Hudson Valley

Hudson Valley of New York State

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Posted with the permission of Ron Vassallo Webmaster/Trustee O&WRHS

Our second O&W Day at the Mamakating Depot will be held on Sunday, April 24, 2005 between 9 & 5 at the Former O&W Depot, 1 VFW Road, in Mamakating, NY.

The view from High View Tunnel: The summer of '54 on an O&W track gang
by RON BRITZKE

The New York, Ontario & Western Railway was mortally ill in the summer of 1954 when I went to work with the High View track gang. The "Old & Weary" had less than three years of its poverty-stricken history remaining. The handwriting was on the wall near the door.

I spent a grueling but happy six months in that golden summer and lingering autumn, wielding a shovel with a handful of dedicated veterans as we tried to keep the deteriorating track in a semblance of operating shape for the few freights that rattled past.

They talked often about the railroad's increasingly bleak future. Would the Government step in and save the 0&W? Could fresh business or capital be found? "They'll never let it die," they assured each other. As their world crumbled around them, they looked the other way and worked harder.

Something of the love those longtime employees felt for the rickety railroad rubbed off on me, and I shared their disappointment heartbreak for many when the rusty old line went under in 1957.

Life was bittersweet in 1954. I had a freshly minted college degree, but the looming military draft made the future uncertain. I needed temporary employment and found it at 0&W headquarters in Middletown, N.Y. A summer track laborer was needed at High View on the Orange-Sullivan county border in southeastern New York near my home.

I reported to the section shanty on a bright, hot June Monday, meeting a reserved - even dubious - reception from Jim, the grizzled veteran foreman, and Bill, one of two laborers on regular duty. The other hand, Jerry, was ill that day. Jim and Bill both had been with the O&W;about four decades, and the railroad was the central force of their lives. Jerry was younger and had been on the gang 10 years.

Jim, Bill, and I wheeled out our ancient motorcar in a ritual that was to become familiar as the weeks passed. Jim would start the engine with a crank - an uncertain procedure, particularly in cooler weather. I never looked underneath at the power plant, but it obviously had few cylinders (perhaps only one) and fired at about every other milepost. The exhaust was deafening; and at every tenth revolution, a shattering backfire disturbed the tranquility of the weed-cloaked right of way.

Once this temperamental conveyance had warmed up, to the accompaniment of much fiddling with choke and throttle, we boarded and were off after Jim had called the dispatcher to get the whereabouts of the morning south- bound freight. "Past the Manor at 5:23," he'd announce gravely to us. This meant the train had gone through Livingston Manor on schedule and we had time to run from High View down to Winterton, the southern end of our section.

At Winterton, we took to an unused siding next to a boarded-up creamery - symbol of a vanished source of O&W business. Eventually, the train would appear, usually with two or three F3 units trailed by too few revenue cars.

With the main clear, we'd proceed to the site of that day's work. It was mostly the same - raising joints. Since the O&W was not ballasted on our section (or on most others), the procedure was simple. Bill inserted our big jack under a rail - one of several tasks he guarded with a jealous passion - and raised the track, exposing cavities under 10 or 12 ties on each side of the joint.

The foreman knelt about 50 yards up the right of way and sighted down the rail, gesturing until the jack was high enough. We filled in under each raised tie with cinders from trackside, tamping the fresh material with a downward stroke of foot on shovel. Then it was on to the next joint to repeat the task.

One day, as I watched a train approach and a line of empty Buffalo Creek flour box cars dancing like drunken sailors over a section we'd just raised, I remarked cynically to Jerry that I saw no visible improvement from our labor. He just grinned and I got a sour look from Bill. We went on raising joints and the trains stayed on the crooked, wavering rails, so maybe we were doing something productive after all.

It was sweaty, dirty work. The cinders raised clouds of sooty dust. The right of way was carpeted with a deep blanket of the black stuff - a legacy from countless passages of Consolidations, Ten-Wheelers, Camelbacks, and other steamers which preceded the O&W's small fleet of diesels.

Yet there was no drudgery in it for me and no reason to think about the process of labor. It was automatic. particularly after my muscles hardened. I recall working a section of track on the north side of the High View tunnel after lunch one day, letting my mind wander and being brought to reality in total disbelief as Jim ordered us to pack it in for the day. Three hours had passed like 3 minutes.

IN RETROSPECT, those days may not have been as enjoyable as they now seem through the mist of more than 20 years. But I can summon pleasant memories in abundance today . . . long-spanned gliders from the airport at Wurtsboro wheeling silently above us in the cloudless sky; the riotous racket of mating chipmunks racing through the dry leaves; the sun's first glow piercing the ground mist on a damp September morning.

