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!

The Litter King of Lincoln

It's the sound of a leaf blower breaks the stillness of a dark night in the North 27^th Wal-Mart parking lot that let's you know Mel Harding, 49, is on the job and windrowing discarded cups, plastic shopping bags and other stuff that people just don't have the time to throw away properly. That's why stores like Wal-Mart hire Lincoln's Cleanrite company and they send out the Litter King of Lincoln.

This robust, scruffy looking masked man of the night is very organized in his fight against litterbugs. First, he uses his back-pack blower to blow the trash away from the curbs and from under cars out into the driving lanes. After the garbage is in the lanes, he gets into his special vacuum truck which has rotating brushes he controls from inside the cab. It's showtime.

Mel zigs and zags, does quick u-turns, and races around cart stands as he searches for discarded trash in an early morning ballet of parking lot Pac-Man. His tips aren't bad either. “I see a lot of change lying around but I don't stop for pennies,” Mel explained. They get sucked up just as easily as an old fast food straw.

His truck seems small for the big job of pickup up most of Lincoln's big mall parking lot trash. “Actually, it holds a lot,” Mel explained. “The trash is sprayed with water and compacted so we really can pick up a ton of stuff.” When the truck is full, he dumps it into a roll-off container and the blight of Lincoln's night ends up in the Lincoln landfill.

Is money the most unusual thing he finds on his early morning sweep of the Capitol City? “Well, it's kind of disgusting to talk about it but the most unusual thing I see are used condoms,” he said. He let the security folks at Gateway know so they could keep an eye out.

Mel has to keep an eye out for obstructions and cars. “That dent is not mine,” he said as he pointed to a big dent in the machine behind the cab. “Another guy ran into a concrete beam in a parking lot.” So far, Mel is damage free even though he roars around Lincoln parking lots that only a Nintendo Gameboy fan could dream about.

“I like working nights,” Mel said as he outlined his experience in the delivery business. “I like the freedom and like being my own boss,” he said. He found this job with the help of Nebraska Job Service and he likes his job as Lincoln's King of Litter. But make no mistake about it, even though he has as job because of litterbugs, he is no fan of them.

“People are very inconsiderate,” he explained. “Sometimes they come out on their breaks and toss junk right where I have just been.” Mel remembers the tearful Indian in the canoe which lead the anti-littering campaign back in a more environmentally concerned time. “Some people are slobs,” he said.

Even though his job depends on people who litter, you can bet his four year old daughter won't be one of them. No doubt there will be some serious trash talk in the Harding house before she ever learns how to roll down a window and throw something out. And you can take that to the dump.

Welcome

Or should I say, welcome to Nebraska. I am a Nebraska writer and I love living here. Part of that love is meeting new people and writing interesting (hopefully) stories about their lives. Remember the television series, The Waltons? Well, you get the idea without the grumpy grandma.

This is not my first attempt at writing that type of personal interest story. I wrote a book about life in Nebraska titled A Visit to Hartington. I also did my time flirting with Nebraska Football by writing a column called A Story From The Stands. I have some history with Nebraska and the people who live here. But always remember, the keyword is people. I am interested in simple ordinaty people and how they go about doing their jobs and living their lives. I really don't care about how big their house is or what kind of a sexy car they drive. Go somewhere else for that kind of stuff.

I like to write about people like Mrs. Lubeley. She was our neighbor when I was growing up in Hartington, Nebraska. My mother dearly loved her because this thoughtful elderly lady was so kind and good natured. When it snowed, I shoveled her walks. You could almost count the minutes before she arrived at our front door, leaning on her cane, and holding a fresh baked apple pie for me. She was always perfectly dressed in a silk dress, complete with rouge on her cheeks and ear rings. Her gentle soft eyes peered through her wire rim glasses and that hint of twinkle was always there. My mother called Mrs. Lubeley her China Doll.

That's the kind of person I want you to meet. Someone simple. Someone who perfected the art of living by making living an art instead of a race to build the biggest and the best. After all, when your times is up, it's up and nobody will give you any reward for what you have earned. It's about what you have learned and what you did with that knowledge.

Like learn how to shovel snow properly and what a warm apple pie smells like on a cold winter's day.