Boomer: Railroad Memoirs

By Linda Grant Niemann and Leslie Marmon Silko

“A fascinating mix of fact, history, self-confession, self-accusation, and self-forgiveness—a diary of both emotional relationships and travel.” —Pasatiempo

This classic account of self-discovery and railroad life describes Linda Grant Niemann’s travels as an itinerant brakeman on the Southern Pacific. Boomer combines travelogue, Wild West adventure, sexual memoir, and closely observed ethnography. A Berkeley Ph.D., Niemann turned her back on academia and set out to master the craft of railroad brakeman, beginning a journey of sexual and subcultural exploration and traveling down a path toward recovery from alcoholism. In honest, clean prose, Niemann treks off the beaten path and into the forgotten places along the rail lines, finding true American characters with colorful pasts—and her true self as well.

“Ma[kes] the railroad experience come alive with all its grit, danger, romance, and general outrageousness . . . Possibly the finest book I’ve ever read about the actual experience of working on the railroad.” —Trains Magazine

“Niemann has a taut, lyrically restrained but vividly descriptive style, with an observational vigilance befitting a brakeman’s mindset, and her narrative clips along like a boxcar rolling through the yard.” —Bloom Magazine

“A remarkable adventure tale, the occupational odyssey of the Ph.D. in literature who immerses herself in blue-collar America.” —Library Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9780253001351

Linda Grant Niemann

Linda Grant Niemann is a professor of English at Kennesaw State University. Her most recent book is Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century. She lives in Marietta, Georgia.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

BOOMER is an American classic, a work of creative non-fiction that is a delight to read. The writing is distinctive–vivid and concise–and its greatness lies in the unique narrative voice that the author created to tell her story. This narrative style came in large part from the railroad work itself. On the railroad, telling stories not only got the workers through the long stretches of distance and time, the stories were often cautionary tales integral to the railroad workers’ survival in a dangerous workplace. Railroad storytelling didn’t mince words and it had to include enough details so listeners knew what to do and what not to do in order to stay alive. Finally, as in any dangerous pursuit, humor was a necessity to preserve the workers’ sanity while they endured the risks.

The great thing about this book is you can visualize everything described. From page one you know the narrator is going to take you places you’ve never been–to the freight yard surrounded by apple orchards and artichoke fields that swept in painterly rows down to the dunes and riptides waiting in the bay. It was cool for July, with that wet smell of salty fog and rotting produce in the packing sheds of the cold storage plants (p. 1).

The author’s sense of humor about herself and other railroad workers is evident on the first page too: I drove my fifty-six Chevy with its four bald tires into the parking lot behind the depot. There were rows and rows of pickups, RVs, Chevy Suburbans, and the beat-up ‘luxury car’ heaps that the brakemen used as ‘away-from-home’ cars. It was solid American steel (ibid.).

Boomer moves effortlessly, weaving threads of many stories throughout: it is a chronicle of the author’s struggle to find meaning in her life and to stop drinking; it is the story of how one woman went to work on the railroad and found a voice all her own, a voice that made her a wonderful unique writer. Boomer also tells the story of the decline and loss of the craft of railroading, and the struggle of the railroad workers with the railroad companies at the end. On page two, the author reveals the way she viewed her drinking:

On my way back to Santa Cruz I stopped by a liquor store for two club cocktails for the road. It was a habit of mine, and I didn’t think anything about it. Being a drug user, I thought of drinking as basically legal. My whole scale of judgment was based on what happened to you if you got caught. Drinking and driving was pretty bad, but not as bad as if you got caught with dope in the ashtray or lids of pot in the trunk. (pp. 2–3)

The first time I read Boomer I was so focused on learning about the railroad work and the author’s relationships with the other rails that I didn’t notice, or maybe I didn’t want to face, what a struggle it was for the author to get sober. The beauty of the storytelling here is the balance between the personal history and the larger history of the railroad. Sobriety doesn’t come easily and requires the convergence of her mother’s slide into dementia and the demands of railroad work to focus the author’s attention on her drinking.

