January, 1961, Paddington Yard

It is two o’clock in the morning on a winter’s night in 1961 in Paddington Yard which was in the process of being transformed into the ultra-modern Symington Hump and Marshaling yards. I am checking cars for my supervisor who is miles away in the Fort Rouge yards. I walk along the top of the boxcars on track B2. As I come to end of the car, I note down the number of the car on my right on track B1 and the number of the car on my left on B3. I have already recorded the number of the car I am walking on as I ran/stepped across the space between the cars. I will do this to the end of the track. Each track holds about a hundred cars which are bonded. As they are released from “bondage”, train crews need to know their location and pull them out of the lineup to be put into a new lineup of cars and made into a train which then is cleared through customs for shipping to the U.S.A.

At age 18 one often feels invulnerable! I walk along a foot-wide path of either boards or steel grating along the middle of the top of the boxcar. Depending on the type of boxcar, I am between 5 to 7 metres above the ground. My switchman’s lamp is looped around my left arm above the elbow. In my left hand is my checker’s pad for writing down the numbers. On this pad are 3 30 cm long strips of cardboard which parallel each other. On each 10 cm-wide strip I have entered a track number. In correct sequence I enter the number of the car and the initials of the railroad company it belongs to from each track. I am checking 3 cars at a time. When I get to the end of the track or if there is a long break between the cars I am walking on, I climb down the ladder located at the end of each car and resume checking when I reach the next string of cars. 

If the night is long and I am tired, I sometimes get careless. This is where the invulnerability factor kicks in.On two separate occasions I stepped off the end of a car only to discover there was no other car to run or jump onto. In the first case I was fortunate in that after a 6 metre drop, I fortunately landed correctly into about a foot of snow and rolled . The second time I landed in a gondola with a load of fine sand which cushioned my landing.  Had I suffered a broken ankle or leg or other injury, I would have probably frozen to death before anyone would be able to find me.

I do 3 tracks from west to east. I return on B5, checking B4 and B6 on either side of me as I walk along the tops of the cars. When I reach the end of the cars, I start checking B7 and B8 while walking at ground level and checking the cars to either side of me.  It is cold. It is dark. It is silent except for the sounds of my footsteps crunching on the snow or crushed rock and the sound of my breathing.  I work quickly and efficiently. When I reach the east end again. I walk north across a vast expanse of empty tracks, the soon to be finished Local yard where smaller trains will be assembled for delivery to communities in Manitoba. In the West yard, I will repeat the process 3 more times and by then I will be back at the switch-men’s shack. I will have covered 10 kilometres, 7 of them high above the ground.

 In the shack there is a company phone which will enable me to contact my chief in Fort Rouge. If he can arrange a ride for me, I will be back in the yard office there in time for them to edit my checks and get them to the switching crew which will then head out to Paddington to start pulling out cars from the various tracks. If not, I will have to wait for the crew to arrive and they will have to look through my checks to find the cars they need to locate and pull out. This makes the process longer and may entail overtime for them and for me. We don’t mind the over-time.

At the end of the shift or even later, depending on the amount of over-time, I walk another 2 kilometres to catch a bus back to down-town at Portage and Main. Here, if I am lucky, I transfer to another bus to get home. If not it's a couple of kilometres hike to home! At home I crawl into bed for a well-deserved sleep after being up all night.