CHAPTER 12 EVERYTHING HERE WANTS TO KILL YOU June 1979
On June’s first Tuesday, Racer and Andy departed Kansas City’s Union Station as the Missouri-Pacific’s newest maintenance-of-way, M-O-W, employees, passing through northern Missouri and Illinois on Amtrak’s Chief. A second unrecalled passenger train transported the duo from Chicago to Philadelphia, putting them at its 30th Street Station too late for a hotel room but too early for even yard office coffee, a time and setting described by a single word, miserable. Slowly walking to the meeting site, they still arrived ahead of the hour when other attendees rolled out of beds or plugged in percolators. Execution viewing rooms could be cheerier than safety meetings. Their Monday topic was new to Racer and Andy but familiar to more seasoned attendees, review of Rule G. While no one present disputed Rule G’s prohibition of alcohol anywhere on railroad property, attendees oddly signed in using a complimentary Latrobe Brewery pen. The meeting lasted forty-five minutes, its conclusion heralded by muffled sounds of multiple pocket watches, being scooped from overall pockets. As the Missouri-Pacific pair left the meeting, a foreman took Racer aside. A warm, welcoming individual, he introduced himself as Vito, inquiring what they had been hired to do and where they would work. Racer summed identically to his encounter with Val, Weed Spray Engineer – MoPac. Vito then provided a curious warning. Everything here wants to kill you; it’s all big and heavy. You need to know when and where the Blue flag protection features apply. Softening, he added. As for me, I’m an old head, Friday I’m laying-off for good to begin my pension years and play with my grandkids. Racer wasn’t sure what he meant by blue flag rule but made a mental note to learn more. Andy worked a toothpick along his denture, wondering if Vito were perhaps an older Deadhead. Racer and Andy were shortly introduced to a MoPac business agent who had arrived in Philadelphia that morning on TWA flight 312. A previous Penn Central and later CONRAIL employee, Rolf Wurth drove all three of the MoPac personnel to Weeds, trees & turf, packing them into a big C-60 doghouse truck before charging down a painfully bumpy access road. Making no allowance for Racer and Andy’s sleep deprivation, Wurth rambled through a disjointed weed spray discourse as if their training needed to conclude by lunch. Wurth indicated his pal, Superintendent Edwards, arranged his two-week loan so self-identified Weeds-fear-me - Wurth could break-in two newbie’s, neglecting a key biographical piece, CONRAIL had terminated him. While Racer’s knowledge of German was short of fluency, hearing the expression der begriff zurückstehen, Racer fenced Andy back, recognizing Wurth was about to begin another weed spray demonstration. Timing corresponded to periods when Wurth appeared bored, spraying herbicides onto tracks that hadn’t seen a weed since the steam age.
No question fell beyond Wurth’s self-perceived insights. Several times Racer politely intervened when Wurth stumbled on simple concepts, but even polite corrections resulted in Wurth-led decibel ramp-ups. Dilution equals the solution to Tox-E-ology – Wurth. Before departing Philadelphia, the Missouri-Pacific agent shared with Racer an unfavorable assessment of Wurth, describing how CONRAIL’s loss control department had months earlier arranged a series of meetings intended to allay herbicide fears among their trackside neighbors. Scheduled to conduct one of these fear-allaying session in Donora, Pennsylvania. Wurth chafed at the limitations inherent in playing a pre-recorded message, instead introducing himself via his Weeds-fear-me handle and shortly pontificating on equivalencies between parts-per-million concentrations and drops of vermouth sprinkled into a gin-laden bathtub. Attempting humor, Wurth then pointed to a reserved male attendee, proclaiming that man’s background as a gin expert, in the process victimizing Donora’s sole Nazarene pastor. He shocked attendees by producing amber bottle, one containing a concentrated weedkiller, teaspoon-ing some into a half-full water glass. Chugging the glass, Wurth proclaimed the taste as Zehr Gut - very good. The MoPac agent was specific in his instructions to Racer. Keep Wurth on a short leash. After four days of trainset shuttling through Philadelphia and Newark yards, the Weeds, trees & turf trainset was added near the rear of a freight train traveling westward across Pennsylvania. During their time in the keystone state other M-O-W employees introduced themselves, many emphasizing the importance of the blue flag rule, no coupling or train movements while a blue flag remains in place. While its official designation was one of blue signal protection, the standard was frequently shortened to the blue flag rule. Given its pre-Civil War origins, its relevance had been strengthened by a series of rulebook meetings, particularly those occurring after 1935. Blue flag compliance on morbidly designated R-I-P, repair-in-place tracks carried life-and-death consequences. Disagreement had flared involving rail car inspectors and management regarding its application in rail yards and the blue flag rule’s application to weed spraying had yet to be defined. Following several days of Rolf-led rambling, Racer devised a four-station practicum series, one intended to improve on weed spray-relevant skills. While personally experienced in lab-scale valve work, Racer reasoned larger railroad counterparts might prove challenging. Wurth patronized Racer’s training efforts until the younger man informed Wurth he wasn’t interested in additional fire-hose demonstrations, adding the MoPac agent nixed prospects for additional teaspoon-ed stunts. At first Wurth pouted although he eventually busied himself by making undiscussed personal notebook entries. George Kern’s contributions to Racer’s four test stations remains undocumented. Station One appeared to feature a bolt and nut collection, those of identical diameters but variable thread pitches. Qualification there relied upon using combinations of visual and tactile reassembly clues. Racer timed Andy until his assistant turned-the-tables on Racer. At Test Station Two, a dark photographer’s shroud allowed them to practice darkened component re-assembly. Initially Racer allowed Andy to beat him, later he did not, fresh record-setting times scribbled on the car’s wall. At Test Station Three they identified and named components including agitators, pressure assemblies, Swagelok™ fittings and hydraulic valve couplers. Halfway across Ohio, Racer poured a tubful of previously unusable nozzles onto the rail car floor, shortly disassembling, examining and carefully reassembling them, looking for reasons for their failure. At test Station Four Racer mated Swagelok™ fitting sets into short runs of copper tubing, routing it to a small high-pressure pump, one allowing them to practice leak-less re-assembly, invoking one of Kern’s credos: Always stronger, never weaker. While Wurth tried to dismiss Racer’s series as a mini-plumbing qualifier, the test stations offered more. Racer encouraged Andy: This is what we are being paid to do, keep trying. Attempting to give Otis’ father a break, Racer hoped Andy was more homesick than alcohol-deprived.
The Missouri-Pacific railroad environment was never very private; the improvised test stations began to attract attention. It may have been a brakeman who relayed comments to a yardmaster in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Perhaps that yardmaster spoke to a road foreman-of-engines in Pittsburgh, the brother-in-law of a Missouri-Pacific superintendent. Anyway, the Missouri-Pacific’s mechanical department viewed Racer as a stand-up guy, one appreciative of the blue flag rule. When Weeds, trees & turf stopped within walking distance of a yard office, Wurth disappeared, presumably to make a call. Twice Racer had overhead one of these German-laced dialogues, causing him to question whether Wurth was also a professional angler or possibly a fur trapper. Corporate counsel, e.g., the railroad’s attorneys, had insisted the Weeds, trees & turf project would be led by a MoPac employee, someone with an understanding of chemicals and their effects. Perhaps anticipating trackside cranks or other Rolf stunt-ers, counsel fretted weed eradication would devolved into a loss prevention quagmire. Weeds, trees & turf moved from Gary, Indiana to the vast Chicago rail yard where it was added to another consist (list of rail cars). Just ahead of departing Chicago a conductor climbed aboard with radioed news for Racer and Andy that their freight agent friend had arranged for them to dead head back to Kansas City on Amtrak’s Chief. Setting misgivings aside, Racer squared up and shook Rolf’s hand. Andy’s goodbye to their Weedsfear-me trainer included the odd footnote that Andy would stay in touch. Gone by then from Kansas City for ten days, dead heading home bolstered both men’s spirits. While hardly railroad veterans, they had