Back When We Slept and Cooked on the Caboose

[NW Mailing List]

I'm very glad you shared this. This part of railroad history is surely not
in any of the many books we all own.  But it's an important look into life
on the railroad.
Mike Rector

On Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 7:54 AM NW Mailing List via NW-Mailing-List <
nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> wrote:

> Very, very interesting.  I learned a lot from this post.  No objections to
> cross-posting from me..
> Jerry Kay, Jarratt, Virginia
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
> To: N&W Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
> Sent: Thu, Mar 24, 2022 7:29 pm
> Subject: Back When We Slept and Cooked on the Caboose
>
> Once-Upon-a-Time, *cross-posting* (as it was called) from one list to
> another would get you excommunicated.  But I have said Sayonara to more
> than one List because of petty disagreements, and as one stares down the
> barrel of his eighth decade of life, his threshold of tolerance diminishes
> considerably.
>
> So... to another List, which most of you do not read, someone posted a
> question about the role of the old Milner-Matz Hotel (Bluefield) in
> providing crew lodging.  And since the answer to that question concerns an
> almost invisible side of N&W railroading, I thought readers of this List
> might find it of interest.  If you think it an inappropriate
> *cross-posting,* you know where your Delete button is.
>
> -- abram burnett
> Peoples Republic of Turnip-istan
>
>
> >>
> Yes, there was railroad lodging at the Milner-Matz in Bluefield... a
> dingy, decrepit old hotel on its last legs.
>
> Sometime around 1970, or perhaps a little later, the railroad and the
> labor organizations entered into what was called the Caboose Agreement. It
> provided that cabooses would no longer be assigned to certain runs, but
> would be pooled and free-running, and any caboose could go on any train.
> That meant that men would no longer have a place to stow their gear (e.g.
> rain gear,) sleep and cook at the away-from-home terminal, etc.  In
> exchange, the railroad agreed to provide lodging for the men at the
> away-from-home terminal.  That's when the N&W leased a number of rooms at
> the Milner Matz Hotel in Bluefield.
>
> Another provision of the Caboose Agreement was that the lodging would be
> near a restaurant which was open at all hours when crews might be put on
> duty, so the men could eat before commencing their day's work.
>
> But let's go back to a time before the Caboose Agreement.  Train crews
> (Conductor and Brakemen) had the caboose as their lodging and kitchen (and
> yes, we always cooked on the caboose.)  But Engine crews (Engineman and
> Fireman) had no caboose, so there was generally a Railroad YMCA to provide
> them lodging and food (Bluefield, Shenandoah, Crewe, Portsmouth, Columbus.)
> I do not recall where the Engine Crews stayed at Bristol or Winston-Salem,
> but the Train Crews always stayed on their cabooses.  Some enginemen just
> did not like the always noisy environment of Railroad YMCAs, so had
> arrangements at one of the rooming houses which were generally around the
> big terminals.
>
> I remember staying in the rooming house at Clare (Cincinnati) one night.
> (You got a bed only there; the toilet was common to whomever might be
> staying there.)  We were called the next morning around 4 AM for a work
> train east, and the owner, who knew how many men she had to feed, had nice
> bag lunches set out on the table for the men to pick up as they went out to
> work... the bags had both breakfast food and a lunch, and it was all
> included in the very nominal price of the room/bed.
>
> When the Caboose Agreement went into effect, the Enginemen were covered as
> well, so they also received company-paid lodging.
>
> I did stay in the Bluefield Railroad YMCA once, and once only.  The place
> was just a few feet from the Round House, and engines were moving by all
> night long, bells clanging.  I went to work the next morning having had
> very little rest !  After that, I always stayed on the caboose down at East
> Yard.
>
> Hope this answers your question about the Milner-Matz at Bluefield, as
> well as how things were handled before that.
>
> Now, concerning your "Beanery" question.  The cafeteria in the Railroad
> YMCA at Bluefield was always open and served up a good faire for the
> working man, at a very reasonable price.   Most of us Radford Division men,
> if we decided we wanted to splurge and "go out" for a meal somewhere other
> than cooking on the caboose, went to one of the hash joints in town, up one
> of the side streets off Princeton Avenue, near the passenger depot,  a
> half-mile walk from the East Yard Cab Track.  Checking the Google Maps
> street-view imagery, I believe they may have been on the lower end of
> Federal St.
>
> One of these places was called Kitty's. It was at the lower end of the
> spectrum for both panache and sanitation.  The wall above the griddle was
> covered with sheet tin up to a height of about ten feet, and I often
> wondered why no one ever took a putty knife and scraped off the thick layer
> of badly-yellowed grease. One other memory of this joint: It was the only
> place where I ever saw bullet holes in the juke box. And they were not
> nice, polite little 22 caliber holes, either... they looked like they had
> been made by the projectiles from elephant guns ! Of course, the glass had
> been replaced in the shot-up juke box, and then life went back to normal
> for a coal town!  Everyone who knows anything about the Radford Division
> has heard of the almost-legendary Engineman Red Hurley, who ran Time
> Freight No. 78 to Roanoke on No. 26's schedule with a Class A Mallet on the
> head end.   Kitty, a nice lady with overly-dyed black hair and likely
> approaching 50, was his girlfriend.
>
> As I recall, the Railroad YMCA at Bluefield closed after the Caboose
> Agreement went in effect and crews were given lodging at the Hotel.  The
> old YMCA was in quite run-down shape anyway.
>
> It's hard to realize these memories are now approaching 60 years old...
>
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