Rocky's Rail: A Spokane Division Trainman 1960-2004
By John Langlot and Mac McCulloch.
Rocky’s Rail is a new hard cover book of nearly 400 pages with 50 maps and 98 photographs that recounts the career of John Langlot who hired out on the Great Northern at Hillyard, WA in 1960 and retired from the BNSF Railway at Spokane in 2004. The book is intended for general readers, historians, and rail fans interested in what it was like to work in the ‘running trades’ in the latter part of the Twentieth Century.
The heart of the book is John’s stories of working on the railroad. A few are typical, but most are unique to him. What sets John’s stories apart are his ability to recognize their worth and to tell them long after the fact. He tells the story of many a railroad operating man using events from his own life. John illustrates the effort and determination of the men who made, and make, the railroads work.
This book is one of very few in railroad literature that describes railroad work from the perspective of a trainman, that is, of a brakeman and conductor. Rocky’s Rail fills that void. It was the conductor who managed the train and was/is responsible for the retail service of spotting cars to and pulling cars from customers’ facilities. John describes the work, what it was and how it was done, and labor/management relationships of his time and place.
Rocky’s Rail describes the operation of the Great Northern Railway in the 1960’s based on the line segments and jobs associated with them. For the first ten years of his career John worked from Hillyard on the Great Northern main line east to Troy, MT and west to Wenatchee, plus all the GN branches in that territory. Two chapters discuss the planning and implementation of the 1970 merger of the Great Northern, Northern Pacific and the Spokane Portland and Seattle that created the Burlington Northern Railway, and the significant bridge construction projects required to integrate the Burlington Northern’s operations in the Spokane area. The balance of the book is arranged chronologically.
After the BN merger, he also worked on the former NP main line between Paradise, MT and Pasco, the former SP & S main line to Pasco, and all the former NP branch lines tributary to Spokane. They are discussed in the context of John’s work on them.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
John Langlot, the son of a Great Northern trainman, grew up in Hillyard, Washington. John worked his first day as a Great Northern trainman on August 6, 1960. For most of the 1960’s he worked as a brakeman on the Wenatchee-Oroville locals at Wenatchee. In time, John worked every trainman job available at Hillyard; all the locals, Chain Gang to Troy, Montana, and later to Whitefish, Chain Gang to Wenatchee, and passenger trips as a brakeman to Seattle and Whitefish. John was promoted to conductor in March of 1968. With the BN merger John could also work former Northern Pacific routes from Yardley to Paradise, Montana, Pasco, Washington, and Lewiston, Idaho. John’s favorite job was the bid-in work trains on which in 1997 and 1998 he participated in the two main track construction projects between Spokane and Sandpoint, and between Sandpoint and Troy, Montana. John retired from BNSF on December 31, 2004.
Mac McCulloch grew up in Wenatchee, Washington, where he worked his first day as a Great Northern clerk in June of 1967; the first of four summer clerking stints as a clerk at Wenatchee. He continued with Burlington Northern at Seattle in the fall of 1970 and graduated from the University of Washington in the summer of 1971. Mac joined the Association of American Railroads Bureau of Explosives on October 1, 1974 working as Inspector at Portland, Oregon, and Manager Field Operations at Washington, DC. He joined Southern Pacific’s Hazardous Material Control department at San Francisco in 1979, later becoming Superintendent of that Department. Mac is now retired and lives in northern Mississippi.