And things were seldom dull on the O& W There came a day when Jim, who was somewhat hard of hearing, knelt to resight a joint after we had raised it and removed the jack. A freight rounded the curve behind him. We called a warning. Engrossed in his calculations, he missed it. We waved with increasing vigor. He finally looked back. By this time, the train was fairly close. He retreated in haste and jerked his arm up and down twice as the engine passed a signal for the engineer to blow the airhorn next time. The crew grinned down at us, but I gave the hogger a middle-finger salute, thinking that he damn well should have hit the horn as a courtesy to an aging man whose knees had long since lost youth's agility.

I had only one contact with an O&W train crew, and that was a memorable occasion during my third day at work. We were cutting brush near the High View station when a train crept out of the tunnel and stopped. The engineer and fireman climbed down and told us they had hit a rock in the dark, dank 3856-foot bore. The prow of the diesel was scarred and a beam was hanging underneath.

I listened but took no part in the discussion that followed. I was very much a junior member of the O&W enterprise - summer fodder to be laid off when snow fell. I'd tried to match the pace of Bill and Jerry, stopping to rest only when they did, but my physical distress in those first days was obvious. It was commented upon frequently, particularly by the tireless, wiry Bill. I cheerfully admitted, when asked, that, yes, my ass was dragging, and, no, college was never like this. But in the first week, I was still a nonentity.

Voices in the huddle near the engine rose. "I wouldn't crawl under that damned thing for $10,000," Bill ex-claimed, glancing up at the three F3's muttering like pre-historic beasts in the sunshine. Noting that the diesels and about half of the train were on a downgrade, Jerry agreed. The train crew expressed concern that the dangling beam would catch in a switch, but they weren't going to crawl around in the cinders.

A ready-made chance to be a hero! "I'll take a look," I volunteered in the calmest voice I could muster. Five sets of eyes focused hastily on me and I read astonishment in each. I wriggled between the pilot and the leading truck, passing a weak joke to Jerry before disappearing into Stygian blackness and monstrous diesel rumblings: "Wedge your foot in front of that wheel if she starts to roll." Luckily, the beam hung by a thread and I soon pulled it free. I sensed a reluctant respect in the manner of my fellow workers, which lasted only until my next foulup at some trivial task which a degree in journalism did not cover.

After this incident, an enduring uneasiness remained with me the rest of my days on the gang. We went into the tunnel to clear out the fallen rock and found it about a third of the way through. It was the size of a tabletop. Fortunately the slab was 4'/2 feet wide and had dropped between the rails. Otherwise we and the train crew might have been waiting for the hook and wrecking crews from Middletown and Scranton.

Scanning that huge fall of slate, I recalled the crashing echoes from the wide-open exhaust of our motorcar against the tunnel walls. What if a backfire shook a big rock down from the roof? The car's canopy was one-eighth-inch plywood. Nothing ever happened, but the twice-daily trips through the tunnel held an element of suspense I could have done without.

The tunnel was also Jim's rainy-day work backup. We occasionally sharpened tools in the shanty during storms, but most of our implements were worn beyond a fine hone anyway. So we cleared rock from the tunnel ditches when it rained. The bore was only partially lined, and the brittle slate of the roof crumbled with monotonous regularity.

The yearly rockfall was substantial enough to require attention from the Scranton "extra gang" every winter. I met this crew once, when we changed a rail early in my stay. Most of the extras were young, and of Polish or Slavic extraction, I judged. They did their work with insolent expertise, drank Finkle's Tavern dry of beer during their overnight stay at Summitville, then moved on.

Late in the summer, we were ordered into the next section northward - Mountaindale - to help repair a lumber-yard siding. We wound up almost needing repair ourselves.

With the motorcar showing a fine turn of speed, Jim whisked us down Mamakating Mountain to a rendezvous with the neighboring gang at Summitville Junction. As we entered the deserted, weed-covered yard, I spotted a switch lined against us. Assuming that Jim had seen it too, and was going to stop, I said nothing. A yell from Jerry broke the silence.

Jim, who ran the car with one hand on the throttle and the other on a huge brake lever, slammed on the binders far too late. As we slid at a brisk pace up to the closed switch, Jerry and Bill bailed out. Glancing at the switch-stands, adjoining tracks, and other impedimenta whizzing by, I stayed aboard with the captain. We hit the switch with a crash as the tools, Jim, and I bounced around the interior of the car. The ensuing silence was total.

Jim's embarrassment was evident, and he covered it by reprimanding the bruised Bill and Jerry for cowardice in jumping. Bill indignantly responded with a hair raising apocryphal tale of a section hand who had failed to jump when a motorcar derailed and took a 6-foot pry bar through the groin - pointed end first.

Thankfully, the Summitville-based gang had not yet appeared from an inspection trip up the Ellenville branch and we rerailed the motorcar with relative ease. We had everything shipshape when they arrived, and I soon dismissed the incident - but not the tale of the unfortunate gandy dancer and his pierced private parts.

