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This month, we have another guest article by Locomotive Driver Julian Hill. In the U.K., they refer to themselves as "drivers", but the name of their union is Amalgamated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen.
We bucked up when the FRA wanted to call us operators and drivers. I think we detected an attempt by so-called "Professional" engineers to take away the appellation of "Engineer" away from us. My hackles raise slightly when I look at the floor plan of a GM or GE diesel and see a seat designated as "attendant's seat" or "operator's seat."
Heck, we've been called engineers for about 160 years.
Robert Lawrence, our friend in Australia says they call themselves "drivers" down there, but I think the term Engineer was used in the formal name of their union.
Over on "this side of the pond" an operator is person who takes out your appendix, and a driver is wooden golf club.
My son-in-law Don McLaurin and my grandson Ty Price and I went to Dallas last Sunday to ride DART Rail's new Northern Route through the tunnels under North Central Expressway.
We were very impressed. The cars were standing-room-only and everyone ask the engineer to turn out the cars' interior light. Wow! It was fun -- it was just like Sci-Fi movie. 65 miles per hour -- underground. One man said, "You have to pay big money at Six-Flags for this."
During our short trip of 3.2 miles, I thought about our friend Julian Hill's turn running from London to Calais, France. 32 miles of his run is not only underground, but under the English Channel of the Atlantic Ocean.
At the Mockingbird Lane Station, we accidently met Retired Locomotive Engineer Bobby Weeks and his wife Mozelle, daughter Lisa Fisher and grandson James.
Bobby says, "I call my grandson 'Parachute'. He just drops in on us now and then."
As we parted company at the West End Station, Bobby and I agreed it would be fun to try to "run on DART's yellow block."
The only thing wrong with DART is that the NIMBYs kept it from happening ten years ago. If it hadn't been for the NIMBYs, DART would already be serving Richardson,Plano, Garland, Irving, DFW Airport, Bell-Hurst, Richland Hills and Fort Worth.
I never have carried a gun, although like the rest of the railroad fraternity, I work in areas where a prudent man might feel safer with one.
Now that the "right-to-carry" law has been in effect, we find that the crime rate has gone down. The only thing I can see wrong with the present law is that it makes a criminal out of the poor guy that may have the most need to carry a gun because of the part of town he lives in, but can't afford the cost of a license or the time off for the training required.
Here is another slam on neckties and the wearing thereof, by Matt Conrad, of J.M.Conrad Co. "Someday I'll hang the inventor of the necktie with one." Matt has a webpage at: http://web.InfoAve.net/~jmconrad/
"You can't teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time, and annoys the pig." -- Mark Twain
------------------ We hear people holler about too much government regulation on business. They say, "We should let business do what it does best -- market forces will take care of the crooks."
They may have a point, but the crooks' retribution may come to late to help the little old ladies who have been "suckered" by unscrupulous business persons.
Don't forget, the unscrupulous now own the regulatory agencies such as the FCC, the state utility commissions.
Think not? Why then do we have telephone companies offering "976" Numbers that teenagers can call for "phone sex" or goodness knows what else.
Why do we let these endless contests bombard our homes with junk mail telling us we have won umpteen gillion dollars, only to find out on the inside, that the actual winner may have been any one of ten-thousand other people?
These people seem to feed on the elderly whose eyesight is poor at best. My 96 year old mother found her self being billed for VCR tapes she can hardly see and a set of angles she said she didn't order.
She says, "I didn't order anything."
Another pet scam is to tell them they might have won a big prize. To claim it, they have to call a "900" number that cost nearly $4.00 a minute. When they call the number, they are put on hold or connected to one of these abominable menu-type answering machines, the kind that says, "If you are calling from a touch-tone phone, press 'one' now ... ."
David Ledel, is Trainmaster at The Forest Park Railroad, and told us recently, "On 2 July 1996, the Forest Park Train in Fort Worth, Texas shortened its round trip by two miles (one mile of track of the right-of-way). The complaints began immediately.
"On 31 December 1996, we finished installing two switches to return the Forest Park Train to its original route and length of a five mile round trip (two and one-half miles of track. On 4 January 1997, we will again run the Forest Park Depot to the Duck Pond in Trinity Park and back. We are all very pleased we listened to our passengers."
"Michael Eisner, Disney CEO, made $97,000 per hour in 1993. It would take more than 1000 years for a [Haitian] Disney worker making 28 cents per hour to make the equivalent of one day of Michael Eisner's 1993 salary."
-- Gerry Fiori
Retired Locomotive Engineer E.R. "Swamp" Chaney will be 86 in June, according to Bobby Weeks. Swamp is the oldest surviving Mineola engineer. His firing seniority date is March 17, 1941 and his engineer's date is November 24, 1944.
Cy is a locomotive engineer in the Bowl Yard in Fort Worth 1-97