Dispatches from a Cargo Cultist

[Lindorm]

Elseforum, I posted a little account of a duty turn I had a few days ago that turned out ot be a bit more adventurous than I had bargained for. Since it might perhaps amuse you, too, O Toadfish, I thought it best to also repost it here.

To recapitulate from my introductory thread, I work as a train driver (US: Locomotive engineer) for a Swedish freight operating company. I am based in Stockholm, and work trains over most of southern and middle Sweden -mail to Malmö, Sundsvall and Göteborg, Intermodal trains with containers and trailers to Norrköping, Nässjö, Gävle and Hallsberg, wagonload freight to Hallsberg, Västerås and Gävle, lots of local services and shunting in the greater Stockholm area and so on.


Here it goes:

===================
This was indeed an adventoruos night and day...

I started out on monday afternoon by going to Hallsberg. There, I readied a loco and picked up my train in the marshalling yard. (By the way, the new batch of shunters in the marshalling yard are all young, cute, blonde females. I predict that some trains with pining drivers will be late departing the yard... And traditionalists will of course lament that the traditional shunter's greeting of "grmblgrf" is now replaced by a cheery "Hi!" )

Aaaaanyhow, I got underway and started driving towards Gävle. The route I took from Hallsberg to Gävle was a somewhat circuitious route through southern Bergslagen, a area formerly full of heavy industry and mining, now a rustbelt with a few huuuuge hi-tech industrial megacomplexes here and there, such as Sandviken that manufactures tools, dies and special steels. The route goes through the deep woods, is often single-track only and is actually very fun to drive.

Once I had left the area of Hallsberg Line Control and entered the outskirts of the Stockholm Control area, things started to go badly. My train was delayed for a few meets here and there, and I was then held in Sala for almost 30 minutes to let a delayed passenger train pass me. Whatever happened to the golden rule of on-time trains always having priority? Grrr... As I left Stockholm Control and entered the Gävle Control Area in Avesta-Krylbo (The Avesta in Avesta Polarit Steel, btw), things started looking better again: I called up the line controller to talk to him about an entirely different matter, and then the controller asked me if I had a heavy train tonight. My reply was "nah, only about 300 metres and 600 tons, so it's a sports model. "

-"And the loco is running fine?"
-"Oh, sure, purring like a cat"
-"Well, then, I cannae be arsed with having ye go intae the passing loop at Dalgränsen and wait for 7538 (a passenger train) to pass ye by. I'll let ye run as far as it goes."

In other words, he let me run on clear signals all the way towards Gävle, and I soon was over an hour early. Things looked better and better, I was heading for an early relief and then to bed, and it was a joy to drive a train.

Until I came to Hagaström, all of two minutes running time from Gävle, my terminal station. The exit signal was at stop. I did have the time to think "huh?" before the cab phone started rining. It was Gävle control, telling me that the catenary in the Gävle central area had failed, and they had to switch off the power to the whole area while the electrical repair crew did damage asessment. Meanwhile, no trains could pass through Gävle at the moment. But the electrical repair crew was on their way, promise.

So I waited.

And waited.

And called Darlica on the phone to while away my boredom.

And waited.

So, then I called up the line controllers to hear if they had any prognosis for when things could get moving again. As it turned out, they had actually managed to sectionalise the catenary and clear two tracks for service, but then the first train through ( A SJ AB-operated passenger train BTW) had managed to pass a signal at danger and then end up in de-energized territory, completely blocking the two newly opened tracks in the station. Yippie-Kay-Yay, etc. The mood of the controller for the Gävle  local area could best be summed up as "We are NOT amused"

About 45 minutes later, they managed to clear a path for me into the freight yard, where I could finally uncouple my wagons and hand over the loco to a waiting driver, who was supposed to use that loco for a train back towards Hallsberg.

I was by then about two hours late, and had been waiting for three hours to go a few kilometres. Ironically enough, the last hour was spent literally looking at the window of the lodging room I was to sleep overnight in. I called up our company control and informed them that my rest period would be too short for me to pick up the train I was supposed to pick up next morning, so we agreed on a time where I would be officially awake again and call in to them

As it turned out, when I called them up the next day, my ordinary train (a intermodal train from the very far north of Sweden) was so late, that it had actually just arrived in the freight yard and was more or less parked outside my window. I relieved the preceeding driver, and got on my merry way, if "a bit" late.

Still, it was a beautiful morning, the sun was shining, and the weather was really warm. I had to wait for a while and let a few other trains pass on the single-track sections at Furuvik and Skutskär, but that was only to be expected, since I was so late.

And then, the phone went off. It was Gävle Line Control, who told me that there seemed to be something wrong with my train. In fact, a trackside detector device had reported sticking brakes on eight axles of my train, including two high-level alerts (where the brakes have been sticking enough for the temperature of the wheelset to go above 450 degrees celsius)!

