Working With the Enemy

Today I wanted to share a little bit about one of the more interesting jobs I worked with the railroad. During the later portion of my time with them I was desperate to find some kind of reasonably sane schedule. I was tired of being on the road and tired of being tired all the time. Right after January 1st, I made a seniority move to the brakeman position on the yard job at a large paper mill located at Coosa Pines, Alabama.

The interesting thing about this job was the fact that it was shared between two competing railroads, CSX and NS. Now it gets a little more complicated than that. Coosa Pines is located on the outskirts of Childersburg, Alabama and Childersburg is located on the junction between the Southern (Anniston, Al to Calera, Al) and Central of Georgia (Columbus, Ga to Leeds, Al). A branch extended south, from the Seaboard Coastline (Manchester to Birmingham), to the plant as well. With all that being said, the yard job was actually a joint venture between three different railroads. The yard job consisted of three different crews that manned Y101. They included a day shift, a night shift and a relief job that covered the off days for the day and night shifts. Day and night shifts received 2 days off a week and the relief job had three. So my seniority took me to the night shift, manned by the former SCL crew out of Manchester, Ga. The day shift during that three month period was covered by the former Southern crew and finally the former Central of Georgia crew filled the relief job.

Power for the yard job was also shared between the NS and CSX which was quite interesting. The NS always provided a GP38-2 and CSX always provided a B30-7. On one occasion I remember CSX sending us a B36-7 which we quickly bad ordered and had sent back to Boyles due to the fact that B36s were horrible at low speed switching. Our particular engineer also preferred to run from the NS unit due to the EMD's throttle response and the fact that it was just a cleaner cab.

Now for years this paper mill was your typical paper plant in that it received loads of pulpwood and wood chips in droves. By the time I worked the job, the plant had been switched over to a completely recycled plant, only receiving a few truckloads of wood chips here and there. Even though it was recycled paper the typical stench still remained.

This will conclude the first part of the series. In the next few articles I will run through the general track layout  and a typical night switching the plant for those that might be interested i n recreating a paper mill job.