Recollections of Harry Glueck and His LIRR Career
1912 - 1988



LIRR # 39, had just been repainted prior to display at Stony Brook 1956. Harry Glueck, age 44, at the throttle. Archive: R. Glueck

 

The Man Who Made the Trains Run: Harry Glueck

by: Richard Glueck

The railroad was a job to my father, and not much more than that. It assured him that his wife and kids would have food, a comfortable home, and a decent standard of living.  The job squeezed every drop of live out of the man from the time he entrained each morning, to the moment we picked him up at 5:17pm, each night, at the far end of the Syosset platform.  On the other hand, I loved the railroad.  I loved the stories, I loved the locomotives, I loved pretending to be an engineer, using cardboard boxes as a child, and graduating from Lionels to H-O gauge, as I grew up.  When he brought home a copy of “Steel Rails to the Sunrise”, I feasted on tons of information both from history and stuff he knew, but never talked about. 

He never talked about the infamous trio of wrecks in 1950.  He saw too much at Rockville Center, and got it worse at Richmond Hill.  We lost a neighbor at the former, a young woman who was decapitated in her seat while trusting the carrier to bring her home.  Then there was the poor guy squashed against the windows of the coach at Richmond Hill, gruesomely depicted in the Newsday extra.  Even twenty years later, he repressed so much of those events that he only grudgingly gave up short recollections.

Of course derailments and wrecks were a major part of the job.  It was rare that I could accompany him, but the rare occasions occurred.  My earliest recollection of “being on the job” was when I was about age seven.  A monster Fairbanks-Morse C-Liner kept picking the switch at Ronkonkoma.  No matter how many times they tried to pass over the point, the center axle kept dropping.  I was actually allowed to walk around while the big locomotive traveled four feet in both directions until the snapped switch point was found and the orders had been given to rebuild the switch.  The massive F-M’s were famous for that little trick.  I still have the broken switch point in a box, packed away with other boyhood trivia. 

On another occasion, the whole family went out in our 1954 Chevrolet to Riverhead, the exact crossing where the RMLI is located today, to see where a Borden’s Dairy milk truck had gotten clobbered by an RS3 and train at speed.  When we arrived, the fire department had a sheet over the crushed cab of the truck, and broken milk cartons covered the ground.  Clearly, this is not what the old man had envisioned as a family trip.  My mother took my sister for a walk, but I slipped away and wandered down the tracks, only to stumble on part of the deceased truck driver!  The locomotive and empty train was backed into the station with what I suspect was negligible damage.  The passengers had been bused to Greenport.  As a souvenir, I picked up the milk truck’s window sign that read “No Riders”, and brought it into Second Grade show and tell the next week.  The broken glass haunted me, and eventually, it got disposed of. 

Dad hated the snow.  I can’t remember how many Christmas and post-Christmas storms he worked 72 hours straight, with little or no sleep, either in Jamaica or in Hicksville.  Some trackmen wouldn’t pick up the phone when they were needed, others were true “railroad men” who like my father, came out and slugged away in the cold, thawing switches, digging out drainage conduits, and doing what needed to be done.  Until the seventeenth year of his retirement, when he succumbed to lung cancer, he still hated snow, although in the end, he rode his own Kubota tractor to clear his one driveway, and there was some satisfaction in that.

If there was a Hell on the Long Island Rail Road in the 1960’s, that Hell was Bay Ridge.  The track was shared with the New Haven Railroad, and their heavy E-33 electric locomotives constantly crushed the Long Island tracks.  Rails spilt, rolled, spread; everything trackage can do.  The local Brooklyn kids had no compunction about throwing switches and watching a locomotive and train of loaded freight cars spill onto the ground.  Frequently, they got caught on the tracks as locomotives rolled up from behind and ran them down.  Dad always went out on these calls.  I did go down with him to see a freight train that had tossed, and sat on a grassy slope while New Haven’s ancient Fairbanks-Morse locos paddle around the wreck, and I had no camera!   Another such call came on a Saturday afternoon, and I asked him if I could go out with him.  In other circumstances, the old man would have welcomed the companionship, but this time he told me “no”, and when I begged, he sharply told me the same with more than a little emphasis.  Eventually, on his return, he told me a kid had “hopped” a New Haven train on its way to the car floats, climb the boxcar, and ..…reached up to grab the overhead catenary wires!  The arc that followed incinerated the boy, leaving a sad, stinking mess for the railroad and the local officials to clean up.  And that was typical of Bay Ridge on regular weekend during the summers.  I remember being at another event down in the Bay Ridge Yard, and watching a string of boxcars roll backwards off the car float barge and into the side of a second train. 