So, according to our procedures, I brought the train to a careful stop at a convenient place -in this case, just outside Marma, a interlocking and passenger halt in the middle of nowhere. And then I had to check on the sticking brakes. Of course, this was one of the 620-metre trains. Of course, the axles that set off the detector where around axle 84, 91 and so on -almost all the way back. Arrrgh! Of course, most of the sticking brakes were false alarms, but two were actually serious enough for me to cut out the brakes on those two wagons. I then had to re-do some essential paperwork, calculating the new brake force available for my train, and new top speed etc, as well as call in a damage report to my company operations centre. Eventually, I could move on again, about two hours late.

Aaaaaand on my way in to the godforsaken municipiality of Tierp ( a place so depressing they actually have to pay a hardship bonus to the few passenger drivers who are stationed there), Line Control called me up again, and told me that my train had set off a detector again.

ARRRRGHHHH!!!!

So, same procedure again. This time, there was only a false alert, thankfully. When I talked to line control and my company control again, we did exchange a few "robust" jokes as to how far I was going to make it this time, and if the floor of a cab was equivalent to a hotel room when it came to claiming back lodging expenses from the company.

I eventually ended up back home in Tomteboda goods depot outside Stockholm, where the depot driver greeted me with a "Where on earth did you come from?", about three hours late.

Oh well, There will be some nice overtime compensation for all this, so I suppose it wasn't all that bad. And the drive up to Gävle was very nice! I even saw some buzzards hunt mice in the fields outside Tillberga in the evening dusk. And I did see a bunch of dancing herons on my way down from Gävle today, which was also fun.

But I was glad when I could finally climb down from the loco this afternoon!
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I should perhaps mention that there are also those days when everything runs so smoooothly that you are home and have poured the weekend's first whisky before your scheduled booking-off time in the depot.  But mishaps tend to be more amusing!

[beagle]

-"Well, then, I cannae be arsed with having ye go intae the passing loop at Dalgränsen and wait for 7538 (a passenger train) to pass ye by. I'll let ye run as far as it goes."

You have Glaswegians in Sweden? 

The overheating axle reminds me of a cartoon with the captain and first officer of an oil tanker looking out of the bridge down the huge length of the ship to the bow and one's saying to the other "I heard a tanker ran aground, I wonder if it's us".

[Griffin NoName]

I didn't realise the complexity of train driving. I thought they were just like extra long cars :mrgeen:

[Darlica]

-"Well, then, I cannae be arsed with having ye go intae the passing loop at Dalgränsen and wait for 7538 (a passenger train) to pass ye by. I'll let ye run as far as it goes."

You have Glaswegians in Sweden? 

Not really but I'd say they are the Swedish equivalence of Glaswegians.

[beagle]

Hard to visualize...

Sort of blonde, blue-eyed, well-scrubbed, polite, sober Glaswegians?

[Darlica]

Well hopefully sober since the kind of work a line controller do is quite demanding. But that's about it. 

[anthrobabe]

What an absolutely facinating story-- and the job sounds fantastic (oh all jobs have their bad moments) but this one just sounds great.

[Lindorm]

Hard to visualize...

Sort of blonde, blue-eyed, well-scrubbed, polite, sober Glaswegians?

Sure! Just like all britons wear bowler hats, have pictures of the queen on their living room wall and say "Gor blimey, Guv´nor" a lot!

Actually, the dialect of the province of Gästrikland is rather special, and I have no idea of how to translate it into english, so I just used a dialect marker. As for politeness in their manner of speech, I suppose that depends on whether you consider "fucking arse" a term of endearment or not. Apparently, the locals do so at least.

What an absolutely facinating story-- and the job sounds fantastic (oh all jobs have their bad moments) but this one just sounds great.

Glad you liked it! The job does have it's points, both good and bad. Fortunately, the good points outweigh the bad ones by far, at least for me. And the job does provide me with some incredible story material from time to time -not least when I was a metro train driver and had to interact with the great unwashed public. Remind me sometime to tell you the true story of how I pleased three teenage girls in one night with a roll of gaffer tape! Or the tale about the bag of dynamite. Or how a dead shark ended up in the booking hall of a station.

Come to think of it, how did I survive all those years anyway? 

[beagle]

My vote is for the gaffer tape story.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

My vote is for the gaffer tape story.

Me too.

Excellent tale, by the way!

[The Meromorph]

Gaffer Tape! Gaffer Tape!  Lindorn, Do Gaffer Tape!

[Griffin NoName]

And another for the gaffer tape !

[Darlica]

tsk,tsk tsk.

You smutty minds!


Nobody wants to hear about the Shark (you do realise that sharks does not belong in the natural fauna around here? right?) But teenage girls and gaffer tape... I say!

[beagle]

Sharks are so 1990s. Ever since Damien Hirst you can't move in the cities here without tripping over a decaying shark in a tank of formaldehyde (Probably why Mr Hirst lives in a big old house in the country now).

Now about that gaffer tape.

[pieces o nine]

You don't happen to have any anecdotes about teenaged sharks and gaffer tape, do you?