The author, who used her nick-name Gypsy to tell her story, had a Ph.D. from Berkeley but no teaching job. She enjoyed the laidback comforts of Santa Cruz with its white-collar teaching community and genteel hippie life. She’d been hanging out with interesting, witty people, smoking dope, drinking wine–drinking lots of wine–but she felt disconnected and adrift. Then she saw an ad from the Southern Pacific Railroad; they were hiring brakemen. Something clicked for Gypsy. It was a drastic move, and she knew it. The first time I read Boomer I thought, Oh no–don’t do that, Gypsy! Try something else!

Boomer isn’t about upward mobility to riches and power; quite the opposite. Gypsy left behind the safe clean life of Santa Cruz for the danger and grit of the blue-collar railroad worker–a man’s world if ever there was such a place. She was determined to find a meaningful place for herself in this world or die trying. Unlike academia with its posturing and piles of paper, the railroad played a fundamental role: We moved stuff people used to build their houses, get from place to place, and to put on their table. I felt part of it all, whatever ‘it all’ was-something I had never felt before (p. 7).

Gypsy also embraced the dangers of railroading to make herself pay more attention to each moment of her life. The stakes were life and limb. At first, it was a lot of pressure. You thought, ‘What if I see it wrong, that light moving a half mile down the crowded track. What if I crush Maureen?’ (p. 11). But early on it is Maureen who almost kills Gypsy with a miscalculation of the speeding box cars. The box cars weighed tons and much of the work was done at night in the dark. A brakeman and her crew had to work together with precision or one of them might be killed or maimed or box cars and locomotives derailed.

One night after she thought it was too late to be called, Gypsy smoked a joint only to get a call to come to work. That night her peripheral vision and senses were impaired enough that she narrowly escaped death when a flat car behind her sped by within inches of her. That night she gave up marijuana although she continued to drink as a great many of her fellow workers did. Every railroad yard had its bar or tavern for the railroad workers, and Gypsy went to all of them. As a boomer or new hire without seniority in the system, Gypsy was constantly on the move, living in seedy hotels near railroad yards, traveling week to week to the next railroad assignment.

Railroading made her take a new look at drinking. After all, alcohol was legal, so it was alright as long as you didn’t go to work drunk. But Gypsy worried when a tipsy coworker came on duty. She didn’t drink on the job because drunks got others or themselves killed.

After she’d worked as a brakeman for awhile, Gypsy began to notice that drinking after work consumed the precious hours she and the other rails had to get something to eat and to sleep before they were called back to the yard. Gypsy went out drinking with the other rails because she liked to drink but also because drinking with them made her part of their railroad brotherhood.

The old-time railroaders watched Gypsy and saw that she took pride in the hard work and danger, and more importantly, that she felt the same attraction, the same love they felt for the railroad. After some initial suspicion about whether a woman could be a brakeman, most of the railroad men accepted Gypsy as one of them. Even the issue of her bisexuality receded because the railroad took priority over everything-before all other desires.

In the midst of this, Gypsy’s mother became more addled and finally she and her sister realized their mother had to go to a care facility. It was during this difficult transition for her mother that Gypsy really began to question her drinking, though she didn’t stop. While packing up her mother’s belongings, Gypsy came across an old newspaper clipping about Otto Flohr, her German immigrant great-grandfather who’d invented the automatic railroad coupler that made fingerless brakemen relics of an earlier craft (p. 82). Also among the papers were drawings of the railroad knuckles and drawbars, and a detailed explanation of the automatic coupler. This discovery she writes gave me a chill to realize the unbroken chain of events-how I was working with these very same pieces, how my doing the job at all was the result of these same safety improvements. An uncanny bridge to the past, great-grandfather’s work, granddaughter’s occupation (ibid.). Truly, railroading ran in her blood. Not long afterward, one of the old-time railroaders who Gypsy greatly respected approached her with gravity: he told her that once he’d enjoyed drinking all night with the rails, but then the time came when he knew he’d have to choose between the railroad or the drinking.

The words of the old-timer shook her up. She’d already begun to question herself about the drinking. She looked at her failed love affairs and failed friendships and her chaotic life without roots, and she wondered if all the drinking might not be the cause. Later, she felt the walls close in on her; she bought a bottle of tequila.

