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Railroad Voices: Narratives
Free PDF Railroad Voices: Narratives
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An evocative and honest portrayal in words and images of railroad life in America, Railroad Voices is a collaboration by two of the first women to work as railroad brakemen. Linda Niemann hired on the Southern Pacific in 1979 in California, where she continues to work as a conductor for the Union Pacific, and Lina Bertucci hired on the now-defunct Milwaukee Road in 1974.
The eighteen-year-old Lina Bertucci used her camera to hold her own in the freightyard, and the resulting fifty-eight photographs in this book present an insider’s view of a world few people have access to. This is the true world of work: the face of exhaustion, of hours spent waiting, followed by intense activity, of the outside maze of tracks and house-size boxcars the workers shepherd with their bodies and a two-dollar lantern. We notice what individuals these people are—the clothes they choose to wear, their tattoos, their faces. And they are, of course, looking at Lina, or aware of her presence in their previously all-male sanctuary.
Linda Niemann’s folkloric memoirs give this environment voice. The railroad for her has become an eighteen-year career and her poetic subject. As the last brakeman hired, Niemann has had to follow the work all over the Southwest, collecting travelers’ tales along the way. Her stories carry the images forward in time to the present-day railroad of short crews, no cabooses, and streamlined, downsized operations. She tells the human stories these changes generate, while delighting in the language and details of the craft. Image and text interplay to place the reader inside an exciting, changing, and dangerous world that has for generations been a major part of American culture.
- Sales Rank: #2394600 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Stanford University Press
- Published on: 1998-10-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.86" h x .69" w x 10.34" l, 1.87 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 176 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Library Journal
Niemann and Bertucci produced this book from personal experiences over the last 20 years working various railroad jobs, from brakeman to conductor. Bertucci contributes 58 memorable black-and-white photographs, starkly revealing the exhaustion and stress of railroading in the faces of her co-workers. Niemann's accompanying narrative tells of her experiences as a boomer, someone who moves with the railroad wherever there is work. She describes the lives of her co-workers, her own personal restlessness, and the world of main lines and yards in California towns like Colton, Watsonville, and Bakersfield. This book is not for those who want to savor the romance of the rails. Instead, it portrays the effects of modern railroading's bureaucracy, schedules, and dangers on its workers. The pictures are compelling and the narrative almost poetic. Essential for collections on railroading and recommended for all others.?Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ., Erie, PA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“This stunning book opens up the reader to the world of railroad work and workers like nothing else. It’s clearly a major literary work. The stories are beautifully written, eloquently capturing a rough and difficult world in an accessible and compelling voice. They are also one of the best sources on women’s efforts to cross over into nontraditional jobs, and on the impact on real working people of the 1980s and 1990s ‘restructuring’ of the economy. The photographs mesh perfectly with the text. They manage, like the text, to depict a hard life without being voyeuristic, sensational, or romantic.” —Dana Frank, University of California, Santa Cruz
From the Inside Flap
An evocative and honest portrayal in words and images of railroad life in America, Railroad Voices is a collaboration by two of the first women to work as railroad brakemen. Linda Niemann hired on the Southern Pacific in 1979 in California, where she continues to work as a conductor for the Union Pacific, and Lina Bertucci hired on the now-defunct Milwaukee Road in 1974.
The eighteen-year-old Lina Bertucci used her camera to hold her own in the freightyard, and the resulting fifty-eight photographs in this book present an insider’s view of a world few people have access to. This is the true world of work: the face of exhaustion, of hours spent waiting, followed by intense activity, of the outside maze of tracks and house-size boxcars the workers shepherd with their bodies and a two-dollar lantern. We notice what individuals these people are—the clothes they choose to wear, their tattoos, their faces. And they are, of course, looking at Lina, or aware of her presence in their previously all-male sanctuary.
