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| Colors on the Silver Screen, the Engine Facility, Western Pacific Railroad, Portola, 2012 |
In the mid nineteen-seventies, I worked as a
"hostler" at the Southern Pacific yard at Bakersfield . My duties as a hostler were to
move locomotives within the engine facility where individual locomotives were
serviced, repaired and stored. There were numerous storage areas including the roundhouse,
which had somewhere around a dozen bays, about another dozen tracks for
individual locomotives outside and adjacent to the roundhouse tracks, the turntable,
two service tracks where the locomotives were refueled and serviced, and a
ready track.
I think to be a hostler that one was required to be a
"promoted" engineman (engineer), because we often took consists (more
than one locomotive configured to operate as a single engine) from the ready
track out into the yard and onto the train. We did so with head-end power and
with helper engines of eastbound trains that had remotely operated helper
engines. Switchmen directed us to an empty track. We were then to proceed down
to the east end of the yard. At the east end, another switchman would take us
to the designated track and couple us to the waiting train. Meanwhile, another
hostler would be directed by a switch engine crew to take his consist of helper
units to be "cut into" the rear portion of the same train (usually
somewhere in the rear third of the train).
Once the train was set (the air hoses all coupled and the train
line charged with compressed air), we would conduct the air brake test. We did
these functions with the remotes in an effort by management to save time for
the engine and train crews. Normally, it was the train's engineer who would
take the power from the ready track to the train, but that entire process took
too long especially after the twelve-hour rule went into effect.
As a hostler, I loved doing these tasks because my pay was
based on the weight of the heaviest engine (an engine is a locomotive or
multiple locomotives that are coupled together, and that operate as a single
engine) that I operated during the shift. It was fun too, whenever we took a
consist down the mainline to the east end because we could go fast at main line
speeds whereas on yard tracks we were restricted to ten miles-per-hour.
