Four decades later, I still chuckle when I think about the grouchy old farmer who jumped on my locomotive at a central Iowa grade crossing, cast iron fry pan in hand, and cussed me out like he was a drunken sailor!
It was summer 1979. I had been a qualified Chicago & North Western Railway engineer for only a couple months, working the extra board out of Boone, Iowa. My crew and I were called to dog-catch trains that could not make it from Clinton to Boone under their hours of service. The Rock Island Railroad had entered bankruptcy in 1975 and was about to call it quits. Much of the Rock Island traffic was being diverted to C&NW’s east-west main line across the Hawkeye state. Those of us on the extra board were working every 10 hours on our rest.
This particular afternoon we were relieving a crew that had died at Colo, Iowa. The inbound engineer overshot the crossing when he stopped, blocking the town’s main thoroughfare with the lead locomotive. When our van arrived, there already was an excessive amount of road traffic waiting. We got out of the van and were boarding the train when we were verbally assaulted by an old guy in an old pickup truck sitting at the crossing. Numerous four-letter words were directed at us conveying his displeasure with having to wait for the train to pull by and stop again to pick up our caboose crew. I boarded the engine, got situated, gave a couple short horn blasts, and started pulling.
This was too much for the old guy. He jumped out of his truck as we started to pull and climbed on my lead locomotive! He did not realize, however, that to enter an EMD SD45 cab from the front, one had to go to the fireman’s side. As we started moving, he was standing outside my front windshield pounding on it with a cast iron fry pan, expressing his displeasure in a rather impolite manner.
As we proceeded down the track, I gave the engine another notch. The speed increased and the look on the old guy’s face was priceless. He looked at the ground, then looked at me, cussed me out, looked at the ground, looked at me, and cussed me out again as we started to go faster and faster.
Soon he figured out he might end up in Omaha, Neb., if he didn’t bail out. I had no interest in being beaned in the face with a fry pan so I kept notching out the throttle. The last look I got of my fry pan-wielding assailant was him jumping off the engine, almost going head over heels before coming to a stop and starting to hoof it about three-fourths of a mile back to his old truck — still sitting at the crossing. All this with frying pan in hand, and without, I might add, an imprint of it being left on my head!
Lynn Sass worked as a locomotive engineer for 42 years.