Of course the most horrific Bay Ridge story came in 1961, when the sewerage processing tank at the edge of the yard exploded.  A series of pre-stressed concrete tanks, immense things, held thousands of tons of raw sewerage, straight from the apartment complexes, for processing, prior to release into the bay.  For whatever reasons, either a problem of too many gangsters in the concrete, or a buildup of gases, one day a tank let go.  A tidal wave of feces, kitchen waste, urine, and bacteria, swept across the yard, only advanced by chunks of the tank wall.  The wave overturned whole freight cars like H-O trains.  Even deep into the yard, refrigerator cars were knocked off their trucks and a New Haven caboose was flipped over in the swirl of decayed debris.  The trackmen that went down to right these cars wore no protective suits or face masks.  The cranes dispatched to the scene had to deal with chunks of stone that outsized them by tons.  Sopping pools of sewerage covered the ties, and one can only hope that no hapless brakemen were wandering between the trains when all Hell broke loose.  As far as I know, I own the only pictures of that disaster; color slides taken by my father of an event that nobody would believe today.  Even a search online doesn’t give very much documentation to a horror show with which few events in Long Island Rail Road history could compare.

Dad started his career during the depression as a crossing guard, then became a draftsman, and started his climb into upper management.  It was he who installed the G5s, #39, at the Carriage House Museum in Stony Brook, in 1956.  He also recorded the transfer of #35 from railroad property to Salisbury Park, in Westbury.  Of all the steam motive power run by the company, he loved the big K4s “Pacific’s” best.  He once told me he liked the size and the movement of those engines.  Perhaps it was only the steam locomotives that really appealed to him in 43 years of loyal company service.  He never took pictures of live steam, but here and there, as I go through the slide record he shot during his tenure, I find a locomotive in the distance while his track crews did their thing.  My father never wanted the track to be the cause of any problems on the Long Island Rail Road.

Of those he worked with, there were men he admired and whose company he enjoyed, while others were expedient and despised for their personal values, ethics, or morals.  I’m sure there were plenty who disliked him as well, since he was a tough task master and expected order carried out without complaints.  Once at a company party, another man in management, fortified with liquor, quietly asked my mother, “How do you live with him?  He’s a son-of-a-bitch to work for!”  On another occasion, I recall a phone call he received at home from a worker who thought some directive was unfair, only to be blasted by, “Don’t you ever call me at home again, do you understand?” 

Those he admired and called friends included, for the record, Gabe Dobrian, another man named DeSante, George Pack and Bill Thompson.  He got along with many, and helped quite a few.  On a train trip home one night, a young Conductor looked over Dad’s pass and mine, and then came back after discharging his duties to say, “Are you Mr. Glueck of the track department?”  My father said “Yes”, to which the Conductor said, “Mr. Glueck, I want to thank you for recommending me for this job.  I was a trackman and you saw something in me.  Thank you.”  My father accepted the compliment, and it made a huge impression on his son. 

By the time 43 years of railroading had passed, the MTA had bought the Long Island.  He stayed at his post, helping to usher in the era of M1 electrics, high level platforms, and electric service up the Port Jefferson branch. He told my mother, “I have to retire now or I’ll die with my boots on”.  He wished no retirement party, but the guys threw one anyway.  He received a watch, along with one for my mother.  He sold the house in Syosset and moved to rural Maine where he raised laying hens, a few lambs, and spent quiet hours fishing from his first and only boat.  He became a member of the town ambulance squad, raised prize pumpkins, and got to see deer browsing in his field each morning.  Had he stay on a few more years, his pension would have become spectacular, but he didn’t and I think he made the right call.  One of his friends in management stayed on, got a great retirement, and died of a stroke on his first vacation, never having lived long enough to enjoy the fruits of uninterrupted tranquility.

When Dad died, we had a memorial service, heavily attended by local residents. We cremated his remains, and scattered the ashes around his gardens.  Four hundred miles away in New York, thousands of commuters raced back and forth over the rails he tended, never having known the contributions of one man who made the trains run.


One story I did not put in the piece was how he put the slow order on the K4s (#5406, my baby) prior to the derailment near Amott. Frank Aikman, who my father deeply disliked, ordered him to take the slow order off the train, but my father told him, "Mr. Aikman, if you want the order taken off, you do it. I will not!" Aikman backed down and the events that followed might well have been worse if the slow order was withdrawn.


Another funny story was at the conclusion of the Floral Park elevation.