at least survived their first pay period. Given a late Friday evening arrival, Racer chose to join his friend George. Peering in the bicycle store, Racer suppressed a grin as he viewed the untouched deli sandwich set between two lit candles. Checking for changes, he found nothing moved, nothing missing, everything present. Kern’s greeting was a more dietary comment. I’m too full eating both ends when you’re away, no inquiry regarding the railroad, not even a short-on-help complaint. The truncated conversationalist then inquired. You be around tomorrow? Amidst word poverty, gezellig prevailed. Around, yes. Time-off, days removed from the railroad, was a misnomer. Even the Preservation neighborhood regularly experienced railroad-derived noise in 105-decibel quotients, twenty more than the 1972 Noise Control Act permitted. Rail yards served as weird tourist attractions, few trainsets attracted more attention than a parked wrecker train, a heavy derrick preceding support cars. Its presence necessitated parental drive-byes, each featuring explanations for its 100-T (ton) stencil. How many post cards to country cousins memorialized these curiously spelled Recker visits? Monday following their homecoming, he and Andy located Weeds, trees & turf spotted behind the wrecker derrick. Perhaps the yardmaster reasoned the two units constituted before-and-after disaster partners. They borrowed a C-60 truck to collect their defoliant chemical shipment, one with origins in St. Louis’ Major League chemicals, most barreled into 55-gallon drums. Racer requested Weeds, trees & turf be repositioned on a Neff yard wash track, one featuring highflow water lines, remnants of steam, repurposing them for tank car filling. If the wrecker’s characteristic were its capacity to lift enormous weight, Weeds, trees & turf’s chief defining feature was its capacity to dispense huge volumes of diluted solutions. Adding herbicide concentrates to tank cars in drum lot quantities, they typically consumed two banded 55-gallon drums to fill a car’s ten-thousand-gallon hold. By comparison, a crop duster’s tanks, ones oddly dispensing liquids, held fewer than five hundred gallons. If large volumes constituted Weeds, trees & turf’s chief attribute, the tank cars’ extended fill times encouraged patience. Mixing and filling even one tank car often consumed a shift, hopefully one missing spills or short-fills.
In late June a Missouri-Pacific team was dispatched to record Weeds, trees & turf launch. An inexperienced photographer, possibly a recently hired music educator or contemporary French speaker, photographed Andy adjusting Mel’s binoculars, possibly surveying Kansas City skyline. Given the Missouri-Pacific Times appeared only biannually, the crazy negatives were fortunately lost. Racer parked the Rambler adjacent to the wash track beside other work-and-back cars, each of their windshields darkened by a patina of No. 2 diesel mixed with rail yard dust. Toting a D-cell radio and an ancient Kern -USA duffel, Racer brought on board grocery staples: Coffee, sugar and salt, biscuits and crackers, plus long shelf-life items such as potatoes, turnips and rice. The food parade’s finale entries included restaurant-sized cartons of both sweet and butter milk, plus a plastic jug containing sweetened Donald Duck orange juice. Racer and Andy agreed their food selections would extend beyond Rolf’s favored Spaghetti-O’s and Beanie-weenies. Racer also retrieved a disassembled PX-10 bicycle frame along with its wheels. Reaching further into the car’s trunk, Racer retrieved a shotgun. Using the bicycle for the gun’s concealment, he secreted it beneath a rail car seat. Similar to alcohol, the railroad forbade firearms although locomotive-less sidings sometimes forced compromises. Weeds, trees & turf’s schedule was in large part a question mark, given its defining documents were generated by a clerk using a milepost listing. The reality of applying chemicals in the Kansas Flint Hills near Leroy Junction, Kansas was remote from a type-written L-E-R-O-Y designation. Priorities for train movements put Weeds, trees & turf at the back of the pack following scheduled operations, other M-OW functions and even following accessory issues, whatever those constituted. Late July 1979 saw them tracing mainlines and sidings across the Sedalia subdivision. Upon conclusion of the Sedalia assignment they were towed into Major League Chemicals’ house tracks where Edwards had arranged for them to witness Major League’s use of proportioning flow