The second year out west we didn't use the sled. Instead, we used track jacks to lift the track. They each weigh about forty pounds. You use a lining bar as a handle and as you pump the jack mechanism up and down the top of the jack raises up. Once a couple of sets of track jacks had lifted the rail, the ruined ties were dug and pulled out. New ties were put back in, the rail was dropped, and the ties were spiked up. One of the foreman told me that long ago an Extra Gang might have a mile of track jacked up at a time. The railroad would recruit a huge gang out of the Chicago flophouses and take them in a crew train out to repair track. They would live in the crew train until the job was finished.

The first year our gang started out large and still had maybe eighty guys in the early fall. The second year we only had about sixty guys. But we fixed more track by hand in a day with a smaller crew than we fixed the previous year with a sled and more men. Our chief foreman the second summer had been only the timekeeper the year before. His bosses were estatic that he got so much work out of us. He bought us drinks in the Alpha bar one day after work to show his gratitude. I will always remember him walking the tracks looking for agates among the freshly dumped rock. I saw foreman Joe only once that summer. I was hanging off a moving railroad car in Alpha and he pulled up in a old red Milwaukee Road pickup truck. "Where's that broken rail?" he called to me excitedly as my train picked up speed. I only had a second to yell, "Hey Joe!", before we rumbled out of earshot.

Out at Jackson one foreman grabbed six of us to fix dingers for a few days while the rest of the crew moved back to Austin. One of his first acts was to fire Whiney Brian. Whiney Brian liked to complain and didn't like to work hard. Endearing qualities when you depend on each other to get your job done. This foreman told the five of us that he couldn't stand to see us working so much harder than Brian. So he fired him. What a moron. At least Brian did half a man's work. Once he was gone, we each had to do a little more. Who we could have done without was the foreman.

While we fixed up the long siding in Austin Chili Face could be seen driving across the road in the distance. Tim the foreman who fired him was a little nervous, but C.F. never came close to us. A small group of us were sent to Wells to fix the yard there. Wells has a "wye". A "wye" is track with three switches in it. You hook the arms of the "Y"'s together. If you think about it a moment, you can see how an engine can reverse direction on a one track line using a "wye". Kenny and Virgil Knutson were our foremen at Wells. Kenny was a raving alcoholic with black teeth. One day his teenage daughter came down to the yard looking for him. She was gorgeous - go figure. A too heavy grain car had just fractured some light rail in the Wells yard and fallen through to the ties. The Car Crew came out from Austin to put this grain car back on the rails. They used lots of heavy timbers and track jacks. When they had the car elevated, they pointed at me and had me get UNDER the car to spike up the new rail. If the car fell, I would have been horribly horribly crushed. It worked out okay, but this was by far the most dangerous thing I did at work. I should have refused to do it.

I finished my tour on the Milwaukee working North towards Blooming Prarie. Now we had some equipment. We had a cherry picker with an arm that grabbed new ties and placed them near the tracks. We also had two hydraulic machines that spiked up the ties. It was early fall and the Extra Gang was getting smaller and smaller. One day an elderly farmer walked out to talk with us. The guy was something like 80 and he had lived by the Milwaukee Road tracks all his life. He was afraid we were ripping out the line like the line from Austin to LaCrosse had been ripped out. He, like I, was glad that the old line was getting repaired. My Greatgrandfather and Grandfather were dispatchers for the Milwaukee. I often wondered if they travelled over roadbed we were repairing.

My father took my picture one day after work the second summer. That's orange juice in the glass. Note the black smudges on my nose from pushing my glasses up all day.

Epilogue

I took my daughter down to visit Grandma in 1999. For the last 30 miles we drove within sight of the old Milwaukee line. The Milwaukee went bankrupt for the last time years ago and was sold primarily to the Soo Line. I don't know for sure who owned this particular branh line now, I think it's a small private railroad. I spotted a pickup fitted with railroad wheels coming down the track looking for broken rails. I pulled off the highway onto a gravel road and flagged down the pickup. The guy driving had been on the Austin Section when I worked for the Milwaukee so long ago. The condition of the track now was as bad as when we first repaired it in '79-'80. Still, one train a week used the old line.