I poured a tumbler full and drank all of it. Then I called Naomi and started pouring out my miseries, blaming her for them, for not saving me from this shit, for being a coward in life. I ranted. I burst into tears. I think she hung up. I climbed the ladder to my loft and slept the sleep of the just. In the morning, the bottle of Cuervo was still there, but I knew it was over. I had no connection to it and never had. I didn’t have to drink anymore. (p. 106)

The next day Gypsy found an AA meeting and stopped drinking. But as she and the reader discover, a bigger struggle was to follow.

It was beginning to dawn on me just how sick I was. I certainly hadn’t expected it to take months to get over withdrawal symptoms. I seemed to get worse and worse. My mind wasn’t working right. I couldn’t concentrate or remember things. . . . I felt an enormous pressure in my chest, as if every emotion possible has just doubled inside my brain and was going to burst out, destroying its human host. (p. 119)

She turned to an AA member for help. The woman told Gypsy that she had to write down her life story honestly and not to hold anything back, then to bring it back to her.

I didn’t like the sound of this. I had a ten-year writer’s block. It was my opinion, philosophically, that it was impossible to be honest in an autobiography. I had written a Ph.D. dissertation on this very subject. Furthermore, I didn’t have a typewriter. It was too big a project. She was making it sound ridiculously simple. (p. 152)

But Gypsy went to the 7-11 store and bought a legal tablet and a pen. She started writing and she wrote every day. Memories would trigger emotions, and I would cry all over my legal pad (ibid.). Later she bought a typewriter which she carried with her as she followed the railroad work from El Paso to Tucson then back to California.

The craft of railroading was changing fast:

Castroville is gone. Watsonville shut down. San Luis closed. Salinas a ghost yard from what it was. Brakemen blamed the company for running off the business. The company blames the cost of labor, talks about the modern railroad, cost-efficient operations, cut-backs . . . The work itself was leaving me, offering me payoffs and mechanical motions. Offering me nothing for what was gone. (p. 243)

Gypsy realized then she was at the end of the booming road, that she no longer wanted it. She moved back to Santa Cruz, taught part-time and worked the yard at Watsonville when they called. Off the booming road, she was able to settle in and turn to the typewriter she’d bought and carried with her. She started writing the story of her life on the railroad.

At its heart, Boomer is the story of how a writer finds her way to writing. To work on the railroad was Linda Niemann’s calling, but to be a wonderful writer was her destiny. The years of working on the railroad gave her real characters and true stories that needed no embellishment. Their use of the spoken word and how they loved to share stories at the bar after work influenced her experience of language and gave her the distinctive, direct style she would use later when she started writing. She listened, and learned what was important in the telling of a story, and what was not. There was the added blessing that the years on the railroad purged all traces of academia from her writing.

The other gift to the writer she was destined to be was the way the railroad took her into the heart of the loveliest wild deserts in the southwest where the only trace of the white man was the railroad track and there were no other humans for miles. The railroad took her where her poet’s heart opened up to the vast great canyon lands and high mountain peaks. She experienced the desert in solitude and had time for reflection as she walked the train alone to look for safety issues while the engineer waited in the locomotive. The job puts me here where I could never otherwise be at these magic times of day, to smell the earth and the juniper and listen for a whistle or watch for the intermittent illumination of a headlight or wisps of diesel smoke (p. 175).

A writer needs solitude and time to write, to practice the art. The nights alone in hotels near the rail yards became opportunities to write because there was nothing else to do after she quit drinking. Writing became her companion.

I always wondered what it would be like to ride in a locomotive or to work on the railroad and ride in the caboose, and Boomer gives the reader wonderful descriptions of what it felt like. Railroad buffs read Boomer for the details about the switches, the signals, the couplers and brakes; for the hair-raising accounts of runaway trains hurtling backwards down steep inclines. Boomer doesn’t shy away from descriptions of the mechanics of engines or box cars; concisely and clearly she explains the lantern signals the brakemen use to communicate with the engineer, how and why brakes are set and released, and how box cars are uncoupled, moved, and rerouted to make a train. Boomer is a history of the U.S. railroads in the last years of the twentieth century when railroading as a craft began to disappear, and the economic decline of the United States and its workers increased its speed. Those who are interested in women’s issues will find Boomer to be a complex, challenging text that shows the obstacles the first women workers on the railroad faced but also how women like Linda found a way to do the job as well, but differently. Finally, in the end, what mattered more than gender especially among the oldtimers was love for the railroad. Anyone who worked hard on the railroad and loved it was accepted into the brotherhood.

