Seven Sixty-Five

“I have my bachelor pad, my ’72 Camero with the muffler held on by a coat hanger. I have a girlfriend, a case of beer for the weekend, a stereo with column speakers, I’m making $7.65 an hour and life doesn’t get any better. I don’t want anything to change - EVER!”

That’s what Kevin said. We were both working for CP Rail, and to put it in perspective, minimum wage was $2.75 an hour and lots of people were making only that much. Now you may not think of $7.65 an hour as being a living wage, but in 1978 you could rent a local apartment for $200 a month, and there was little tax - in other words for an 18-year-old with no mortgage or kids, life was sweet. For Kevin, he could set this ride into cruise mode on into the future and stay happy for a long, long time. 

We were working as “B” men, that meant summer help mainly, supplemental to the three men required to work every “section” on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Peterborough. Our section was from Havelock to Bewdley, and what a section crew did, was maintain their track, and team up with other crews to do larger track building projects. A large team of men was required at times, because of the sheer weight of rail against human muscle. The usual kind of rail we dealt with was called “one hundred pound rail” because every one foot, weighted one hundred pounds. To carry a piece of rail you were installing, took a lineup of men in concert, transporting the track with something called “rail tongs”. Manpower was also needed to shovel gravel, lay in the creosote-soaked rail ties, and to pound in the spikes. If you lined up a bunch of spikes and started them in the hole, there were some guys so strong, they would come after you and with massive human force, drive in those spikes with one single blow per spike. You might want to stand back for that one. Manpower ruled the day. If you were young and able you were guaranteed a job. 

​A good part of the summer work was fencing. That was seasonal because it could not be done in winter. Fencing was necessary because of the vast expanse of track that ran by farmer’s fields, and you had to be able to keep the cows off the tracks. If cows were loose, thousands of pounds of rail was not able to slow down quickly, and hitting cows was very expensive. This kind of work put you through the roughest of bush. I can remember one section neck deep in swamp with a million backflies and mosquitoes buzzing around my head, wondering how I had ever signed up for that particular kind of misery. Fencing was all-hands-on-deck kind of work and it made the regular section men cranky and short with anybody who was inexperienced. You would be hammering down barbed wire in the worst of conditions, with the full-timers yelling at you the whole time. None of them wanted the kind of heat that would descend on them from above if cows got hit on their section of track.

The in-between maintenance work was less intense, more like plugging holes in a dike. A section of track could get compromised over time by the sheer tonnage of trains passing over it. Track sections were 39 feet long. In between lengths of track was a tiny gap and every time a wheel rolled over that spot, it would “click”. Those tiny clicks over many wheels over time would be sufficient vibration to make a small dip in the joint, almost indiscernable at first, but you can feel it riding a train, that is why a train not only clickety-clacks, but rocks slightly as the wheels ride the tiny divots side to side.  A section crew, would sight down the rail to which joints where sunken, and boost them up to level as necessary. You would jack up the ties and tamp down more gravel from underneath, replacing loose or missing spikes in the process. 

B men like us did the grunt work. The full-time section men, would find a shed somewhere to play a card game named “cats”, and leave the B-men to do the real thing. They would keep a close tab on close-circuit radios for where and when the supervisors were scheduled to arrive so that they could make a good showing when those white hard-hats passed by. Most of these guys were local. Coming from places like Bewdley and Havelock in those days meant “country” in ways that few might understand. Basically, I was working with a bunch of hillbillies. But for Kevin, this was life at its finest. The discussion all day would be drinking and f***ing and since most of these guys would get stinking drunk every single night after work you could surmise that there was lots of the former going on and very little of the latter. 

And then, it happened… Specifically, ribbon rail happened. One day out of the blue, a big train arrived with no prior announcement. It was not a passenger train, or a freight train, it was a monolithic steaming beast right out of the tale of John Henry. What it could do, was lay long beds of track, stoke in the ties and spike them, and weld together the succession of track it laid down, all while rolling along slowly without stopping. The name “Ribbon Rail” derived from the fact that the welded track was seamless and laid down like a roll of ribbon. This massive machine did away with the need for any manpower. It didn’t take long for that innovation to shake down through the system. That summer, everyone was laid off except for a skeleton crew of one man per section to keep an eye on things.  

“I have my bachelor pad, my ’72 Camero with the muffler held on by a coat hanger. I have a girlfriend, a case of beer for the weekend, a stereo with column speakers, I’m making $7.65 an hour and life doesn’t get any better. I don’t want anything to change - EVER!”

I don’t know what ever became of Kevin. I guess he did what everyone else does when radical changes in technology or a massive downsizing hits you. You adust however you can. You may laugh at the idea of $7.65 an hour being someone’s gravy train, but it serves as a reminder to me, of just how fast life can change. You are sitting all comfortable in your cozy little world, and then.... 

“The only constant, is change”, they say. Back then I really had no idea that ribbon rail was just a small taste of much more to come.