Linda Niemann’s folkloric memoirs give this environment voice. The railroad for her has become an eighteen-year career and her poetic subject. As the last brakeman hired, Niemann has had to follow the work all over the Southwest, collecting travelers’ tales along the way. Her stories carry the images forward in time to the present-day railroad of short crews, no cabooses, and streamlined, downsized operations. She tells the human stories these changes generate, while delighting in the language and details of the craft. Image and text interplay to place the reader inside an exciting, changing, and dangerous world that has for generations been a major part of American culture.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Voices in the Night
By WILLIAM H FULLER
Gritty, dusty, muddy, ballast-strewn dirt under foot. A coppery feeling in the mouth. Eyes strained and burning, almost too tired to open. Perpetual noise---the incessant squeaking, grinding, thumping and crashing of heavy, lumbering machinery. Break time, and the codgers slumping in straight-back chairs leaned against the wall are all snoring, smoking, or describing their latest sexual conquests. Oily, smoky air stinking of hot grease. The feel, smell, look and sound of heavy industry, all the same day after day, night after night. These are the sensations that Niemann and Bertucci's book leaves in the reader's mind.
The title and even the subject matter notwithstanding, I hesitate to categorize this book as a volume on railroading. The impressions of the people and their work-lives that are featured in the prose and the photographs are descriptive of all those who labor in the blue-collar jobs of heavy industry. These railroaders have much in common with miners, steel mill workers, grain elevator operators, truck builders, and all the rest on whom our nation's economy depends.
If we must, because of its focus, speak of it as a railroad book, let us be clear about what it is not: There are no ballads or wreck songs here, no folklore about John Henry or Casey Jones, no heroic histories of rail disasters, no financial analyses or statistics of ton-miles hauled or ruminations on the nostalgic era of steam locomotives. What we really have is a book of contemporary photographs, some taken with film and some painted with the brush of words. Both kinds of photos reveal the grass-roots operating railroader and the real, unembellished, and usually uninspiring environment in which he or she labors.
What is the lasting value of this book? It is truly American sociology and history. Not the history of the corporate board room. Not the history of company economics. Not even the technological history behind roller bearings and the huge diesel-electrics that haul unit trains from Powder River coal fields to the ravenous furnaces of east coast electrical generating plants. The history in this book is both more basic and more essential, for it shows us the working conditions of the people who make the machine run, whose work enables the rail corporations to prosper, and whose personalities are shaped by the unsympathetic and unending tasks set for them.
If, Gentle Reader, you react badly to harsh language, to untempered sexual remarks, or to photos including "explicit" centerfolds taped to a yardman's locker door, then perhaps this book is not destined for your reading list. On the other hand, if you find fascination (or perhaps reminiscence) in unexpurgated portrayals of blue-collar working Americans or if you merely wish to understand the demands of such work and how it shapes the people who perform it, then I believe that you will treasure this book as a most worthy addition to your library. Whether you shelve it with your books on sociology, heavy industry, American history, or transportation will be your call. It integrates them all.
By the way, if you find fulfillment with "Railroad Voices," explore "Set Up Running," a similar exploration into the life of a real, unremarkable railroader, an engineman on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Both books show us the real world of the railroad employee with grease on his (or her) clothes, gloves on his (or her) hand, and a union dues deduction in his (or her) paycheck.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Linda is unique
By Dennis
I was a Switchman for the SP Railroad in LA just as Linda was starting out and had the pleasure of working with her several times before she was forced to move to other parts of the system because of her low Seniority. Let me just say that if you really want to know the real deal regarding railroads I really don't think anyone could have combined the reality of the railroad persons life with the human issues capabilities of Steinbeck like she succeeded in doing. This woman is a rare treasure and gift to all of us interested in railroads and railroad history.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Train to Dystopia
By James Gerofsky
Railroad Voices tells the story of two women encountering railroad life in the final decades of the 20th Century. It's an outlier relative to most railroad literature, which caters to train modelers and enthusiasts, or to historical and academic experts. This book speaks to an artistic and intellectually engaged audience without assuming any railroad interest. The railbuff or historian can come along for the ride, but shouldn't expect that their curiosities and sensibilities will be catered to. Railroad Voices focuses largely on the flesh-and-blood people who ran the trains and worked in the marshaling yards, where the trains started and ended their journeys.
