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Re: Perhaps THE closest call at a grade crossing you will EVER see
Author: Jim700
Date: 02-20-2012 - 00:20
Ted Grande Wrote:
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> Fusee in the back seat of the car. They stopped
> close enough to toss one in. Would make a nice
> fire to brew a new cup of coffee.
In the early '70s I was switching the Dock Yard side of the SP&S Portland Hoyt Street Yard on the midnight shift. My ALCO S-2 was just on the city-center side of the Front Street crossing and we had a handful of empty flats as a handle to pull one of the tracks. Our pin puller had the crossing lit up like a Christmas tree with fusees because of the poor visibility of the empty flats on the rainy night. One car came flying northward down the otherwise empty street giving the impression that the driver was totally oblivious to the blocked crossing. While wildly swinging a fusee the pin puller went out into the lane of traffic to try to get the idiot driver's attention and in the process nearly got hit as the driver swerved to a stop at the last instant. The most recent generations of rails are probably unaware that fusees used to be equipped with a nail in the bottom. It came into very good use this night as the switchman was so pissed at nearly getting hit that he planted the spike on the lit fusee right in the middle of the hood of the offending car.
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> Fusee in the back seat of the car. They stopped
> close enough to toss one in. Would make a nice
> fire to brew a new cup of coffee.
In the early '70s I was switching the Dock Yard side of the SP&S Portland Hoyt Street Yard on the midnight shift. My ALCO S-2 was just on the city-center side of the Front Street crossing and we had a handful of empty flats as a handle to pull one of the tracks. Our pin puller had the crossing lit up like a Christmas tree with fusees because of the poor visibility of the empty flats on the rainy night. One car came flying northward down the otherwise empty street giving the impression that the driver was totally oblivious to the blocked crossing. While wildly swinging a fusee the pin puller went out into the lane of traffic to try to get the idiot driver's attention and in the process nearly got hit as the driver swerved to a stop at the last instant. The most recent generations of rails are probably unaware that fusees used to be equipped with a nail in the bottom. It came into very good use this night as the switchman was so pissed at nearly getting hit that he planted the spike on the lit fusee right in the middle of the hood of the offending car.
