I seldom spend time watching a lot of television, however when it comes time to do so, my favorite lately has been "Dirty Jobs". Last night there was a 10 minute segment where Mike joined two Union Pacific (I think) maintenance workers to change out rotten rail ties. Now by no shape of the imagination was this one of the really Dirty Jobs, however I now have an understanding for some of the railway nomenclature as they spent a little time discussing "Gandy Dancers" and 15 steps to nailing a railway tie. I was also amazed at how low tech and manually intensive the job is. They stated that something like a billion rail ties are in the US railway system. Must be some mechanized process to replace ties. So this got me to thinking, what other types of (really) Dirty Jobs are out on the real Railroad. Pictures would be great if you have them.
Any internal work on the firebox, boiler or smokebox of any steam engine. Those places are just plain sooty and filthy.
According to one Conductor I spoke with years ago on the Wisconsin Central, cleaning off the road kill like dear.
A few things that were dirty to me were, Changing out head, liners and pistons, celler packer, and steam cleaning engines after hitting a flock of sheep.
Clearing wreck sites with spilled oils, syrups, or nasty chemicals. The Poo-Poo Choo-Choo also comes to mind. Or worse yet, a passenger wreck with many bodies as occurred in the UK several times in years past.
