Category: I’ve Been Working on the Railroad

That’s what a Los Angeles driver asked me when he followed me into a mall parking lot after reading my license plate frame that reads:                               I’D RATHER BE ON A BACKUP MALLET.  “I’m really into croquet but I’ve never heard […]

I was now a switchman, a professional railroader with my favorite railroad. I loved working there but it didn’t take long to find out that it’s a lot easier to railroad when you’re a high school kid doing fun things in the cab of the Elsie than it is having to deal with the reality […]

Back in the 1940 and 50s, railroads often ran special passenger trains for railroad fan groups and Railway Club of Southern California, Railroad Boosters and other groups frequently chartered trains that ran over interesting railroad routes.  One of the favorite features of a railroad fan trip was having the train stop at interesting locations for […]

One day in 1949, I wormed my way into the nerve center of the locomotive—THE CAB—where the engineer controls the movement of the engine and train. After 1905, when Santa Fe took Death Valley Scotty on his chartered train from LA to Chicago in about forty-four hours at speeds that sometimes exceeded 100 MPH, they […]

I guess a bio is supposed to start at the beginning—so, I was born in 1933 in Los Angeles and raised in Inglewood a couple of miles east of where LAX is now. Having started life that long ago, I sometimes have a hard time understanding what my daughter Melissa is talking about; like, “this […]