Good morning...  It's 1:45am and I'm waiting for a call.  Breakfast eaten, lunch and backpack packed, dressed to kill (or at least work.)  I feel more rested today than I did yesterday at this time.  Yesterday I had a really hard time getting to sleep, and last night I didn't have any problem going to sleep.  It was a good, long 15-hour work day.

Yesterday was interesting.  I experienced everything you would experience during an award-winning movie - I laughed, I cried, I was almost taken into custody by the Canadian border patrol...  So yesterday was my first time riding with/shadowing a driver on an OTR (over the road) trip.  I connected with the woman who referred me to this job in the first place.  Her name is Karen Younce-Guynn, a sturdy, talkative woman of about 65 I'd say.  (On the first Sunday I was here in Minot, she passed me a note in church saying that PTI was hiring drivers and that I should apply.)  She is an ex-bookkeeper who has been doing this driving job for about a year and a half.  I had only met her once at church a couple weeks ago, and wasn't even sure I'd recognize her (she's in another Minot ward).  Since we trainees are responsible for setting up our two OTR and yard shadow trips, I thought I'd connect with her and have her train me rather than one of the flea-bitten former Hells Angels riders working here.  After all, I didn't want to be confined in a van for 12 hours with a reformed ax murderer.

So I call her, and she asked if I would pick her up at a car repair place in the morning.  Fine, it was on my way to work anyway.  She was having them clean her car engine...  First clue.  She seemed pleasant enough and we went into the office and picked up our binder and instructions.  She had drawn a trip up to Portal, ND which is at the Canadian border, about 3 hours away.  Typically, it's good to get longer trips like this because it allows you to use more of your "on-board" time - meaning the time that you are available to be called for a run.  Usually, the railroader requests the trip with a "need time" - a time during your on-call time that they need to have the van ready to pick the crew up.  This trip, however, was an "asap" meaning that they need the van as soon as humanly possible.

We throw our things into a Suburban in a bit of a rush because it's a long trip up there.  As you leave for a trip, you have to do some setup with the on-board GPS that tracks the trip and sends you information about the trip request.  Well, the GPS wasn't working properly, and it delayed our time to leave by about 30 minutes.  She is somewhat a techni-phobe, an impatient, indiscriminate button-pusher (only us computer support folks know what that means.)  According to Karen, much of the time the GPS in the vans don't work properly and it's a hassle.  She started ranting about how nobody does their job at this place - cars are never cleaned, fixed, etc. and she also was constantly bad-mouthing the people in the office and the fleet manager...  Second clue.  Evidently, there is some truth to her ravings and she gave me excruciating detail about why the office staff up and quit their jobs last month.  Of course, it was all the District Manager's fault.

It's a long drive up to Portal ND.  Generally, any day at 2:30am, I don't have much to say.  That didn't seem to discourage her through.  Our conversation up there consisted of long, arduous threads of her prattle with some of my "uh-huh's" strategically uttered.  She told me about her childhood starting at age 3.  She told me about her 2 broken marriages.  She told me about vacations she took in Florida, Jamaica, Bermuda, Mexico, Tobago, the New Heberdies... and I zoned out on a few more.  She told me about her illnesses and her sister's illnesses.  Did I mention that it's a long drive to Portal ND?  Riding with the reformed ax murderer was looking better and better.

Well, we get up to Portal and gave the crew a ride back to their depot.  Then they discovered that they had locked their keys in their truck, so we spent about 2 hours doing nothing while their conductor tried to get roadside assistance out to unlock the door.  Well, there are no street addresses in Portal (population 121, probably including domestic mammals) so the roadside assistance was not capable of assisting.  They said that they couldn't dispatch a driver unless they had an address, and no address for Portal would work.  I suggested that they get the sherriff to come out to do it, and finally they were in to their truck.