Goodfellow wanted to make a big publicity bash about it and called out the news media to document the first train through this modern improvement. An enormous floral wreath had been constructed at great expense over the track where the first train would arrive. Instead, a freight was sent through. An oversize box car hooked the wreath and carried it the rest of the way into Jamaica, with Goodfellow screaming and raving about the loss of the expensive arrangement. I guess some shipper got a thrill out of being recognized with flowers!

Richard D. Glueck 12/16/2007  

Floundering About the LIRR:

by: Richard Glueck

Our entire family had passes on the Long Island Rail Road.  It was “one of the perks” that you got when your father was in management in those days.  I’m sure I didn’t use the pass in those days as much as I would today, but that is the perspective time gives you.

Until 1956, we lived in Mineola.  I was born in Nassau Hospital, which probably explains a great deal about my love of trains.  From 1957 until 1973, we lived in Syosset, within a few blocks of the railroad; just enough for good, healthy walk   My brother, 11 years my senior, would check out the timetables and figure out how to work the trains so he could take his little brother fishing at Oyster Bay.  We’d entrain with our fishing rods and a tackle box at Syosset, go into Mineola, and change trains for the Bay.  If I recall correctly, since this was post steam era, the trains were hauled by a gray and orange RS1, long before “Dashing Dan” appeared on the scene.  A regular Conductor on those trains was a man named Dan Harrington, and a nicer man you’d be hard pressed to find.  Mr. Harrington was always interested in what we were going after, where we were going to rent a boat, and wished us good luck.  Frequently, we’d time our return trip so he’d be on the return run from the Bay to Mineola. 

When we got to Oyster Bay, we’d detrain and walk down the yard while the locomotive was brought down, uncoupled, and turned on the turn table.  The watering column stood in the yard yet, not having been cut down in the rush to “modernize”.  The whole place smelled of hot ties and creosote, warm air, old bait, and Diesel oil.  From there, we’d walk down to the park and rent a boat or perhaps walk up to the beach area near Jakobsen’s Shipyard.  That place always intrigued me because of the stacks of tug parts, cabins, wheel houses, and sheet steel.  They almost always had something interesting in the berth, whether it was the H.M.S. “Bounty”, built for the film, or the converted sub-chaser turned yacht, “Argo”.  The beach was a joke, since it was mostly broken clam and oyster shells, or broken concrete with hunks of twisted re-bar sticking out of it! 

My brother took some of his earnings from driving deliveries for Jackson Pharmacy in Syosset, and purchased a box of sandworms.  Then we’d pile into a wooden row boat and he’d row us out into the harbor to wet a hook.  He taught me how to set up a flounder spreader and bait the hooks so the worms didn’t catch you with their sharp, hooked, pincer jaws.  They were nasty things!  And we fished.  Oh, how we fished!  I doubt there was anything as much fun as catching flounders from a rowboat with your big brother, then occasionally stopping for a drink of Pepsi (out of the bottle) and scarfing down some ten-cent chocolate Hostess cupcakes.  This was paradise.  It was rare that we didn’t catch two or three dozen flounder, and Lord knows how many sea robins, begalls, and sand sharks.  We tossed back what we didn’t want and strung the rest out on a chain to bring home.

When the fishing part of the day was done, two very brown, tired, but happy boys would head back to the Oyster Bay yard.  One trip I specifically recall put us in the P54 combine at the rear of the outgoing train.  Dan Harrington had us hang our burlap bag of fish in the baggage section, while we sat in the passenger compartment on the dark green leatherette seats.  Mr. Harrington told me that he had something for me if I wanted it after he made his way through the train.  When he returned, he handed me a huge rubber banded wad of punched ticket stubs, collected after the coach string had made its outbound trip from Jamaica to the Bay and on the return.  It must have held 600 ticket checks in every conceivable color of which they were printed.  It was the only time I remember purple ticket checks amongst the more familiar reds, greens, and oranges.  I kept that wad of ticket checks from that trip until I was into high school.  To this day, I have no idea what the different colors represented, but I remember Dan Harrington, and I remember changing trains at Mineola.  From that point on, the best part of the trip was over.

For the record, we filleted the flounders back at home and yes, we ate the pure white meat.  My brother took me fishing many times afterward, too, often at Bayville, on Stehli’s Beach, sometimes down at Quogue, trapping blue claw crabs in the canal, and each time was a great experience with wonderful memories.  But I must say with all honesty, the train trips to  Oyster Bay, the train ride out and back, and a fine Conductor who was happy to see two young boys doing what boys should be doing, made the “fish trains” special.  And I wonder if boys today have that same chance with men who represented the Long Island Rail Road in the manner of great railroaders, like Dan Harrington?

Richard D. Glueck 01/17/2008