Richard: Signed in with Harry Gill who was superintendent of shops there at Topeka. His early career was as a diesel maintainer, one of the first early diesel maintainer and Master Mechanic at Winslow. He was early pioneers of maintenance of diesel locomotives along with Blickle, Johny Morris and Macky LL Luthey and some of those folks. Harry Gill says well He says I am going to put you out in the shops there and start you to work. That's how I ended up. I started out pay scale was $2.03 an hour which was probably was lower than any other new hire engineer anywhere!
Russell: At that time were you an apprentice in the steam shop or Diesel shop?
Richard: Well at the time the three year special apprentice ship program was a program designed for college graduates to get experience in all departments in the mechanical department with the future goal of being a supervisor. You had to take these various positions and jobs and actually in there and get right down and get your hands dirty. Unlike the new trainees were they kind of shag you around from one place to another were you don't do anything except get in the way basically. In those years you actually had to get down and do it!
Russell: What type of things did they have you actually doing?
Richard: Will the goal was a certain number of months you worked with the machinist certain number of months you worked with the electricians and a certain number of months you worked with the carmen not only in freight and passenger cars but also in locomotives.
Russell: So you were actually working the lathes and so forth?
Richard: Yes. So they decided that Topeka was the first place. Of course in those years Topeka shops in 1959 was basically a car shop the only locomotive work that was on the property was done at the old roundhouse. That was like running repairs and light maintenance I think over a period of time we had one unit come in for a wheel change or something like this a couple of times. Normally consisted of working with those crafts and then when you were done with that you would go to another shop for locomotive experience.
Russell: Where there several of you in this program?
Richard: It was kind of program that several individuals were in as I recall I was probably the next to last one. I think there was one person after me that went thought this three-year program for college graduates.
Russell: Went though it individually or as a group
Richard: Went through it individually. The difference between my type of apprenticeship and the one-year special apprenticeship was that the other people had their regular machinist or Electricians apprentices four year at the time and then they would take the one-year special apprenticeship program to learn to be a supervisor. In a way that got more knowledge as far as working in the shop is concerned because they were able to cover more territory, but on the other hand we all had to learn to work the machines and do the trouble shooting what ever the case might be.
Russell: While you were at Topeka did they put you up there
Richard: Yes. That was another thing that we had a question came up yesterday or the day before about the fire department on the Santa Fe. One of the thing they allowed use to do was to sleep at the fire station at Topeka among the ranks of the volunteer fireman who came from the ranks of the shop employees. Except for the truck driver who was a labor sonority list whose full time job was fire truck driver. Then we had a full time fire chief. All rest of them were volunteers that were assigned or volunteered for that. So we slept with those people in the beds up stairs.
Russell: So the fire department was composed of people who got room and board for being in the fire department.
Richard: They just got to sleep there and it rotated they had two different groups that came in one night and one another night so it would not disrupt their family life.
Russell: So the regular people were getting special pay for sleeping in the firehouse?
Richard: Yes, I think they did if I remember right. Our duties were as far as the special apprentices were concerned was to handle any in coming calls from the fire watch and the people who went and checked in every hour to see if everything was alright that was basically a night watchman job. We would handle there calls anything else that took place while they were out fighting fires some where either in the shop or in the city as they were connected with the city system. One good thing so we did not have to worry about pay rent but we still had to go out and eat some where. As far as the work is concerned started out in Topeka in the machinist craft and worked up in the machine shop area. The very first job I had was cleaning these jacks that hold the piggy back trailers on the flat cars which was the old stile and cleaning the jacks out cleaning the grease out so they could be repaired.
Russell: You said these were the old style jacks how did they work?
Richard: They were the old crank type. They weren't fixed to the car they were portable type. I mean they were removable because some of the piggyback cars we had at the time were just standard deck flat cars. Anyway they had these old jacks to clean the grease out of so I had a scraper, just a common type scraper, and I was told you had better get some gloves. Will the only gloves I had were some good dress gloves. I ruined a pair of dress gloves in a week so I knew right off the bat that was not going to work So I had to get some regular gloves to work with. It was quite interesting work in the machine shop for a while I think I was down in the wheel shop for awhile.
Russell: What type of things were you machining in the machine shop?
