Linda Grant Niemann was an alcoholic literature PhD who went to work on the railroad and got sober. She tells about it in Boomer. I expected to learn more about railroad operations from this book than I did, but otherwise this book did not disappoint at all. The life of a boomer, a worker who went from work site to work site around the railroad looking for work, was hard, and it grew harder as the railroads including hers, the Southern Pacific, modernized. A despairing drunk had plenty of room to despair in that sort of work and living combination, and plenty of company. Meanwhile women were new to the scene, and bisexual women were a mystery to the men; on both accounts there were attacks.

I read this in three nights and an afternoon. I turned off the light those nights because even retired I have to sleep; I didn't want to stop reading. ( )

BOOK 77 - [Boomer Railroad Memoirs] by [[Linda Niemann]]

The fact that this was about a woman working on the railroad makes me want to rate it higher than I would otherwise, just because it's fun. I mean who gets a Ph.D. and then goes to work as a brakeman for the railroad? Linda Niemann did. I enjoyed reading this information about how railroads work and found it interesting. The author assumed the reader knows more about that topic than I did however, and I didn't know what she was talking about half the time as she described the work. There is a glossary but I didn't find it very helpful. Niemann describes some experiences with sexism but doesn't seem to have been too bothered by it and certainly handled it well. I enjoyed reading about her relationships with co-workers and lovers. Her struggle with alcoholism is one of the best descriptions I have ever heard about that process. I'd especially recommend it for people who fight that battle. I'd also recommend it for anyone who loves an alcoholic and wants to understand why the repercussions are so long lasting and really only begin after the drinking ends. Four stars. ( )

I bought this book a long time ago, may have read it then but my information says 'no'. Working railroads has changed a lot in the intervening 20 some years. I chuckled at the "soccer with boxcars" reference.

What a life - don't know the land, don't know the people, don't know the yard and don't know your own self. She makes it sound like a horrible life and with the completely unplanned schedule it is! I wonder how the railroads find anybody to work for them.

Are all the roads were like that or only the SP with all the merger spasms they went through back then. The story gets very repetitive. First it's sex, then it's alcohol, then it's drugs and it starts all over again in each of the railroad towns she goes to in search of work. In between a little railroading gets performed.

I'm not sure what I was expecting to read when I picked this up but it kept me going and hoping the repetition would go away. It finally did on the last few chapters when the idea of leaving kept surfacing.

I'll let you all decide if this is a review!!!???!!! ( )

Niemann was part of the first wave of post-World War II women to seek railroad employment in occupations which, except for WW I and WW II, were almost the exclusive province of men. Thus, in addition to learning the essentials and overcoming the challenges of her chosen craft of brakeman she had to deal with the issues of gender prejudice. Her descriptions of how she dealt with these workplace issues gives the reader an understanding of the day-to-day challenges of railroad work and an appreciation of the effort needed to earn the respect of her male counterparts.

Niemann’s book is part of my personally designated trilogy of must read first person accounts of working on the railroad. The other two books in this “trilogy” are Brownie the Boomer and Railroadman. Brown’s book covers the life of a boomer in the late 19th to the early part of the 20th Century. Del French’s book spans the early to middle part of the 20th Century and Niemann’s account covers the boomer life in the latter part of the 20th Century. She writes well. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in first person accounts of railroad life and/or an interest in the trials and tribulations of breaking the gender barrier in the late 20th Century workplace. (Text Length - 245 pages, Total Length - 252 pages. Includes glossary) ( )

Niemann describes how she gave up her hippy-ish lifestyle in a shack in the woods of Northern California to take a job as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad. For something like ten years, she was a "boomer", moving from depot to depot as required by local peaks in traffic.

She writes about the difficulties of working as a woman in a manual job in a traditionally male-dominated industry, about the skills of the railway workers, the danger and unpleasantness of their working life, the camaraderie and also the bitter rivalry that arise in an environment where your life depends on colleagues doing their jobs properly, but everyone is competing with everyone else for work, and you can be "bumped" off a job at a moment's notice if someone with an earlier seniority date turns up.

At the same time as telling us a lot about the people who work in the American railway industry and the conditions thaey put up with, the book is a frank personal memoir, often hilarious, sometimes sad, of the author's complicated love life and her struggle against alcoholism. (The supremely drunken interlude where she takes a job in a winery and attends a vintner's convention with her boss is straight out of Kerouac.)

Because Niemann is constantly moving around the Southern Pacific system, the book is also a fascinating travelogue of the American South-West, taking us to places too obscure for most travel writers, or showing us well-known places from the viewpoint of the peripatetic railway worker. Niemann is a great fan of the American landscape, and there are some descriptions that make you want to hop on the first Westbound freight and head for the desert...

Niemann seems to have worked on the railways during most of the 1980s, so there is also a lot about the changes taking place in the industry. She is very critical of the tendency to replace skilled workers by technological innovations and the dirty tricks the companies use to cut staff numbers.

My only real difficulty with this book is where to shelve it -- memoirs, women's writing, or railways? ( )