How to Change a Train Tire

Let's face it. There is nothing worse than that sinking feeling you get when your nice smooth car ride turns into a rumble of failing rubber.

Unless of course, it's failing steel--like a train wheel. I work part-time for a company who totes Burlington Railroad employees around the area. Sometimes we just take a relief crew to a train and bring the pooped ones home. But sometimes, we head for the countryside and wait for a train to come along and drop off a car with a sick wheel.

The skinny scissors jack that drives you crazy trying to make work in the middle of the night just won't make it on this job. You need something special like a giant sort of tow truck and a couple of hardened tough guys like Jeremy Axtell and Jason Flama.

It's their job to fix the "flats" on 250,000 pound loaded coal cars. The conductor comes along with his 130 something car train that has a bad car in it. (The car has been identified by a gizmo that the train crosses as certain mileage points and checks the wheels as the train clanks by.)

Back to our conductor. He, and sometimes she, is the train boss. The conductor finds the car and "cuts" or unhooks the train one car behind our clunkster coal hauler. The train pulls ahead a hundred yards or so and the conductor switches the track so the train can back the sick car onto a siding. The conductor unhooks the bad car and the train pulls ahead. The conductor switches the track back to the main track. The train backs up and hooks up to the remaining good part of the train and off they lumber at 45 mph, honking their way through the night.

The lonesome car sits on the siding until the computer generates an order for Jeremy and Jason to fix the "flat."

These two burly guys come out with their burly truck and put a couple of burly jacks under the car and up she goes. They take a good set of wheels off of the truck and using the truck mounted crane and gently, and I do mean gently, put the wheels on the tracks ahead of the project. With a torch nip here and a torch nip there, the bad wheel set is soon out and the good set in. Total time: 5 minutes!! No kidding. I timed them!

When you look at the place where all of this happens, winter comes to mind. It's flat. There is not much of a wind break. And the North wind has dead aim at the repair place. I can only imagine what working out there in a driving wind with below zero temps would be like.

"Summer is worse, I think," says Jeremy. "There is no breeze sometimes and you get a face full of dust as the other trains come by. It's really miserable."

Never thought of that.

Miserable or not, you have to give these two strapping guys credit for what they do. The wheel set weights 3,000 pounds so there is no dropping the wheel on your toes without lifetime consequences. (Sorry, no donut wheel under the coal car.) Just swinging it off the truck could turn one into a terminal dummy if you got clunked in the head. And, should you elect to stand back and admire a job well done, the last sound you might hear is a honk from another train coming by as you turn into road kill that would keep the neighborhood squirrels up with night-fright.

Clearly, there is a lot of danger in what Jeremy and Jason do. But, like most craftsmen, these two guys do it well and get to sample the cuisine at some of the small town cafes as part of their reward.

So here's a deep fried chicken fingers salute to two guys doing tough important work. And, I hope you guys keep all of yours!

But I still can't imagine doing this in the dread of winter!