Richard: Will in the machine shop I was in what they called the tool department. Up there in the tool department we worked on lathes making parts and things of this sort. One of the lathes I worked on was a brass lath. This department that I worked in was on the second floor of the machine shop there is nothing in their any more. It is more for material storage. At that time we had a bunch of machines up there and worked on passenger car steam end valves and things of that sort. So I got some lath experience up there. Then they decided that I would go down to the wheel shop. While I was down in the wheel shop I worked on roller bearings, freight car roller bearings. At that time they did not have conveyors or anything like that they would bring the roller bearings on a pallets so you had to physically pick them off the pallet and mount them on the axle and press them on to the axle with a bearing presser. The 5 1/2 by 10's weren't so heavy but when you started getting in to the 6 x 11 size they started to getting a little heavier. The 6 1/2 x 12 package roller bearing for freight cars were just starting to coming in. The Santa Fe and other railroads were not quite certain whether they wanted to go that route with that heavy a weight on the journal with roller bearings. So they also had some of these Allison Bearings semi friction roller bearing thing. I am tiring to think of the cars we had these things I think they were GA 82 gondola car that had these things on. After a while they found that the 6 1/2 x 12 rotating end cap roller bearings would do the job just as well as the Allison bearings did so they went to that. Then for a while I worked on what they call the wheel-grinding machine used to smooth out the treads of the wheels. That was down in the old wheel shop as well. We maintained the diameter of the wheel to a certain tape measure and they had be to less that a quarter tape. We had that to do and that was quite a busy job as the Topeka shop did most of the freight car wheel work at that time
After that took place I started to working with the electrician's for a while to. This was up in the Coach shop. So I had to transfer in to the electrical craft. Just about the time I did that in August I got my draft notice and had to go into the army to service my active duty time because my active duty time consisted of 4 months. I got in to the critical skills program in the army. I wanted to go into the Railroad Battalion but they were full up. But they had this critical skills program were an engineer could serve 4 months of active duty and seven years 8 months stand by reserve to fulfill his obligation. So I did my 4 months.
Russell: So you didn't get your full 3 years in?
Richard: Will it was kind of delayed a little bit by four months. So I got into the passenger department. What was taking place is we were getting these baggage car shells from the Pullman Company. The Topeka Shops were finishing them off putting on the decking, wood decking laying in conduit for light fixtures and that sort of thing.. Our job was putting in the conduit and wiring for the light fixtures. Will then I went to the army.
When I came back starting in January they put me right back into the electric shop. In that time not only were they working baggage cars but they were converting these sleepers cars, lounge observation cars lightweight stainless steel to chair cars, because they were running short of chair cars and had an over abundance of these older stainless steel sleeping cars like the various indian name cars from the original super chief. The car that I worked on with the electricians was the original super chief sleeper car Taos. We did all the electrical work on it wired it all up and it was renamed or renumbered into chair car 2956. So we got on the ground level of that one and went through the complete work and sent it out of the shop as chair car 2956. So that was quite an interesting experience on that
Russell: So you had to gut out the sleeper?
Richard: Yes! Every thing had to be gutted out first we had to tear out all the wiring. After that thing was all torn out and of course you had to watch because the insulation in those old Budd built stainless steel sleepers was very combustible. There was many, not many time but awfull lot of times were a guy would have a torch in there and pretty soon the heat from the flame would get the insulation on fire between the walls between the inside and the outside. It would smolder in there for hours and sometime late at night the night watch man would see the thing smoldering away and so he would call the Topeka fire department or the Santa Fe fire department to put the fire out.
Russell: So the fire department was kept busy.
Richard: That's right! Likewise goes for down in the freight car sheds to some were some of the old wood decking things of this short were they were using cutting torches they would get the deck on fire or the inside lining. That was quite a combustible thing that had to be watched.
Will then after that I did various other jobs with the electrical department then they decided I would get into the machinist craft. So I work on tool grinding work and parts like that.
Well then they then sent me down in to the car department. I had to learn to be a welder. So as a result not only did I use a welding rod for the first time on the passenger car side welding up break heads. Then they would take them over to the machine shop to be machined them down to normal specifications. They would have to check to see that I did not have all kinds of puddles and which I did by the way originally. So it was a learning experience on using a welding rod which I learned very quickly that was not very well good for me because it changed my eye site even with the heavy dark glass. I could not stand that I noticed it effected my vision as far as my near-sightedness was concerned.
But I did go down to the car sheds and work for the freight car men. They were building some of these coal cars at the time for York Canyon service and places like that. I worked on welding end frames, things of this sort.
Then we had to work in the test department while we were there. At that point in time we had to go into the physical lab. We had various experiments things of this sort we had to do. I might add that special apprentices when they were in the program had to write a monthly report of what they had done. Then one of the secretaries over in the motive power building or in the shop you were working would type up the report. A copy would go to the head of the apprentice ship program system wide who at that time was William D. Major and another copy would go into your personal file and then third copy would go to the superintendent of shops office. You had to write all these things have them typed then they were sent in. Some of the material that done in the test department were more along my line because we were using physical machinery to break things up to tell the tensile strength of material and this sort of thing. For example they had like welders would have to qualify their welding once in a while and they would pieces that they would weld together. We had to see what the amount of pressure it would take to break the weld a part and see it came with in limits or not.
One interesting job I had down their was to test a bunch of materials compared to other materials to make cross bars for MTC cars and they had aluminum and steel and some sort of fiberglass martial. They wanted to see if this lightweight fiberglass material was just as good as aluminum or steel, which it was not because it started to shear. I took the test and wrote it all up and was able to use some of the formulas that I had used in school to prove that this in deed what would take place. That was part of were my knowledge came in. That was just in Topeka. It turned out their was some complaints about my writing my lab reports. Because normally everybody would write it hurry up and get it done and send it in and it might be a little paragraph but mine might run one or two or three pages long. So there was some complaints about that not so much in Topeka but in some of the other shops.
Then after I went through those three crafts in Topeka, then I was told October 2, 1961 to transfer to San Bernardino, California to get my experience on locomotives.
Transcribed by Russell Crump
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