Thus, from a railfan perspective, I was initially disappointed with Railroad Voices (but not to say that its stories and photographs are entirely devoid of technical interest). Also, as a former switch tower operator, I would have liked some pictures and stories from inside the switch towers (like the ones seen in Ms. Bertucci's photos from Milwaukee). Ditto for the dispatchers who directed train movements, plus the signal maintainers who kept the switches and signals working.
But no, this is a train crew's story told in words and photos. And it's a story well told.
Ms. Niemann's writings are pungent and compelling, and she directly confronts the distasteful and unpleasant aspects of railroad life in post-industrial America. Once upon a time, passenger trains served the elite of our nation, while tracks and freight trains were a necessary fixture to most every city neighborhood, along with the rural heartland. But times have changed, and today's remaining lines traverse the forgotten corners of our land, places populated by illegal immigrants, the mentally ill, homeless outcasts and criminal transients (far from the benign drunken hobos of 1960's suburban memory, recall the cute miniature hobo on the Lionel train under the Christmas tree).
Ms. Niemann's negative and tragic description of railroad life is thus more sad than surprising. The hours on the freight runs are long and unpredictable, managers often push beyond reason in the face of relentless competition from 57 foot tractor-trailers and inland barge lines, and the dangers of killing or being killed by a string of 70 ton freight cars never ceases. But what is especially tragic is Ms. Niemann's lack of any pride or consolation in being part of something as tangibly big and important as railroads still are to the American economy.
Workers once felt good about hiring on with the railroad; you were no longer just another "townie", another grocery store clerk or elementary school janitor. You were part of something stretching from coast to coast, the veins and arteries of American commerce. The work of a train crew was always hard and dangerous, but there was a sense of purpose that many if not most railroaders once shared. This spirit still seemed to exist when I worked on the Erie Lackawanna in 1970s.
It appears that over time, the believers were largely replaced by a younger, more cynical generation weaned on distrust, encouraged by the events of the Vietnam War and Watergate to conclude that "the whole system is corrupt". We railfans sensed the change. Through the early 70s, many railroaders accommodated railfan interest. Admittedly, there were always "rails" who wanted you off the property (often so they could pursue their "Rule G" violations, on-duty use of intoxicating substances). Others wondered aloud why intelligent people with cameras would waste their time studying and recording a world that was crumbling. I recall an old Lehigh Valley railroader saying that the railfan hobby was "like watching a man die of cancer".
But most of the old heads and many of the younger ones seemed complemented by our interest. Rail buffs affirmed that what they did was indeed important. How many garbage collection crews or taxi drivers have people following them, filming and admiring the details of their work?
Ms. Niemann by contrast is a railroader of the 1980's and 90's, when her attitude about railfans became common: "the brakeman stares out the window, wishing he were going to be home tonight, and angry at the rail buff because he constructs a fantasy, while the brakeman must live it". Her anger is partly with an enterprise that no longer believes in its own necessity and worth. Even into the 1970s, railroads painted their freight cars in catchy colors and adopted logos to impress the public with their "can-do" spirit. The Chessie System had a sleeping kitten, while the Southern "serves the south" and "gives a green light to innovation". The Union Pacific was "the automated railway" that "can handle it". And until the disastrous Penn Central merger of 1968, one predecessor line painted its boxcars a snappy jade green and called itself "The Road to the Future".
We're now in the post-Penn Central future, and the few railroads that survive are mostly profitable. Warren Buffet owns BNSF, one of the big-4 American systems. And yet, railroad management mostly turns away from public observation, painting their engines black or dark blue, pulling gray or dark brown freight cars ornamented with numbers and little else. It's thus not surprising that employees also disfavor attention. The attitude of railroad owners, managers and workers appears to be that "we still make money and are needed, but that could change." This attitude is not unfounded; for example, Post-Panamax ships and the decline of coal usage due to global warming, cheap natural gas and improving green-energy could cause further railroad contraction.
Railroad Voices is a good reality fix, a reflection on the cruel edges of modern society at large. Ms. Bertucci and Niemann provide an increasingly rare look beyond the entertainment front that digital technology has created for the "successful" class, a world view dominated by Facebook, Xbox, Netflix, NFL, etc. Their book peers into the un-pretty and uncertain part of America where necessary work is done -- but with such cynicism and spiritual degradation.
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