The economic and industrial empires of the United States are in decline; the craftsmen, the workers who make steel or ships or keep the railroads running are a disappearing breed. In a few more generations, people will not remember how dangerous complex tasks were performed without computers or cell phones. In times of drastic change, we need the stories that show us the possibilities of transformation so we can begin to imagine ourselves differently, so we can try to summon the courage and daring that Gypsy had–unique, bright and undaunted by obstacles she entirely reinvented herself. This is what makes Boomer a classic of American literature.

BOOMER

THE FREIGHTYARD LAY TO the east of the town, surrounded by apple orchards and artichoke fields that swept in painterly rows down to the dunes and riptides waiting in the bay. It was cool for July, with that wet smell of salty fog and rotting produce in the packing sheds of the cold storage plants. I drove my fifty-six Chevy with its four bald tires into the parking lot behind the depot. There were rows and rows of pickups, RVs, Chevy Suburbans, and the beat-up luxury car heaps that the brakemen used as away-from-home cars. It was solid American steel.

The parking lot was in the center of tracks in the shape of a Y, used for turning engines. The engines seemed huge, covered with black grime, five or six hooked together roaring and screeching to stops. I could hear the sounds of crashes from the switching yard and could see solitary boxcars floating down the tracks.

I entered a door and found myself in a long room filled with lockers. At the end of the room was a table, a beat-up couch, and several overstuffed chairs black with diesel grime and the stuffing poking through. An older man with a sooty baseball cap wedged over his tilted face was snoring away on one of the chairs, oblivious to the racket from a computer printer spewing out yards of paper onto the floor. A big man in overalls came out of the men’s washroom.

Trainmaster’s office is in there. Don’t worry about the herder, he’s had his shots.

OK, I thought, fine.

Trainmaster Mohan looked at me across a beat-up walnut desk stacked with computer printouts weighted down by a brass-plated railroad spike. A coffee cup sat there with a quarter inch of what looked like diesel fuel in it. I guessed that it was cold and that he would probably drink it anyway. There were bunches of cheerful older women in the office dressed in jeans and cowboy boots and without a lot of makeup. It felt more like a softball game than an office. It felt just fine.

Mohan had a robust handshake and a very red nose.

So you want to go railroading, do you?

Yes, I said, not having any idea what going railroading meant. The way he said it had something of the flavor of going whaling. I was going to work in Watsonville, wasn’t I? I handed him a business book I had written and explained the company I did it for had gone under. Mohan took it and hefted it thoughtfully. I was glad it was a heavy book.

Well, we got all kinds of people out here railroadin’, and you’ll find most of ’em are good people. I guess we got room for a writer.

For a moment, I was in a room fronting the Sahara. The Legionnaire Captain shoves a paper across his pitted desk.

Make your mark. You are now lost to the world you knew.

Now, you’re going to hear bad language out here, Mohan went on. It’s always been that way, always will be. And railroading gets in your blood. That’s the only way to describe it.

He leaned forward then and looked straight into my eyes.

And now I got to ask you another thing. Do you drink?

Well, yes, I drink—I mean, I’m a social drinker.

Mohan smiled. Well, we’re all social drinkers. But remember that drinking and railroading don’t mix.

On that note the interview ended.

On my way back to Santa Cruz I stopped at a liquor store for two club cocktails for the road. It was a habit of mine, and I didn’t think anything about it. Being a drug user, I thought of drinking as basically legal. My whole scale of judgment was based on what happened to you if you got caught. Drinking and driving was pretty bad, but not as bad as if you got caught with dope in the ashtray or lids of pot in the trunk. I had no intention of ever drinking on the job. To my mind, the railroad was an opportunity to dry out a little.