Derailing a motorcar must be a rarity, but it happened again a few weeks later. Our foreman was nearing the end of a long career and he was tired. He overlooked another switch, this one on the passing track halfway up the northern side of the mountain. I saw it coming, yelled, calculated that we wouldn't stop in time, and stepped out - away from the pointed pry bars.

This time there were no trackside obstacles. I landed on my feet at about 20 mph, took one gigantic running step, and plunged forward. As I glided toward a landing in the forgiving softness of the cinders, I looked up at Jim, Jerry, and Bill clutching whatever handholds were avail-able. They looked at me, soaring in midair beside them. This time the cacophony of bouncing tools was almost drowned out by their raucous laughter as the car hopped to an ignominious halt and I picked myself out of the long furrow I'd plowed with my nose. Again, nobody was hurt.

The amusement died when we tried to rerail the car. This time we couldn't do it. A grim-faced Jim had to call for help on the track phone, and everyone from Middletown to Cadosia. l must have heard about our mishap. The Summitville gang tried without success to hide their grins as they helped to heave our conveyance back on the rails, but their nonchalance was not deceiving. It was a cruel blow for Jim, and I could read it in the tight set of his jaw.

Our section went up, down, and through Mamakating Mountain, so we worked in a sylvan setting into which the right of way almost blended. The O&W's efforts to keep the tracks clear involved some ancient scythes and a curious contrivance which loomed up one summer morning. It was a motorcar from Middletown, pulling a trailer. On it were perched a workman, a large tank, and a hand pump.

The gentleman in charge of the apparatus Railed away, and the nozzle produced a feeble stream which he aimed, at the profusion of poison sumac in the ditches. Jim glanced with grim amusement as the apparition passed, then asked me, "What's in that tank, boy?" When I hazarded that it must be weed-killer, he retorted without elaboration: "That's liquid fertilizer." As the days passed,'' I saw what he meant. A few leaves turned brown at the edges, but the undergrowth mostly flourished. Apparently the cash-poor railroad had watered the stuff to stretch it, and the water more than offset the poison.

The High View station guarded & sunken, rusting sidetrack which was all but hidden in weeds. I was surprised one morning to see a gondola parked there, I hadn't even been sure the switch worked. I peered over the side at a half load of new ties, fragrant with creosote. It took Jim hours of amortizing just to decide which of the crumbling ties on our section needed > replacing most. We could have used up the whole allotment within sight of our shanty.

This led to my only attempt at spiking. Bill was adept at it, smashing the spikes home with a few well-directed blows. Jerry wasn't bad either. I did most of the tie-shifting with, a huge pair of tongs while they hammered.

One day I demanded to try it. Jim handed me our oldest hammer, worn with years of use and > probably twice as old as I was. My first blow across the rail (I shunned the more cautious same-side approach) was a direct hit. I smirked as they goggled. The second shot hit the rail. The hammer head and half of the handle whizzed away into the woods like a scared pheasant, and my spiking career was spiked.

I was laid off briefly in August, collecting a graduation present from my parents a - British-built Triumph motorcycle. That transformed the 8-mile trip to and from work. I swooped joyously over the undulating back roads between home and High View, lunchbox slung over my shoulder with a rope. I parked my shiny new beast in an empty shack which still stands at the mouth of the tunnel.

On the weekend before Thanksgiving, I was laid off for good and said farewell to my companions. Jerry and I had developed a warm friendship, and the taciturn reserve of Jim and Bill had thawed Occasionally. Now it was over.

I was 3000 miles away in" Los Angeles, savoring trips to the Tehachapi Loop and working in the motorcycle industry when the O&W went under. But even before that, the High View gang had broken up.

Jerry quit soon after I left and went on to other things. Mercifully, Jim did not see the end of his life's work. He retired and died quietly six months later as the O&W swayed on the brink of oblivion.

Bill - fierce, square-jawed, touchy - stayed to the finish. Forty years a track laborer, he was proud, of his many skills as only a man of little education and limited horizons could be. When the O&W died. Bill's light went out. A year or two later, firemen were called to High View one night and found the section shanty aflame. They put out, the blaze and discovered Bill's body in the ashes.'

WHAT did it all mean? I stand at the gaunt, silent tunnel portal today and find no answer. More than 20 years have fled since I drove away from High View on that last icy November afternoon, and the past is as irretrievable as the future is unknown. The weeds finally won and the for-gotten right of way is vanishing.

My thoughts are far away as a distant rumble intrudes. The morning southbound at the far portal? A change in engine pitch breaks the spell as a twin-stacked International Transtar heads down old Route 17 with a load that might have gone l.c.l. if the Old & Weary had survived.

There is a small ache in my throat as I straddle the motorcycle which brought me to High View once more. A throb of power beckons me back to today, and the shadows of another time fade in the shimmer of heat waves. along the highway.

Header photo taken BY JC Stellwagen and middle photo by Marv Cohen were not in the original article

Thanks to Joe Petaccio for sending us this article and for placing the above plaque in tribute at High View, NY.

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