reflect on their careers as satisfying adventures within a big, extended family.
Rail routes appear as zigzag corridors, like silly string spewn on maps of the United States, giving hints of where railroads have made or broken thousands of towns and cities. The cross-country “iron horse” tradition went full-throttle after a golden spike was driven through an iron rail, May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah. This pivotal event in American history united the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad for the country’s first transcontinental ribbons of rail, connecting Sacramento, Calif. to Omaha, Neb., in the same year that Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated as president of the United States, still troubled with “reconstruction” following the Civil War.
Then, magnates in 19th century corporate offices and lavishly appointed executive rail cars decided where, when and how the country would be stitched together by the lucrative commerce of shipping and transportation. But these “princes of business” – or “robber barons,” depending on your slant on history – depended wholly on tough, skilled brakemen, conductors, switchmen, firemen and locomotive engineers who focused on the demanding, sometimes dangerous tasks at hand.
The Union Pacific that began the cross country race to complete the Transcontinental Railroad is the same Union Pacific, with headquarters then and now in Omaha, Neb., that has dominated the rails through Del Rio for ten years. Before that, freighters and passengers – until Amtrak, the National Rail Passenger Service began service in the 1970s – were served here by the now-extinct Southern Pacific Railroad. Many UP employees in Del Rio began their careers with SP, and still harbor fond memories of the good old days.
“But railroad work is not good for families. It’s a hard deal,” asserted Joey Gonzalez, Val Verde County justice of the peace, June 15. Judge Gonzalez won his Precinct 2, Place 1 seat in 2003, only a few months after his retirement from a 35-year career over the rails of the Southern Pacific Railroad and its successor, the Union Pacific Railroad. The UP bought out the SP in 1996, provoking anxiety among trainmen, uneasy about being caught in the transition.
“The SP saw us as family. The superintendent would come out from San Antonio and make us feel that way, but the UP just treated us like, ‘If it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t have a job,’” one retired brakeman told LIVE! asking to not be identified.
Competitive to the end, SP loyalists horded collections of memorabilia, photographs, posters, uniforms, commemorative magazines, and souvenirs of dizzying variety. Gonzalez “hired on” with Southern Pacific Railroad, May 6, 1969, three months after the inauguration of President Richard M. Nixon, and four days shy of the Golden Spike Centennial ceremony at a national historic site by that name in Utah. Less than five months later, he married Marta Zigler, and the couple still reside in a cozy, high-ceilinged home in central Del Rio, a gathering place now for six children and eight grandchildren.
“I have hundreds of railroad ballcaps, both Southern Pacific and Union Pacific,” Gonzalez said with obvious satisfaction. His collection of memorabilia is the mark of a man still romanced by the railroad mystique, and it includes calendars, posters, jackets, even a locomotive model that – drive wheels to the ear – doubles as a telephone. Gonzalez cherishes a box of yellowing “Southern Pacific Transportation Company Timetables,” 36-page, 8” X 11” books of charts, schedules, special instructions and yard limits for every station between San Antonio and Alpine. “If you didn’t have this when you came to work, you could be fired!” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez’s vivid memory recalls when orders were delivered to passing trains by telegraph and string. Company telegraphers sent messages for trains from city-to-city and siding-to-siding where the onionskin orders were hoisted on tall poles within arm’s reach of passing brakemen near the engine and in the caboose. Rolling past the pole, each brakeman reached out and snagged the string-tied orders so both ends of the train knew instructions and warnings about tracks ahead.
Now, of course, trainmen receive such information by computers, print it on computers, and receive updates on computers. But in Gonzalez’s day, a typical five-man train crew included an engineer, fireman, head brakeman, rear brakeman, conductor. Originally, a fireman was not on board to put out fires, but to keep them lit in the boilers during the age of steam-powered locomotives Gonzalez explained. “When I was working, they were basically apprentice engineers,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez remembers, too, the historical landmarks along his normal route, from Del Rio to Sanderson, Sanderson to Alpine. Just north of Comstock was the Shumla siding, now marked by a string of falling down limestone buildings. “It was a grocery store and filling station kind of a deal,” said Gonzalez. Southern Pacific trains stopped on a siding at Shumla, and crews and passengers disembarked for a rest break and refreshments.
Now, the Shumla School, just over a limestone ridge from the historic station, is a non-profit, experiential school that acquaints Del Rio, Eagle Pass and regional youngsters with the rich historic, prehistoric, natural and cultural assets of this desert region. Today, SHUMLA is the school’s acronym for Studying Human Use of Materials Land and Art.
Gonzalez, now 63 years old, is desk-bound in the Val Verde County justice of the peace annex that once served as the historic county jail. A former co-worker and still friend, Catarino Garcia remembers Gonzalez this way: “He’s only five-and-a-half-feet-tall, but that big, deep, gravelly voice on train radios made him sound very authoritative and about six-feet-one.” Though Gonzalez missed the “Age of Steam,” he recalls with pleasure brief episodes when old Southern Pacific steam engines traveled from San Antonio to Del Rio, and on west. He knew the rails from San Antonio, and was sometimes detailed to ride with engineers, advising them on track conditions, terrain and communities along the route.
More wistfully, Gonzalez recalls the pleasures of rail travel on his daily trips to Comstock, Dryden, Sanderson, Marathon and Alpine. “I enjoyed every trip because they were all different, and my duties were always changing. And most people don’t realize what’s out there, the deer and other wildlife, the scenery, the sunrises and sunsets. And when the old steam engines used to come into Del Rio, the whistles and the sounds …” Gonzalez said, trailing off.
