THE IRON HORSE
SOME PERSONAL THOUGHTS ON RAILROADS
I
have always enjoyed folk definitions of words—the sillier the better. I once read that the Natives used to call an automobile the “thing that runs by itself.” Crazy-no? Today I take on “iron horse,” or the more general iron trail, iron road, metal road, etc.
laid thick metal plates to rest the rail on. Those big iron rails were laid into place and the plates adjusted for alignment. Another guy moved along the track setting the spikes. They had to be precisely placed so they stood perfectly straight up. One man stood on each side of the rail and wielded a “spike maul.” This is essentially a pick with both ends ground off flat. That small face doesn’t allow for any mistakes. The two “gandy dancers” SPIKE MAULS MAKE GOOD DOOR HANDLES. would swing from alternating sides; when the spike was driven, ask? Simply a track worker. But the folk then took one step to the right and the etymology is unusually fictional. I was whirling mauls never missed a stroke. told at the time it came from the brand of There were rarely any misses, for obvious shovel used. reasons. And what’s a gandy dancer you Over the years this has been expanded to
A SELECTION OF DATE NAILS In 1962 I got to see tracks up close and personal. I went to work that summer at the copper smelter in McGill, Nevada— one hundred twenty miles from the nearest town, not counting the nearby village of Ely, which actually provided the services. There were two big constructs—the mill which crushed and concentrated the copper ore, and the smelter where it was melted down to extract the copper. The air was so bad it would turn sagebrush into copper sculptures. The short track spur was used to move ore between the two locations. That summer they decided to replace the little section with new ties and rails. In those days this was still hand work, sorry to say. Cross-ties are heavy when new, but saturated with minerals, they were literally petrified. Of course I got the worst of the bad jobs. The good thing was seeing the skill of these tobacco-chewing characters; cross ties were laid, then a big crew used something like the tongs they carried big blocks of ice with, and a couple of fellows 50
December 2019
MAP OF NEARBY LAND GRANTS
refer to a Chicago company which made lots, maybe all, the tools used in track work. In actuality there appears to never have been such a company. It’s moot now because virtually nothing is done with hand tools. One of the great moments was the meeting of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah, at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, once again popular knowledge and the real event only had the word Promontory in common. Promontory is just what it sounds like. It is a spur of low mountains that extends mile into the lake from the north. Technology of the time didn’t allow for rails across the huge lake. But that’s not the most interesting part. My wife’s grandfather had homesteaded on