hook-ups. Witnessing Major League fill their umbilical-ed tank cars, Racer concluded it didn’t enjoy a significant advantage over what he had improvised at Neff yard’s wash track. Two accounts of Racer’s weed spray engineer duties emerged. One described his work as a highorder challenge, simultaneously addressing complexities of meteorology, botany and plant genetics. The other description trivialized his duties as those of trackside Orkin-man, someone working and living in a beat-up baggage car, one featuring a primitive total loss toilet. Across main lines, on extended setout tracks and along sidings and spurs, Weeds, trees & turf crawled at less than twelve-mph, pausing briefly for resupply and with dusk. While train crews were restricted by hours of service rules, those restrictions did not apply to them. Occasionally someone in the time office provided a reprieve, mainly to avoid holiday pay scales. Given Andy’s alcohol dependence, Racer was reluctant to venture far. Spectators hounded Weeds, trees & turf as if it were a circus train. Rail fans pointed cameras at its sprays, creating visual records of its spray booms. Incredulous onlookers stood nearby as if Andy were dispensing fairy dust. More knowledgeable adults gathered children and pets before scurrying inside. Chemical petitioners approached Andy’s operator-chair, waving 2-liter Coke bottles or plastic milk jugs as if they served as universally-agreed signs for pilferage. Against Racer’s instructions, Andy accommodated such requests with the enthusiasm of a store demonstrator smearing flavored cheese onto Ritz crackers. He had stopped Andy steps short of flushing chemicals into an anonymous gully. That isn’t dishwater, Andy. By 1979, trackside tangles, briars and hedges constituted vestiges of a botanical landscape known to the Indians and likely viewed by Missouri’s pioneers. Absent defoliants, raccoons, foxes, opossums and deer chose trackside habitat as a precarious site to raise offspring. Weeds, trees & turf consumed fiftyfive gallon quantities of expensive chemicals, its operators rarely documenting outcomes and even less frequently retracing treated sections. Missouri and Kansas streams necessitated carefully timed cease-andthen-resume sequences.
Racer’s chemicals incompletely matched the diversity present among multiple species of vines, brambles and volunteer trees. Tiny droplets, less than one-millionth-of-an-inch in diameter, either interacted or failed as a chemical fog streamed down both sides of the train. Coverage across a section could fail by an untreated ten-yard weedy segment. Twice he had found Andy sprawled over his operator’s chair. When might a bystander report, or worse, photograph Otis’ father asleep there. Racer’s worry-based insomnia merged into fitful sleep, officials approaching Weeds, trees & turf with news of a crew’s fiery death, one attributable to weedinstigated track warpage, that dreaded expression, equipment-on-the-ground. Their news sources included local radio and previously read rounded newspapers, ones matching the curvature of conductors’ boots. Multiple sources confirmed herbicide-mediated weed resistance problems. Trains oddly seeded unwanted crops given cracked boxcar floors could shake wheat or corn onto track beds. How much oddly-planted wheat was necessary to misalign a track or maybe worse a switch? Train crews occasionally claimed trackside deer populations were more efficient in bud trimming than Andy’s sprays, sometimes the crews were right. Their winter transition from 1979 to 1980 was interrupted by trainset repairs at Coffeyville’s R-I-P track, plus returns to poorly-treated Pueblo, Colorado and another week spent near weedy Wagoner, Oklahoma. Racer returned to 13th and Olive to refine 1980 chemical order inputs, justifying both their chemical and equipment needs. Unfortunately, most references he relied upon were based on gallons-per-acre figures, not the gallons-per-mile estimates Racer needed. His notebook calculations suggested that Weeds, trees & turf consumed nearly two hundred gallons of diluted chemicals per mile, an estimate complicated by dilution factors varying according to plant species and densities. While herbicide list prices averaged five dollars per gallon, Major League attempted to invoice the railroad at nearly twice that. Historically, the railroad had paid at least three hundred dollars for most fifty-five-gallon drums of concentrated defoliants, invoices sometimes totaled twice that. Racer appreciated that purchasing agents favored