Back in college, just after I got out of HS, I actually got to work for a railroad...sorta. I was hired to work for a grain company in Cornelia Ga, where I spent most of my time cursing the remote control unit that I was tasked with operating. Thing was BUGGY as anything, but it was an interesting job none the less. It started as an old battered SW1500 (may have been a 1200...I dunno) which worked beautifully. Then in a fit of "hey let's upgrade" the company picked up a pair of trackmobile units. Now don't get me wrong, the Trackmobile worked fine, but it had a very bad habit of going buggy. By buggy I mean totally ignoring your inputs and doing whatever the hell it wanted to do. Eventually the company figured out that there was something wrong in the way it was picking up the signals, but I digress. Once the thing was fixed, work was actually better, more so since it was easier to run around your cars. Hop in the cab, lower the road wheels, raise the track ones and just drive the thing around the train. Like driving a big forklift really. That's not to say even then there weren't problems. One comes to mind that I thought I'd share. I still laugh about this, more so because it wasn't my fault. Sure, people could have gotten hurt, but it's still funny.
One morning, while taking my lunch break, the second guy that worked the yard came in. He didn't stay long, just grabbed his lunch and control belt and headed back outside to eat on the go. We weren't supposed to do that, but sometimes the work load was enough that we'd do it anyway. In any case, I'm sitting there when I hear my boss ask me totally in a deadpan voice "Why is your cut moving down the lead?" Blinking I looked up and reached for my control belt hitting the emergency stop, only to have it do nothing. My unit and its six little ducklings trundled past the loading tower, out onto the lead and made it to the derail (about a mile down the line) before it put its paws on the ground. All the while the engine of the TM was screaming and spitting, like it WANTED to wander off.
Turned out that when the other guy came in for lunch, he'd grabbed the wrong belt. So there he was, standing at the end of his cut, wondering why the heck his unit wasn't moving...while all the while mine was going on its merry little adventure. Thankfully it didn't take long to clean up, and no one was hurt. Couple days later I came on my shift to find the control belts labeled with these HUGE stick on numbers and letters that read "CONTROL UNIT 1" and "CONTROL UNIT 2." As if to add insult to injury, Belt two had what looked to be BRIGHT PINK paint on it. So we'd never get them mistaken again.
Sometime, ask me about the time I got a speeding ticket in the TM. That too is a funny story.
