Railroaders' Nostalgia > Hells Bells

Played one heck of a joke on my young conductor. A week ago (Friday March 26th) I had a eastbound loaded scoot train on the Washington Eastern RR with three SD40-2's. The middle locomotive started to have a problem when in notch 7 or 8 it would trip the low water button despite there being plenty of water in the expansion tank. we had a sizeable train of loaded grain hoppers, and I would need all those notches for some of the many grades on the line.
I had a cocky young conductor along and I had him going back to try and keep the middle locomotive running. Coming up the grade into Davenport he was having a helluva time trying to keep it running. He restarted it three times before it would stay running.
After adding more cars to the train, we left town heading east. There is a moderate grade leaving town, and a slow order on the bottom part of the keeps the train to a crawl going up the grade. After the tail of the train cleared the slow order, I notched it out, but no farther than notch 6. I then held down the attendant call button on the bottom of the control stand to ring the alarm bell and moaned "not again". With that alarm bell ringing in the cab my young conductor just exploded. "I'm going to F**king blow up that engine.......and on and on". I let him rant for about a minute before releasing the alarm button and then said "Just Joking!!!".
He was staring daggers at me for several seconds before saying "You F**ker!!!....I'm going to remember this and get you back........".

Gotta have a little fun on the railroad sometimes!

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

Love it!!!!

-LD

That's a good one Ted!

Larry

What is a scoot train?

DFWJIM Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What is a scoot train?

On funnelfans railroad I think they call their grain trains "scoots"
JC

Posted from Android

Almost as funny as when I hold the horn button on the conductor's side after the hog is finishing his whistling sequence for a crossing. Works on dash 9's anyways....not so much the 40-2

DFWJIM Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What is a scoot train?

Our scoot trains move grain from local elevators to the main shuttle elevator for Highline Inc. The local elevators can load anywhere from 5 to 40 cars at a time, but there is a big price advantage to loading a unit train in under 12 hours. WER typically runs two round trips a week keeping almost 1000 truck trips off the highways.

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

A conductor tried that horn trick with me. The ACes button if you hit it fast enough only the bell will ring.
I caught him on the second try and he was miffed. I tend to pay attention. And deaf they tell me.