It always bothered me that I couldn’t identify the engineer in this picture of Amtrak train No. 98, departing Main Street Station in Richmond, Va., on Sept. 14, 1974. He wasn’t the regular throttle jockey, whom I knew. Still, it’s one of my favorite images and was used to promote my first book, From the Cab: Stories From a Locomotive Engineer, published in 1999.
I finally reached out to my longtime friend, retired engineer, and Chessie Road Foreman of Engines Teddy “Doc“ Holiday, who said, “That’s Bill Duke. A great passenger engineer [and] probably working a ‘hold down’ (temporary vacancy) after the regular engineer had maxed out his miles.”
Before being directly employed by Amtrak in 1986, I had worked both freight and Amtrak trains on the Seaboard Coast Line. In those days, one of the lesser-known peculiarities of railroading limited the number of miles an engineer could run each month. Mileage was duly noted and tabulated and toward the end of the month, if the engineer had reached a certain limit, he wasn’t allowed to work again until the beginning of the next month.
Recently, so much has been reported about railroad employees not being able to take off when necessary it’s hard to believe, when I was a new hire in the 1970s, I worked with children of the Great Depression who became upset if they were not permitted to work as much as they wished. In all fairness, unlike the practice today, railroads used to maintain an ample “extra list” of unassigned employees to cover vacancies. This rule also applied to conductors in first-in/first-out pool freight service, who had their mileage regulated. It meant increasing, decreasing, or letting stand, the number of crews in the pool. Older employees didn’t want the same-sized pie cut into smaller pieces, whereas more jobs meant work for the younger ones. Once, an old conductor wanted to fight me over a single minute of overtime on our sign-off time. “It may not mean much to you, but that’s 25 cents to me!” he snapped.
Today’s railroaders, thankfully, have never known the despair of the Great Depression. To be clear, the “old heads” loved their home and families as much as anyone, but working every day, including holidays, was the price they paid to keep food on the table, a roof over their heads, and clothes on their backs. Today employees earn higher wages and enjoy much better benefits, but often feel that doesn’t outweigh quality of life issues.
Engineer Bill Duke left Richmond‘s Main Street station for a round trip to Newport News, Va., and back, the day I photographed him. A rare easy job (it consumed only about 6 hours), it allowed him to sleep in his own bed every night. He’d still have to report the 150 miles, and at the end of the month, he might be held off, but I doubt he complained — not like the old timers who urged me, “Make it while you can, because tomorrow, you may be laid off.”
Check out “I saw the light,” a favorite From the Cab column from retired Amtrak Engineer Doug Riddell.
Thanks Doug, for being a friend, as well as Sandy, whom my wife enjoyed as well. My generation is the same as yours and from the time I could understand words, my father told me that nobody, especially the government, would owe me anything in the way of a job. Railroading was hard, but I did 34 years as a salaried worker bee at Southern & CSX and enjoyed most of it. The last 4 years, I paid back some of it, “working” as a docent at the C&TS in New Mexico. I have read your from the cab book several times through.
Thank you, Jacob!
Thank you Doug for continuing to share your work stories. Always a highlight! Indeed in my about 38 years of reading Trains and Passenger Train Journal, you, Fred Frailey and Mike Schaefer have been my favorite writers 🙂
Thanks, David and John. I enjoyed sharing it. As with most of what I write, it brings back a lot of memories for me.
Enjoyed that article. It certainly added to my understanding of how the extra board worked in the late 1970’s. As a child of a Great Depression era railroader that added context as to “why” is all also very relevant for the next generation.
We now have a scheme called a self protecting pool, where if an Engineer is marked off, and extra man is NOT called…instead the next man in the pool is called. Extra men are only called when no one else is available…make of that what you will….