A Good Day's Work Read Online Free Page B

in my view, is perfectly understandable. The trains run on time. A seagull never gets sucked into a diesel locomotive engine, causing the train to begin a death spiral five miles above the earth. At a train station no homeland security type stands before you, working his fingers into a rubber glove in anticipation of a body-cavity search. Instead a crinkly-eyed Québécois dude flirts with the ladies as he takes tickets and gets everyone organized.
    At 9:30 p.m. they’re allowed out into the yard: the “foamers” so ardent in their love for locomotion that they are alleged to foam at the mouth at the site of their favourite diesel train; travel buffs starting their first transcontinental rail trip; sufferers from fear of flying; maybe even a romantic ortwo looking for the kind of adventure that befalls men in tuxes and women in chiffon dresses aboard locomotives in Alfred Hitchcock movies. Every train I can remember being on also has its share of passengers susceptible to nostalgia for the sort of fabled, innocent past conjured up in Gordon Lightfoot songs and vintage Canadian National posters. People like that board the train vibrating with possibility. I know I do.

    THREE days earlier Jordan McCallum walked over to the fridge in his Dundas, Ontario, bungalow. As a locomotive engineer who works the “spare board,” he’s the low man on the totem pole. Instead of a regular shift, he’s on call seven days a week. It works this way: there’s a list; first name in is first name out. As people are called out on the job, names rise on the list. Jordan gets two hours’ notice when they want him to come to work. Back in the old days there were crew callers: junior guys who would jump on their bicycles, ride over to your house, knock on your door and give you your work assignment. Now someone just dials your cell phone.
    â€œYou can make the spare board work for you,” says Jordan in a chipper voice, which I discover is his usual mode of communication. “If you’re going to work with someone consistently, it’s almost like a marriage. I like the variety. I like working with different people. It keeps it fresh. For me, until I have the seniority to hold a certain run, it just works.”
    So, he opened the fridge, grabbed his soft-sided lunch bag and threw in some icepacks for the sandwiches. Then he walked outside, got into his black Ford Escape and drove thesixty kilometres to the CN shipping yard in Mimico, in the southwestern part of Toronto, where he boarded a train for London. The next day he worked back to Toronto. A day later he awoke at the Comfort Inn on the outskirts of Sudbury, then took a cab over to the railroad town of Capreol, where Craig Stead—who he has shared a locomotive cab with on and off for fifteen years—had just arrived in his burgundy pickup. “When I started out, the Canadian’s engineers were always old guys close to retirement,” says Craig in his gravelly rasp. “They call the Canadian the ‘varnish job.’ When you’re the engineer on the Canadian, you’re ‘running the varnish.’ It was usually the reward for a long career. Guys like Jordan and me lucked out. All the baby boomers are retiring now. We know it’s a great privilege to be an engineer on the Canadian.”
    At about 10 a.m. on June 9, 2010, they pulled the Canadian into CN’s Mimico switching yard. They did their final checks. They grabbed their gear. Then they took a cab to the Marriott Hotel in downtown Toronto, where they snoozed, watched some tube and got a bite. By 7:30 p.m. they were back at Mimico, printing two sets of documents—their tabular bulletin general orders—off of the computer.
    These orders let them know about washed-out track, broken rail or any other reason to watch their speed in the trip to come. Once they have a clear understanding of the route they call the controller and tell him that he can