Now I will talk about the work I do in the yard or “on the ground”. In the yard there are a number of different types of jobs. The most common is a 2-man remote switching crew. Its me and another guy and we both have remote control boxes that control the switch engines we will be using. One of us controls it at a time and we use those engines to move cars to either build trains or spot cars at an industry. Its as easy as selecting forward or backward and then a speed (up to 10mph).
Another job is a transfer job. Its a more traditional railroad job because you have a 3-man crew–an engineer, a foreman/conductor, and a brakeman. What that job does is take longer cuts of cars from one yard to another, whether it be to another railroad or another Union Pacific yard across town. Transfer jobs will also do switching like remote crews if the need arises. Its typically a catch-all job that can take all day. I don’t care for these.
The third most common yard job is hostling. What that does is move locomotives around the yard. Usually taking “power” off of incoming trains to be serviced and taking power from service tracks to outbound trains. Sometimes you deliver engines to other rail yards. Hostling jobs are 2 man crews with one guy controlling the locomotives and one guy providing signals and getting switches. I try to avoid these jobs too because they pay less and you don’t really know when you will be finished in a given day.
In the yard you can bid to work one job on a set 5 day schedule at either night, morning, or afternoon shifts. Most jobs are intended to be 8 hours with someone relieving you after that. If you don’t hold a “regular” job, you can work the “extra board” which is a pool of guys that fill in for regular guys that call in sick or are on vacation. Extra board workers have to have a general understanding of all the jobs in the yard (fairly daunting, yes).
So a typical day in the yard consists of following directions given by the yardmaster as to what cars go where. Usually there is paperwork involved so we can verify the work we do. Since most jobs are remote jobs i’ll focus on that. After we figure out what our work is (most jobs do the same thing every day) we get our remote boxes and link up to a set of switch engines. Switch engines are 2 smaller locomotives coupled together. With the remote boxes we will walk around on the ground a lot to flip switches for the track we need to go to. when we aren’t on the ground we sometimes ride cars if we are shoving them into a track. its required we be on the head end of whatever direction we are moving for generally obvious reasons. Other things on the ground we do are make cuts between cars. Its done by pulling a “pin lifter” to separate two “coupled” cars. Sometimes we have to connect the airbrake hose between cars if we are going to use airbrakes. usually in the yard we don’t use air brakes, just the brakes on the engine to stop our movement. cars have their own individual hand brakes too for when you set them by themselves somewhere.
Being on the ground around moving cars and engines is dangerous but my rule of thumb is if you aren’t in the tracks you can’t be hit. We use a walky-talky like radio for communicating with your work mate and other jobs working near you as well as the yardmaster. Radio communication is a big part of what we do in the yard as often times a man on the ground will need another man at the controls to make a move for him. Its also so we can avoid hitting anyone/other jobs.
So lets say we have instruction to get a car out of a rail and put it at an industry spot. We will have a list of cars in a track and we will couple into that track and pull out all of the cars in the track till we find the car we need. usually the list matches whats in the track. we then cut off the car we need and set it over to another track by itself and then put the cars we don’t need back into the original track. then we grab our one car and head to the industry where we will “spot” it. Another typical instruction is to pull out a whole rail of cars and attach it to another whole rail of cars to build an outbound train. I like these jobs because they aren’t too complicated lol. Another thing we do is take a track of cars and shove them over a “hump” where we separate each car one by one and let them roll over the hill and into a giant set of tracks below the hump. A computer will read what car it is and automatically line the switches to the destination track in the “bowl” of tracks. The bowl consists of any number of tracks, usually 20+ and they are dipped in the middle so cars dont’ roll out of them. Each track in the bowl will be for a particular destination and when that gets full the switch crew on the other end of the track will pull out those cars to add to an outbound train, like i described previously.
I don’t know if any of this makes any sense or not but thats pretty much what i do in the yard. I mentioned in my last post that road conductors do some work on the ground but usually its to walk the train to find a problem (very rare) if we are enroute somewhere or to put the train away at our destination. So 95% of the time on the road is in the engine cab but in the yard its mostly outside on the ground. So the weather is a bigger factor in the yard and its why i would rather work the road in the winter like i’ve been doing the past month or so. I was in the yard from April till early December last year. The yard is better for having time at home so when the weather is nice its better to work there. The road does pay better though.
Again, if any questions, just ask!
