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On the Rails: A Woman's Journey
The first woman to go railroading on the Southern Pacific recounts her journey--the people who work on the trains, the craft of the railroader, the Western landscape that inspired her--providing an elegy to a dying trade
249 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 18, 2016
I worked on the same railroad division as Linda Niemann's home territory, technically the Coast District of the Southern Pacific Railroad's Western Division; I started a few years before she did but there was substantial overlap in our railroading careers. I never was on a crew with her--I was a brakeman before she arrived and a locomotive engineer by the time she began, so we never encountered each other on the job. She also "boomed" to a lot more places--Oregon, New Mexico, Texas--than I ever got to.
Which I think is part of what makes her book valuable. The industry was undergoing profound change in those years, changes she captures very well in her chapter on The Little Red Caboose; one of them was the loss of job priority on one's "home" division, so that laid-off railroaders from far away could displace juniors anywhere on the vast system. The result was to create a pool of transient workers like Linda, without enough seniority to escape layoffs, driven far afield in order to keep working year 'round. The operating crafts (people who actually run trains) were never a picnic, but they enjoyed some of the perks of skilled, unionized labor in America; as technology "de-skilled" the jobs and reduced the size of crews, those perks vanished, and weren't compensated by easier conditions or better pay. It happened on LInda's (and my) watch, and she describes it eloquently.
She also gets what she calls "the brakeman's reward," the moments of amazing beauty in the New Mexico desert or the Cascades or (in my experience) New York's Hudson Valley, running through areas far from highways or towns. A really fine piece of work.
Which I think is part of what makes her book valuable. The industry was undergoing profound change in those years, changes she captures very well in her chapter on The Little Red Caboose; one of them was the loss of job priority on one's "home" division, so that laid-off railroaders from far away could displace juniors anywhere on the vast system. The result was to create a pool of transient workers like Linda, without enough seniority to escape layoffs, driven far afield in order to keep working year 'round. The operating crafts (people who actually run trains) were never a picnic, but they enjoyed some of the perks of skilled, unionized labor in America; as technology "de-skilled" the jobs and reduced the size of crews, those perks vanished, and weren't compensated by easier conditions or better pay. It happened on LInda's (and my) watch, and she describes it eloquently.
She also gets what she calls "the brakeman's reward," the moments of amazing beauty in the New Mexico desert or the Cascades or (in my experience) New York's Hudson Valley, running through areas far from highways or towns. A really fine piece of work.
January 12, 2009
OK, so the first half of the book is fascinating, all about bouts with men, women, drugs, alcohol, and trains. But then, halfway through this tale, Niemann finds sobriety, and all of the sudden the story transforms from a gripping tale of twisted steel and sexual encounters into a pursuit of personal oneness brought on by the abstinence of everything that made the first half cool.
She is best when writing about the desert landscape or anecdotes about colorful personalities riding the rails. The jargon is almost incessant, but if you're smarter than I am, you'll see the glossary in the very back of the book before you read to that point. Damn. I did the same thing when I read A Clockwork Orange. There really needs to be some sort of disclaimer in the beginning about this stuff to save readers like me from feeling totally lost during lengthy excerpts about railroad car switching, pinning, braking, and whatever else she did out there.
A good read, though not always a fast one. She gets points for raw grit intermingling with poetic strings of desert landscape.
She is best when writing about the desert landscape or anecdotes about colorful personalities riding the rails. The jargon is almost incessant, but if you're smarter than I am, you'll see the glossary in the very back of the book before you read to that point. Damn. I did the same thing when I read A Clockwork Orange. There really needs to be some sort of disclaimer in the beginning about this stuff to save readers like me from feeling totally lost during lengthy excerpts about railroad car switching, pinning, braking, and whatever else she did out there.
A good read, though not always a fast one. She gets points for raw grit intermingling with poetic strings of desert landscape.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews