In the 1970’s I worked as a brakeman for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad in the Proviso freight yards.   One of  the jobs that I was assigned to do was to catch freight cars that were rolled off of the top of the hill that they called the hump.  As the freight car rolled down the hill, it was switched and sorted into one of the sixty-nine tracks that  were assigned to different destinations around the city, state and country.   When one of the tracks would be coupled and pulled clear, the skateman (me) would be called on the radio and he would have to catch the racing car that was  coming down the empty track, crawl up to the top of it and turn the brake crank  to stop it before it rolled out the other end. Then the skateman would have to crawl back down the ladder, get off of the car and get out of the way before the  next car came down and crashed into it. The car with the brake would stop all  subsequent cars that came booming down the track.   Sometimes those cars would hit very hard.   Sometimes they would hit hard enough to derail the car or  damage it in some way.   It was not unusual to see a freight car accident  several times during a shift.   This is the story of the aftermath of one of those accidents.

I was working the night shift in the fall of 1976.  It had been a quiet night and I had very little to do so I stayed in the shanty all night.   At about dawn I was called to stop a car that was going to be sent down a clear track.  It was an empty track that was right next to a track that had a refrigerator car that had it’s door knocked off in a violent collision.   The refrigerator car had carried thousands of unpackaged,  cleaned chickens.   When the door was knocked off, there were piles of chickens everywhere up and down the track.   Each time a new car was sent down the track  that had the damaged car, the impact would send another pile of chickens out the  door and onto the ground.   As the car was forced farther and farther down the  track, there were more and more chicken piles.   This event attraced the rats  from everywhere.

Railroad rats were plentiful and they were not normal sized rats.  The railroad rats were built out of generations of huge well-fed rats that consumed the corn, wheat, meal and all other food  products that littered the railyards.   When we came to work, we would read the paper and then we would tape the paper around the bottom of our legs with duct tape.  We did this because it was not uncommon to walk in the railyards and have the ground give away as our leg went down into a rats underground cave. In that  event the rolled newspaper protected our legs from rat bites.

I knew about the chickens that night.  The guy on the previous shift had grabbed a couple of dozen of them and shoved them into his bag to take home and he asked me if I wanted any.  He was not about to give me any of his chickens, he just wanted to tell me where I  could find a pile of my own.  No thanks.

The empty track was about a half mile  long.  I had to get far enough up the track to catch the car so I could have time to stop it before it ran out the other end and crashed into something.  As  I walked up the track in the morning light, I saw chickens being pulled into the rat holes.   I could not see the rats, but I saw the little tugs that they were applying to the other end of the chicken.  It was a little creepy.

As I walked further down the track I saw a sight that was out of a Hitchcockian nightmare.  I saw thousands of big black rats running all over the piles of naked chickens.  I could hear the children of the night as they fought each other over the abundant chicken piles  and it was very frightening.  I stopped and did not want to go any closer to them.  I saw my boxcar coming down the hill about a half mile away. As it rounded the curve and entered my track, it got the attention of the rats.   The  rats stopped fighting and they started running to stay ahead of the boxcar and  they were coming right towards me.   Thousands upon thousands of rats were being  chased by the car that I needed to catch and stop.  I wanted to run the other way, but if I did not stop that car, it would go out the other end and crash  into the Wisconsin 320 that was more than two miles long and heading towards the  mainline.  My freight car was barreling down the track pretty fast and it was  overtaking and running over the carpet of rats that could not run fast  enough.

I had an idea.   I reached into the leg pocket of my coveralls and I pulled out two flares.  The flares were standard equipment for a brakeman and they were used to signal the engineers in  the locomotives in the absence of radios.  Also, when a train is too long, the engineer can not see the light of the brakeman’s lamp, so the brakemen will use these very bright red flares to send the signal to stop, go and slow down.

I lit the flares and placed then in  front of me on the ground.  I thought that the rats would come down the track  and run to either side of the flares while I stood behind the bright red glow as  I waited for my box car.

They leading edge of the panicked rat  wave was upon me and they did not even notice my hot flares for a second.  They  raced all around me and they were hitting my legs and jumping up on me as I kept whacking them with my lantern and with my screaming vocal cords.  They just  kept coming and as I fought them off and my feet kept dancing like I was standing on a bed of hot coals.  I kept stepping on them and they kept biting and tearing away at my leg newspapers.

My boxcar had finally arrived and I  fought the rats off until the last second as I grabbed the ladder as the car came rushing by.  As I was holding onto the ladder I looked below and the  ground could not be seen.  The rats were rushing by like a river all around the boxcar and I could actually feel the car bumping as it ran over rat after rat after rat.  As I started up the ladder I felt a weight on the lower part of my  army jacket.  I could feel the rough tail of the rat as it whipped the back of  my legs as it tried to maintain it’s grip and crawl to the top of the thing that it was hanging onto for dear life.  Me!!

I was in a panic.   As I was crawling up the ladder on the rocking boxcar the rat was crawling up me and it was getting close to the middle of my back.  I tried to knock it off with my lantern but I lost my grip and my lantern fell down into the sea of rats below.  I stood on the small platform on top of the boxcar and I only hoped that I could stop the boxcar and deal with the rat before it reached my neck and head.  I cranked and cranked the brakewheel as fast as I could.   The brake was partially set when I felt the long whiskers of the rat hit the back of my neck.  That was enough for me!  I abandoned my post, screamed and I jumped off the boxcar onto the top of the car over on the next track.  I rolled around the top  of the car screaming like a little girl as I dislodged the cat-sized rat from my coat.  It ran from me and fell off the side of the car.   I looked at the  boxcar that I was supposed to stop and the partial brake was not enough to stop  the car before it reached the end of the track and it hit the side of the  Wisconsin 320.   The damage was not too bad because I called the engineer of the 320 on my radio and I warned him that I lost control of my car and they would  have to stop their train.  I had lost the battle with the rats and he was going to be hit somewhere in the middle of his train.

When my shift was over I had to report the incident and the wreck to the trainmaster.  I was written-up and I had to go to Trainmaster court.  I had not been able to stop a boxcar that had a perfectly good brake.  I had also violated a rule that clearly stated that you  can not jump from one car to another, especially when they are not even on the same track.  I had even lost my lantern and that was another huge violation.  Also, I had not used a skate to stop the car.  In theory, we are not supposed  to get on the car and apply the brake until the car is stopped.  The skate is a  device that we have been instructed to place on the rail and when the wheel of the car hits the skate, it is supposed to bring the car to a sliding stop. In reality, if we put one of those on the rail, it would derail the car because the  tracks were in such miserable condition.

Although the railroad court heard my story and understood the conditions that I was working under, I was suspended, or “Canned” for thirty days for the violation of the aforementioned rules.  I  thanked them profusely.  When a brakeman is suspended and he carries the Union’s Can insurance he makes more money than if he is working and he has all that time off.  It was a wonderful thirty days paid vacation and I will never, ever forget that dawn of the chicken rats.