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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.
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