I had been hanging around for a few years with a very party-time crowd, and my life was on a downward slide. I had gotten a Ph.D. and a divorce simultaneously. The fancy academic job never materialized, and I hung around Santa Cruz getting to know my neighbors. Soon I was playing flute in a street band, eating donated sandwiches, and spending every night in clubs dancing the night away. My living room was full of strippers, poets, musicians, and drug dealers. Gradually there was less music and more drugs, and in a few years I was living in the mountains in a shack, my lover had moved out, my dogs had heartworm, my Chevy was a wreck, and though I thought of myself as a musician, the money, such as it was, came from dealing, and none of my friends worked.

When I saw the ad in the Sunday paper—BRAKEMEN WANTED—I thought of it as a chance to clean up my act and get away. In a strategy of extreme imitation, I felt that by doing work this dangerous, I would have to make a decision to live, to protect myself. I would have to choose to stay alive every day, to hang on to the sides of those freightcars for dear life. The railroad transformed the metaphor of my life. Nine thousand tons moving at sixty miles an hour into the fearful night. I now would ride that image, trying to stay alive within it. I know that later when I sat behind the moving train in the darkness of the caboose, window open and the unknown fragrances of the landing filling the space, the blackness of the night was my friend. It felt good to be powerless and carried along by the destiny of that motion. I felt happy and at peace. I was where I belonged.

The railroad didn’t believe in lengthy formal training. They offered a two-week class that covered the book of rules, a three-hundred-page document with a dual purpose—to keep trains from running into one another and to prevent any situation in which the company might get sued. Rules of the road that you had to learn were mixed in with rules that you had to ignore in order to get the work done. But you had to know that you were ignoring a rule so that in the winter, when company officials had time to sneak around testing, you could work by the book.

The rulebook was also in a continuous state of revision. Revisions appeared in the timetable that you carried with you at all times. Further revisions appeared in regular timetable bulletins that were posted at work. Soon your rulebook resembled a scrapbook, with paragraphs crossed out, pages pasted in, and notes on changes that were then crossed out and changed weeks later. It drove you crazy. You always had to be on the lookout for a company official hiding in the bushes while you did your work. This individual would pop out and ask you questions about the latest rule revisions. A notation of failure would then appear in your personal file. These notations were referred to as Brownies, named after the official who devised the railroad demerit system. As trainmen were fond of pointing out, however, there was no merit system to go with it.

Out of seventeen student brakemen three of us were women. This was a large percentage, comparatively. The first women had been hired two years before, and they were around to give us advice. The point was to get through the class, ignore the sexist remarks and the scare tactics, and get over the probationary period known as the derail. Then you were in the union and a railroader for life. Getting over the derail took sixty days, and if either the crews you worked with or the company officers had a complaint, you were out. At the end of two weeks of classroom instruction, you bought a railroad watch, they gave you switch keys and a two-dollar lantern, and you marked up as an extra board brakeman. It was going to be sink or swim in this business. We drew numbers to determine our seniority dates—the most important factor in our careers. One or two numbers could mean that you worked or didn’t.

On the last day of class, they took us down to the freightyard to grapple with the equipment. We practiced getting on and off moving cars, climbing the ladders and cranking down the handbrakes, lacing up the airhoses and cutting in the air, changing the eighty-five-pound knuckles that joined the cars together, and hand and lantern signals. These signals were the way members of the crew talked to each other, and they were an art form. An old head could practically order an anchovy pizza from a half mile away. You would see lights, arcs and circles, stabs of light. It would repeat. You would stand there confused. Finally you would walk down the track and find the foreman in a deep state of disgust.

I told you to hang three cars, let two go to the runaround, one to the main, go through the crossovers, and line behind. Now can’t you read a signal, dummy?