They asked us to shuttle one of their guys to the depot in Portal, Canada (just across the border.)  So, we loaded him up in the van and left.  Well, we got to the border and there was a very nasty dispositioned Canadian border guard waiting for us.  She demanded our passports, and I and the railroad guy had ours at the ready. However, our driver Karen said that she needed to get hers from her bag in the back of the van.  The guard lady became very snotty and dispatched a guard out to the car while Karen exited the vehicle and got her passport, which she gave to the guard.  The guard lady became angry because she found a $50 bill in Karen's passport, and the guard thought that Karen was attempting to pass a bribe.  Then the story gets good.

Karen, the sturdy, talkative woman goes into a nervous, wandering narrative about how she was just traveling to Florida and Jamaica and that she always keeps some emergency money in her passport, and that a customs agent in Florida questioned her about the money, as well... giving WAY too much detail about everything.  I was starting to wonder what Canadian jail cells were like.  Anyway, the guard came up to me and told me to wait in the van.  She had already cleared the CP employee (a Canadian citizen) riding with us.    Well, I didn't hear/understand what she said to me (she spoke English with a heavy French accent) and that aggravated her more.  Then she repeated the command to me and I complied.  She was carrying a little .38 caliber service revolver, but I think I could have taken her.

About 30 minutes later, Karen comes back to the van and says that she can't go into Canada because of "some things in her past".  Oh great, and I gave up a chance to ride with a *reformed* ax murderer, and now I'm riding with Door Number 3.

We dropped off the CP guy and they sent us home.  Another 3 hours of the former topics, except broken down into more detail.

Got back to the office in Minot and I went out to ride in the Burlington Northern marshaling yard (called the Gavin yard) with another guy, David  Decker (he didn't seem like an ax murderer) and had a really nice time with him.  He reminded me of my wonderful father-in-law, and Mr. Decker was very knowledgeable about train operations (he had worked in and around trains most of his life) and I took pages of notes about the yard.  This is where they receive trains in, unhook them, them put them back together with the appropriate configurations that are needed for the next run.  It's all very systematic, process-oriented, and interesting to watch.  It's very similar to what I used to do with my HO-scale railroad set as a kid, except the cars here weigh a bit more.  Some of the locomotives (they call them 'power') can be run by remote control, so it's much more efficient to drag the cars around without having to get up into and out of the power.

Our job is to shuttle people(s) back a forth across the yard, which occupies several hundred acres and is traversed by 50 or so lines of tracks.  (I'll try to include pictures next time.)  There are many rail switches (which guide the train forward along a track or switches it to another track) and all these switches need to be set manually.  You listen on the radio for crews to call.  The language they use on the radio and in conversation is mostly very technical and leaves me feeling a bit intimidated (they'll say something like, 'crew release up diesel to hump 12 E' - that means drive over to where they fuel the locomotives, pick up whomever is there and take them to track 12 on the east hump side, where the cars are sequenced and hooked together.  Why can't they just say that instead?)  I guess you just have to listen and learn.

Well, I also learned that the Gavin yard is a very dangerous place and you really need to be alert and watch where you're going - the most obvious is that you need to take great care when crossing over the many tracks that cross the yard.  And since many of the tracks merge into one another, if you're not careful your van can be crushed like a soda can if you drive into the wrong place at the wrong time.  Trains don't exactly stop on a dime, as you can imagine.  Also, there's lots of important stuff, like switches, that if you accidently run over one, you disable a van, possibly mess up train operations, and ensure that you get no Christmas card from Burlington Northern. And the best part - locomotives make a lot of noise when they move, so you're alerted.  However, empty oil tanker cars make *no* noise as they get unhooked, pushed, and glide down the track to the "car man" maintenance shed.  They're also painted black, so at night it's doubly scary.  What this means is that occasionally  the crew will unhook a car and let it glide down the track to a brake area.  This reduces effort and time spent pulling the car down to the car man shed.  If you're not paying attention, all of a sudden a 212,000 pound, unmanned, gravity driven rail car rolls into your lap without warning.  That could ruin your day.

I finished my satisfying workday about 8pm and headed home alone.  Grateful to be alive and to have nothing but the classic rock radio station wearing away at my ear drums.