The Round House

My last winter in Havre, Montana the temperature dropped to 57 degrees below zero one night.  Until that cold spell broke, it stayed below zero, day and night, for six weeks.  It was necessary to keep head bolt heaters in our vehicles and plug them in all night so they would start in the morning.

When parking our vehicles during the day, the parking lot was not equipped with receptacles.  Using head bolt heaters during the day was not an option.  At noon break we would all go to our vehicles and start them up, run them till they got warm, then shut them off and go back to work.  The plan was for the vehicle to be warm enough from the noon idling that they would start at night at the end of the day.  It usually worked.

The winter with the 57 degrees below zero I was on a job wiring the new Roundhouse for the Railroad.  In the days of steam engines the Railroad would use a roundhouse to de-ice frozen train engines.  A frozen up train engine would be taken into the roundhouse and overnight, in the enclosure, the heat from the boiler would thaw out the engine.

The roundhouse was also equipped with a turntable.  The turntable was used to turn an engine around and put it back on the track it had come in on (hence the term “roundhouse”).  With the advent of diesel engines, the roundhouse was no longer round.  A siding would run through the round house with a roll up door on each end.

When a diesel engine froze up they ran it into the “roundhouse” on the siding.  They would close the doors and use hot water hoses to thaw out the electric motors down by the wheels that they drove.  Basically a diesel engine is just a huge, oversized generator.

We had been wiring the roundhouse before the extreme cold weather hit, but weren’t quite done with it.  One of the things left to do was hook up the electric valves on the sand pit.  The sand pit was located outside in the cold!  The valves controlled the pumps that transferred the sand into pipe via air movement, over head and dropped into a tank on the train engine.  The sand was used to provide traction on icy days.

Every time I bent one of those wires, the insulation on the wires would pop off like peanut brittle.  To complete the job, I had to unbolt the valve assembly, bring it inside where it was warmer, warm up the 4 wires with my bare hands, do all of the wiring, then take the whole assembly outside and make one connection.

One morning while we were working there, an engine was brought in to thaw out.  One of the roll up doors would not close.  As the inside temperature began to drop due to the open door, things began to freeze up.  Two carpenters were brought in with long extension ladders and short bar pries to close the door.  With one man on each side of the door, they had to pry the door down an inch at a time.

I have not observed the railroad reverting to steam engines, so there must have been design improvements on the diesel engines since that time.  After all, it has been over 40 years.

Out In The Cold

In Montana and North Dakota it can get downright cold.  The last winter I spent there it got down to 57 below zero.  Usually construction slows down in the cold weather.  If a job was “out of the ground” they would put up tarps and use space heaters and keep working until the job was done.

One fellow told me he had worked for a local shop one winter.  He was working on a job out of town a ways.  He saw a deer standing in a snow bank while driving to the job one morning.  When he came back that night the deer was still standing in the same spot.  He stopped, got out of the truck, and went over to the deer.  It didn’t move so he kicked it.

“Man I nearly broke my toe.  That deer had frozen solid while standing there eating.”

I knew there was a trick that the locals would play on newbies.  They would find a frozen deer and prop it up in a snow bank.  Sometimes they would use it for target practice.

I let him think what he wanted to think.

Though I no longer work on them, one of the jobs I worked on in the winter was a radar station up near the Canadian border.  It was a government job and supposed to be a secret.  It was so secret that the only ones who knew what was going on were the men working on the site and the government inspectors.

Well the neighbors living next to the job site also knew.

And all of the residents of the nearby small towns knew about it.  And of course they told everyone they could think of, as far as they could spread it.

The blue prints for the job were not like anything I had seen before.  On the plan they would draw a line from a part or device to a number.  The number would be in a circle, a square, or an octagon.  You would take that number and sign and look it up in a book.  Then take the number from the book and go to the warehouse and look it up in another book.  That book would give you a bin number.  The bin number was coded to take you to the location of the part you were after.

Sometimes the part number/location number would be bigger than the item.  A half inch lock washer could have a 12 digit number.  (Or, maybe that was the lock nut.  But that’s O.K. it was supposed to be a secret.)

There are stories about the tricks we played on one another because of those part numbers.  Stay tuned for those.

One time when we were traveling to the base, about 30 miles north of town, one fellow asked me; “Are we pretty close to the Canadian line?”

I said; “Yes.  See that ridge of snow there?”  I was pointing at a ridge of hills in the distance, about 3 miles away.  (The snow had just covered the top of the ridge I was pointing at.  Everything beyond it was snow covered.  Everything in front was not.  The ridge was called Gobblers Knob.  It was just high enough to be the highest point on the prairie.  Hence the name “Gobblers Knob”)

I didn’t say anymore.  More as in – “The border is about 15 miles past that.”

From then on those guys thought they were about 3 miles from Canada

Electricity Bites

When I first started wiring I was a bit careless about working with hot wires.  For instance, one time I was working with hot wires, up on a ladder, near the ceiling in a garage used for storage.  I cut some of the hot wires and the circuit shorted through my body so that I could not let go.

My option was to step off of the ladder.  The weight of my body pulled me off of the hot wires and I fell.  It isn’t the height of the fall that gets you; it’s the sudden stop at the end that is the difficult part.  In this instance the stop at the end involved a vehicle of some sort.  In some way I landed on the bumper of the vehicle with the bumper across my back.  My back was sore for about a week.

Another time I was under a house sitting on a dirt bank.  When I pulled a piece of sheathing off a piece of BX Cable (a forerunner of the metal clad cable we use today) it felt like someone had slapped me across the back with a 2×4.  In the making of the cut I had contacted the metal sheath and the current carrying wire within it.  By being seated on ground I was completing the circuit.  Once the cut-off piece came free of the wire the current released me.

One time I was working on an outside sign in front of a place of business.  It was getting late in the day.  Somewhere there was a time clock of which I was unaware.  I got hit with the current when the photo cell on the time clock turned on the feed to the sign.  That was bad enough.  However because it was a sign, a neon sign, there was also a transformer involved.  The transformer changed the voltage from 110 volts to 15,000 volts.  Boy wasn’t that a jolt.  The reason I’m not dead to write about this is because the higher the volts the less the amps.  In this instance it was a milli-amp shock.  However it still hurt even if it was a low amp shock.

Move forward about 30 some years and I was wiring an unfinished basement.  The owners were remodeling it into living quarters.  Since there were people living in the upper floor I left the power on.  After I called in for an inspection, the sheetrockers brought in their sheetrock.  The access to the basement was so tight that to make the corner they removed a portion of an open wall, thereby dislodging a box and its wire from the stud to which it was attached.

Later the inspector called me on the phone and read me the riot act.  He had been inspecting the job and was curious about a wire hanging loose, unlanded in a box, in the middle of an unstudded wall.  So he reached down and grasped it saying to himself; “Hmm.  I wonder what this is for.”  ZAP.

He adamantly told me; “The home owner or one of his kids could have been killed!”

I told him that I had to leave the power on because people were living in there while they awaited his arrival to inspect.

He said; “I don’t care about the family – you leave the power off until after it has been inspected.”  (I don’t think he recognized his 180 degree departure from his previous concern about the family.)  What could I say?  More of: “Sorry sir.  Yes sir.  It won’t happen again sir.”

For a brief moment what I really wanted to say was:  “I have been bitten on average about once a week for 40 years and I have only died a couple of times.”  But I held my tongue.  He was already angry.

It was a shocking lesson.