For all of 1974 the only meal I ate was breakfast. Railroad brakemen were called to work on eight hours rest, so it was always virtual morning when the phone rang; time enough for scrambled eggs and hash browns. The C&NW Railroad was lumbering through a frantic busy streak in the middle of a nationwide fuel shortage that sidelined truckers.
Twentysomethings like me were rare in a nepotistic family trade and we knew it. What didn’t we know? Within a few years the Great Western, Minneapolis & St Louis and Omaha routes would be gobbled up by the Union Pacific. Brakemen and firemen would soon disappear from the ranks forever. There wasn’t much need for union-protected steam locomotive jobs in the age of diesel. The familiar red and yellow cabooses of the boomer years vanished overnight, along with the elegant art deco F7 streamliners lording over the Great Plains.
It was another lucky break for me when an inside tip at a ‘74 Super Bowl party led to a paying job at the Chicago and Northwestern railroad. I applied beside the sons and nephews of CNW switchmen, brakemen and conductors, passed the hearing test, and for the next few years, the world flew by us in the blur of one breakfast after another. Summoned around the clock to meet an explosive demand for grain, oil, cars and anhydrous ammonia, we were bound for perpetual breakfast.
Before sundown on Aug 8, 1974 our Omaha local pulled off the mainline onto the Kasota siding for the hot northbound Viking fruit express roaring in from the Central Valley of California. I waited on the caboose rear platform puffing on a cigarette of uncertain origin blasting Elton John’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” on the boom box, watching the sunset when an enormous explosion lit up the dusk; boom! The grain elevator at the crossing blew up even as the last few boxcars of bland Central Valley fruit and veggies passed by screaming northbound.
What we figured out later at the bar? The Viking’s lead unit had thrown a burning cinder toward the grain silo West of the mainline. We stood watching, dumbfounded as the mainline rail heated to a red hot glow, bowing out of alignment as the sun slipped out of view. We were taxied to the Boston Hotel at St. James, Minnesota. Across the village square was a trolley car bar where we sat sipping Christian Brothers brandy as Nixon resigned on the bar tv again and again, until we crawled away from the wreckage of that moment in time.
At breakfast we got word that Jim Galt, an acquaintance working at the grain elevator on that day, had died in the inferno. Held over until the track was repaired, our crew deadheaded on the next Viking express northbound; home again for breakfast.