Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern
Smoking is a habit that’s never appealed to me. No smoking for me. During my time as conductor for the Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad, many of my engineers smoked. There was no choice for me but to grin and bear it. I never got used to it, but as long as they kept the window on their side of the locomotive open, I’d keep my dislike of smoking to myself, and that seemed to work. Still, I’m sure they all knew I wasn’t fond of sucking in secondhand smoke.
One afternoon I departed Waseca (Minn.) Yard with an engineer we’ll call “John” and a student engineer, sitting in front of me in the brakeman’s chair — “Bill.” We were making an Austin Turn on one of those fantastic fall days that give Midwesterners bragging rights for the best weather around for, oh, about two weeks of the year.
We were approaching what was known locally, and on the railroad, as the “schoolhouse” crossing a few miles east of Waseca at 25 mph, track speed. My engineer was blasting his horn with particular vigor, and starting quite early, at this crossing. Our lead SD40-2 had a cab-roof-mounted horn, so my brain was on the verge of shaking from this continuous racket.
I looked over at my engineer, and saw an expression on his face telling me something was terribly wrong. Looking ahead, and off to the left, a Waseca County highway department road grader was ambling toward the grade crossing at a few miles an hour, oblivious to our loud presence. As the grader’s front wheels passed the crossbuck at the edge of the crossing, out of the corner of my eye, I saw John shove his automatic brake handle hard to the right. He was putting us into emergency braking. This was going to be close.
Seconds before we entered the crossing, the long front part of the grader was between the rails, and I could see a collision was, by now, almost unavoidable. I threw myself to the floor of the locomotive and grabbed onto the handrails leading up from the toilet compartment and shut my eyes, bracing for impact. A few seconds passed and I felt nothing. How had we not hit him?
I pulled myself back into my chair in time to see the side of our locomotive clear the grader. The driver must have thrown the thing in reverse at the last possible nanosecond and gotten clear of the crossing. I stuck my hand out the window, pointed it at the driver, and extended a finger that shall remain unidentified, as I felt the train’s brakes grip and slide us to a stop — a good four or five car lengths past the crossing.
Bill asked me a question that, for the life of me, I can’t recall. To be honest, I don’t know if I even processed the question at the time. I must have been as white as a ghost. John let out a laugh at the sight of me and told Bill, “I think Andy’s got to swallow his heart back down into his chest before he can answer.” Then John pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, pulled one out, and put it between his lips. As my breathing began to return to normal, John reached over to me with his pack of cigarettes. “You want one?” he asked, knowing full well I didn’t smoke. For a second I forgot all about that junior-high demonstration of what smoker’s lungs look like and considered his offer, then held up my hand, and managed to get out, “No, thanks.”
John smiled as he lit up. “Now maybe you understand a little better why so many of us out here smoke.”