initially high cost estimates, ones allowing them to take credit for price reductions. The perceived path to railroad advancement was one of saving the railroad money, frequently asserted, far less frequently documented. During a dreary planning session, he had indelicately scrawled a ten-dollar per-gallon figure on a planning board minus an accompanying explanation. Hardly anyone present appreciated Racer’s dollars-per mile estimate applied to undiluted chemicals, not the spray chemicals they actually applied to track ballast. His blackboard cursive did produce a question. How many gallons do you use per mile? Racer’s answer addressed sprayer volumes, not undiluted chemicals. Varies, perhaps 150-200 gallons per mile, all figured on a diluted basis. The distance between Racer’s intended message and what his Eye-ease counterpart thought he heard possessed Mississippi River dimensions. The finance person line-itemed a ten-dollar-per-gallon figure against a 175-gallon/mile consumption rate for a ten-thousand-mile railroad. The error in the erroneous, enormous really, twenty-million-dollar chemical cost estimate was eventually noticed but in the meantime a case emerged for contracting out weed spraying, likely Weeds, trees & turf’s first strike. In February 1980 a Neff yard clerk signed for a smaller-than-expected shipment of chemicals, a volume insufficient to maintain Weeds, trees & turf needs through August, much less October. They spent March’s first two weeks organizing a much smaller than expected shipment. The bottom line, one beyond line-items or calculations, was an appreciation for Weeds, trees & turf had not grown legs. The closest Racer came to appreciating these misgivings occurred during an April
1980 meeting when he bristled at an accountant’s offhand reference to the Agent Orange Train, perhaps their second strike. By May 1980 most of Weeds, trees & turf’s advocates had vanished. While M-O-W crews often hiwheeled trucks along active tracks, the mainline was unsuitable for napping, even among non-drivers. Boondoggle schemes belonged to obscure access roads, particularly those Weeds, trees & turf had recently cleared of wines and saplings. M-O-W advocacy had a price, though. Lower the Boom, Agent Orange! Nuke ‘em, Sleepy, both references to Andy. Nevertheless, the maintenance-of-way department, home to champion nappers, continued its support of Weeds, trees & turf. A scheduling conflict emerged, one with a curiously hyphenated name, rail - grinding, referring to powerful grinding wheels designed to smooth track imperfections. But even with use of companion water-cooling, rail-grinding created sparks, having two effects, pyrotechnic-quality nighttime displays and trackside fires. Weeds, trees & turf’s schedule optimally placed it ahead of grinding; limited data suggested fewer weeds meant fewer fires. When a rail-grinder initiated a trackside blaze, a panicked telephone exchange ensued, another railroad official notifying a local fire department of a purposefully set although non-arson fire. At a place alternatively designated L-E-R-O-Y or Le-Roy or Leroy, Kansas, rail -grinding threw Weeds, trees & turf its third strike. The railroad’s mainline closed in both directions as fire units rushed from as far as Topeka, Kansas, to extinguish a prairie fire the railroad admitted setting. The fact Racer exercised no control over train movements didn’t diminish the capacity to blame. L-E-R-O-Y or beyond, additional figurative smoke rose as news outlets reported the plight of soldiers succumbing to age-unlikely illnesses. Several 13th & Olive meetings regarding Weeds, trees & turf’s fate featured Post-Dispatch articles describing Agent Orange-associated illness. On June 1980’s second Friday as Weeds, trees & turf stood motionless along a blue-flagged siding, lacking locomotive power Racer questioned Andy regarding a spray head repair. The switch engine will be here soon, Andy. How long before I can pull the blue flag? Just a couple – more minutes. I’m cannibalizing sprayer heads - re-supply hasn’t arrived. Racer noted Andy had carelessly strewn two broken spray heads. Given the tool room traded new-for-old, misplaced equipment counted against Weeds, trees & turf’s strained budget. Pointing to the head discards Racer questioned if Andy had dunned students for their broken glass. How about letting me know two minutes before you’re finished? I would like for us to tie-up early so I can deliver you home before Otis goes to sleep. EVERY DAY ON THE RAILROAD WAS THE SAME.