Carl Crawford, Union Pacific conductor, went to work as a telegraph operator for the Southern Pacific. Only four years out of Del Rio High School, Crawford knew railroad wages and benefits were better than he was making at Russell Hardware, and though friends nudged him toward the rails, he hated to leave a job he prized. “I really liked the old hardware business, and was pretty good at it,” Crawford said, June 16. It took him about 10 days to realize he didn’t like telegraphy, and wanted to be on the trains. Crawford snagged an interview as a fireman, but actually began as a brakeman, April 22, 1969. Two years later, he was promoted to conductor, and now – 38 years later – still is, by choice.
Crawford doubles as a negotiator in labor management struggles arising from historical dangers and long, often unscheduled hours. “When I started working, between 1969 and 1995, everybody on the trains here worked from Del Rio to Sanderson and back. It was 126 miles, and a shift no longer than 16 hours, but sometimes it took us 16 hours just to get to Sanderson,” Crawford said, explaining that track conditions, weather, scheduling and many other factors affect freight train progress.
Sanderson, in those days, was a railroad town, a major maintenance location with a roundhouse, depot and resident crews and families underpinning the economy of the remote village. All that’s gone now, and as the railroad closed facilities, Sanderson came close to ghost town status. “We began having a 220-mile run to Alpine, but then, in the mid-1970s, shifts changed to 14 hours, and then to 12,” Crawford said.
“I’ve been a union representative, including the UP buyout of the SP – I was one of eight general chairmen that did that – and the closure of the Sanderson roundhouse and station, as well as other agreements between the SP and its employees.” And how did Crawford enter the contentious realm of union negotiations? “I got fired!” On a 1970s work train, an entire crew was dismissed, Crawford explained, sustaining a 90-day, unpaid “vacation” for all crewmen, after an episode the company viewed as egregious. “A couple of deer out there on our right-of-way got in the way of someone’s small arms fire,” Crawford said. “At our ‘mini-trial’ at the end of those 90 days, we had terrible representation, and I thought I could do a lot better, and maybe help avoid some of those kinds of happenings.”
Crawford was elevated by membership election from “local chairman” to “general chairman” of the United Transportation Union, and traveled to negotiate agreements between the organization and the railroad, carrying the authority to make agreements and ensure railroad compliance through arbitration, mediation and public law boards.
At times, the distinction takes on the odor of “No good deed goes unpunished.” In 1990, the railroad strove to force employees in Lufkin to move to Houston. The employees rejected a proposed agreement of compensation in the matter, sending the issue into arbitration, the results of which Crawford inherited when he assumed his new duties as a negotiator. The proposed agreement failed, so UP railroad employees sued both the railroad and the union for $50 million. A federal judge dismissed the suit.
As with Gonzalez, Crawford has warmhearted recollections of the people encountered in his career, approaching completion of his fourth decade on the rails. “I remember most about the people on the five-man crews I worked with between here and Sanderson. I have probably already worked with at least 97 conductors, brakemen and engineers, and I’d have to mention all of those people, but many of them are deceased,” Crawford said.
Trainmen don’t work for 12 hours, and go home to families and other friends. They often lived together in improvised housing in trackside communities. “Before I went to work on the railroad, there were cabooses assigned to crews, and they just lived on them. When I came on, the railroad had eliminated cabooses assigned to train crews,” Crawford said. Cabooses stayed with a crew, and belongings stayed aboard where the crew lived when on duty. Then, the UP began pooling cabooses, placing them on trains as they were “made up” only for the duration of a particular run, no longer the traditional living accommodations that traveled with each crew.
Crews began to use housing along the route for overnight stays, Crawford explained. “They weren’t allowed to tie us up where there wasn’t lodging and restaurants that would be open whenever we arrived.” One railroad-managed housing unit in Sanderson, Crawford called a bunkhouse. “All it had for each guy was an Army bunk and a bathroom with a couple of commodes, and that was about it,” said Crawford. “I don’t think I stayed there very long, and I finally rented a place for myself and had a few roommates.”
Crawford’s wife, Lynn, maintains a wholly pragmatic perspective on her husband’s work, reinforcing Gonzalez’s observation that families suffer with the uncertainties of a trainman’s career. “There is no schedule, and that’s one thing you have to get accustomed to. It’s been my experience that there are two kinds of railroad wives: They are either completely independent, or totally dependent on the husband’s career. I have a friend whose husband worked for the railroad, and is now retired. But she never traveled outside of Del Rio by herself; she was always waiting for a train to come in.”
Lynn Crawford waits for no trains. For the last few years, she’s been nest-building all over again, after the lovely home she and Carl lived in for all their married life burned. The historic house, built by pioneering Del Rio architect and builder, John Taini, at the turn of the 19th century, was gutted and smoke-damaged in 2004. But Lynn also busies herself with a longstanding passion for soccer. “Our son played,” she explained, June 21. “Now, with the Del Rio/Laughlin Youth Soccer Association, we have nearly a thousand kids to get registered and organized for fall season and play.”
Lynn is also considering a return to another passion. For several years, she owned and managed an antique shop in the building she and Carl still own, now the Buffalo Girls, 440 S. Main St. “I still have an interest in antiques, so I still go junking,” she said, saying she may open another shop downtown in the future.
Carl uses the second floor of that same historic building at the corner of South Main Street and Garfield Avenue to rekindle his passions as a studio and darkroom photographer. “I guess I got started when I was young, and going on vacations I’d take along little Kodak instamatics, that kind of thing, but when I came home, I’d look at the photos and say, ‘What the heck is that?’ I wanted to take better pictures of what I really saw,” Crawford said.
“So, in the 1970s, I bought a Nikon camera body from a [Laughlin Air Force] base officer, and began taking pictures of babies, motorcycles and things people asked me to take pictures of,” said Crawford. Of course, his collection includes extensive photographic documentation of his first loves, trains and the people who keep them running.