It automated operations and prioritized safety. Norfolk and Western Railway merged with Southern Railway in 1982 and the newly-formed Norfolk Southern made many changes. Fuel, oil, and sand levels had to be monitored, or else trains might stop or slip on distant tracks, requiring the expense of a delivery truck. They worked on pitted dirt ramps in poorly lit areas. Waters joined a team that raised engines up on jacks and removed brake pads, which came free with a powerful force. More: Visiting Our Past: The romance of the railroad touched Asheville I don’t want anybody to get in trouble.’” This electrician came up and said, ‘Look, you all don’t have to argue. The foreman drove the train through the switch and tore it up. “He didn’t tell me I had to throw the switch if it were thrown wrong. “We were switching engines around the shop,” Waters continues. He hadn’t been on the job two weeks, when his foreman told him to watch the switch. “You had foremen down there - just out of college - who’d make black guys do stuff just to aggravate them,” Waters observed. After a three-day training period, he was let loose into a racial initiation. Waters continued to not follow suit, even after his position had been cut at Enka’s BASF plant in 1973, but eventually he sought the paycheck and became a railroad man. I’d go down there, and there were two hundred workers sitting around, and they were dirty.” “No matter what time we’d come in in the morning, he’d drag us up. Ira and his brother Rayford had driven their father to work every day for a while. Waters had gotten his job through his father’s influence, though his father’s job experience was nothing he wanted. James Waters had been a hostler with Southern Railroad. More: Visiting Our Past: Working on the railroad was Casey Jones-dangerous … Rainy summers, it would be landslides.” Us (black men) would h’ist coal till our arms seem like would come loose at the sockets. “Whole trains of coal cars would get loose sometimes and man! There was a scatterment. “I’ve knowed the time when us cleared away twenty-seven wrecks in one month, workin’ in the rain,” McDowell related. Jim McDowell, interviewed by a Works Project Administration writer in 1939, recalled his years as an African-American section hand on the Asheville to Charleston line. “Blacks did the manual labor and whites were the foremen back then” and they mostly “stayed to themselves,” Waters said about the railroad’s heyday. The railway hired many African-American workers. “Each 24 hours finds the roundhouse crews of the Asheville division of the Southern checking and repairing, if necessary, as many as 80 engines,” the feature stated. In the roundhouse in 1941, an April 13 Asheville Citizen photo feature titled “Life of the Giant ‘Iron Horse,’” documented, Jack Connor, machinist’s helper, assisted machinist Whitney Davis in inspecting a pop valve to make sure excess steam had an outlet.” Several other workers, all white, operated the turntable replaced a headlight tapped on the engine to detect loose parts inspected the boilermaker checked the brakes and reviewed work schedules. MORE: Asheville's roundhouse matters to many MORE: Roundhouse in Asheville to be demolished Back then, trains had to be serviced every day.” You can run a train for six days off diesel fuel. “When I first got there we had 200 people,” Ira Waters, a former engine maintenance worker at the roundhouse told Pat Berkley of the YMI in 2002. The big roundhouse, which had gone up on Meadow Road in 1924 (and came down in 2014), began its route toward obsolescence in the 1950s, taking jobs with it. In 19, Southern Railway switched from steam to diesel locomotives, and it changed railroad culture as well as function.
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