The day after our practice session, I got into my car and tried to roll the window down. My arms didn’t work. This was my first moment of doubt about being able to do the job. It was hard to get the upper-body strength required to hang on and ride for long distances on the side of cars. Terror at falling beneath the wheels was a big motivator, however. Terror and ridicule. There was a lot of both during the probationary period and the student trips. On student trips we tagged along with a regular crew and tried to learn something. To me, what we were doing made no sense whatsoever. Just getting used to the equipment had me so disoriented that I had no idea where we had gone or how the crew did anything. One of the crew suggested to me that I go to a toy store and look at the model trains, to see how switches work. They say, though, that whatever you start out doing railroading, it gets imprinted, and that’s what you are most comfortable doing from then on. I couldn’t have picked a better place to break in than Watsonville Junction. It was old-time, local-freight, full-crew switching. Kicking cars and passing signs. The basic stuff that you have to learn at first or you never get no matter how long you’re out here.

The small switching yard at Watsonville classified all the perishable freight from the Salinas Valley and Hollister/Gilroy—the salad bowl of America. A break in the coastal range at Salinas allowed the fog to pour into the valley, cooling it, and allowing cool weather crops like artichokes, brussels sprouts, and lettuce to grow. Strawberry fields and apple orchards skirted the low hillsides. There were cool fresh days in midsummer. The packing houses and canneries were running around the clock, with rows of mostly women working the graveyard assembly lines. Clusters of yellow schoolbuses bordered the fields, and farmworkers moved slowly through the orderly rows, bundled up against the fog and pesticides.

This map of canneries, packing houses, cold storage sheds, and assembly warehouses made up the maze of tracks in Salinas known as the districts. In railroading, knowledge of the track system is most of the job. You have to know how many cars can fit, the slope, where the road crossings are, where runaround tracks are that you can use in switching. The Salinas districts were named for cities of the freight’s destination: New York, Portland, Boston, Chicago. After a few days, the crew expected me to know how to get there from here. I had no idea. Just the idea that there were only two directions to go on a switch engine (forward and backward) hadn’t sunk in yet.

OK, pinpuller; line us up for Boston, off the Portland Main.

I looked out at this web of tracks; I knew the red switch targets were mainline and that bad things would happen if you threw one of them when you weren’t supposed to. The book of rules had me paralyzed. There were six things you were supposed to look for in order to throw a mainline switch. What were they?

Are you going to throw that damn switch or are you going to have a nervous breakdown?

Are you sure that we can throw it?

Oh Lord, student brakies. They should be paying us extra for this.

Watsonville switching crews worked fast, like a soccer team playing with boxcars. They moved in position like a team, climbing aboard and peeling off moving cars to keep in sight of one another and the engineer. On Saturday night they worked twice as fast in order to go home early. It was called running for a quit. On other nights they worked fast so that they could go on spot in a little switchman’s shanty tucked in beside the packing warehouses. There was a switchlock on the door and a long table inside where some serious cardplaying went on.

Since I was still learning the most basic moves, it was impossible to keep up with the pace. But how do you manage to learn? My strategy was to follow a crew member around like a baby duck, getting in the way. He then would yell at me and tell me what to do. So I’d learn something. I also wore this silly hat—a baseball cap with silver wings on it. The hat meant several things to me: one, I figured they would see the hat and not run over me, and also I wanted to bring something of my old identity into this new situation, which was threatening to dissolve my sense of who I was. The hat became the cutting edge of nonconformity in the freight-yard. It separated those who could take a joke from those who couldn’t and clearly marked those people who had an attitude about women being on the job.

I wouldn’t wear that hat if I were you. I mean you don’t know shit about railroading and you’re wearing that hat.

I guess I wanted the hat to take the flack, and not all the other things about me that weren’t going to fit in here. I wore the hat.

Summer was the busy season, and we all worked steadily as brakemen, switching out the perishable freight in Salinas, Monterey, and Hollister. The locker room would always be full of boxes overflowing with broccoli, green onions, lettuce, apples, cauliflower. It smelled wonderful and you felt included in the bounty of this part of the world. It gave me a sense of

Reviews for Boomer

[mr6durick · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[mkboylan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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. 

[ulmannc · Rating: 3 out of 5 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!!!???!!!

[alco261 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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?

[john5918 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very interesting book about the life of an itinerant female brakeman (sic), known in the US railroad industry as a "boomer". It is of interest not only to railway enthusiasts, but also more widely, as a study of a woman working in a man's industry in which gender sensitivity was still a long way off.