Bill Fisher (3)

A signal maintainer is an individual who is responsible for all of the lineside electrical equipment on a railroad. If you are not particularly enamored of trains and their associated technology you are probably only aware of one single facet of lineside equipment – the flashing lights and the crossing gates that keep you from driving your car in front of a fast moving train at a highway grade crossing. In fact, while important to your personal survival, grade crossing equipment is only a tiny fraction of the electrical equipment that is part of the railroad infrastructure and just a small piece of the electrical equipment concerned with railroad safety and operation.

A railroad is divided into blocks and traffic through these blocks is controlled by block signals which are essentially very large traffic lights. In addition to the traffic lights there are electrical sensors within each block that are either connected to the track or present trackside which check for such things as intact rails, correctly aligned switches (you don’t want to take a 60 mile-an-hour train into a dead end siding), the condition of the train as it rolls past (if you tune to the proper radio frequencies you can hear the mechanical voices of trackside detectors broadcasting roll past axle counts and defect status to the train crews and the dispatcher…and if you don’t have a tuner you can watch the remake of The Manchurian Candidate with Denzel Washington and in the final minutes of the film as they are flying into the desert location where he was worked over by the bad guys you can hear one of these speaking in the voiceover – “NS track detector milepost…..no defects.”) and many other things.

If there is any problem with any part of the electrical equipment at any time day or night it is the job of the signal maintainer to go out and fix it because when this equipment is not functioning any railroad activity on the affected section grinds to a complete halt and, since the railroad is a connected whole, a stoppage on one section of the system will very quickly impact operations across the entire system.

Donner Pass on the Southern Pacific (now the UP) was and is a very harsh environment and the problems Ma Nature presents to a railroad are many and varied. The proper functioning of the electrical equipment on Donner was Bill Fisher’s concern for 30 years and this book is his first person narrative of his railroad work experience. This well written account provides an excellent description of the ordinary and extraordinary day-to-day work of a maintainer. The word pictures hold the readers interest and the text both entertains and informs. If you have any interest in an in-the-trenches description of railroad work I think you will find this book to your liking. See Common Knowledge for an example of the writing style. (Text Length - 190 pages, Total Length - 198 pages. Includes glossary) (Book Dimensions inches LxWxH - 7.25 x 1.0 x 10.25)… (más)