The following remembrance was published in the Dec. 1948 issue of Railroad Magazine:
“A boomer himself, W. M. Cadmus, 530 Peck Ave., San Antonio 10, Tex., likes to read about boomers, such as ‘Haywire Mac,’ who referred to the three humps at Conway, Pa., in our August issue. Mr. Cadmus writes: ‘I had the pleasure of riding herd on all three humps. The middle lead was located just east of the rest house, where you could flop for a thin dime. Brakemen were paid $2.30 for 100 miles or 10 hours; switchmen $2.76 for day work, $2.88 at night.
‘The riders were known as ‘gunnies,’ a term I never heard outside of Conway. On cold night we’d huddle in the boxcar shanty while the engine, called a ‘snapper,‘ cleared the lead. Some cars would go wrong. In case of a pullback to the hump to rehump them, the conductor would yell for ‘Two gunnies,‘ or ‘Four gunnies!‘ Some time afterward, when I was working at Las Vegas, N.M., a boomer asked me if gunnies were being hired there. He seemed surprised to discover that I knew he’d come from Conway.
Runaways at Conway were frequent. One day a crowd of us on the rest house balcony watched a 9-car cut of W.J. Rainey coke racks run wild into a cut of 69 hoppers. Black dust hung over the scene for nearly 30 minutes. Before it lifted, we saw that five cars had been smashed into kindling wood.
We had a picturesque gang of clowns (switchmen and yard brakemen). Their stories of the outside world were a factor in my seeking new scenes. I found that those men knew what they were talking about, and I have no regrets at having hit the boomer trail. I was an Erie and Ashtabula Division brakeman. Business sank to a low ebb each winter, so I spent the cold months working in the yard. Often I was routed out of a regular caboose for a day’s work in the yard. This was a fine break-in for the boomer trail, enabling me to qualify for yard or road jobs.
One night a clown got lit up and flagged the hottest limited in front of the westbound hump to offer the hogger a swig from his quart of rye. What the hogger replied is unfit for publication. At the time I was riding‘em, Conway did not use the system of chalking cars for the next cut. The brains, the cutter and the switch tender carried switch lists. Later, I saw the chalk method employed on other roads such as the airline hump of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul at Milwaukee, Wis.
Since the brass hats at Conway turned thumbs down on boomers, it was amusing to note the hashing over of the ’farmer’ theme in connection with references. Every known method of establishing farm experience from cradle to hump rider made good listening as well as useful information. I often wondered what a brass hat thought as he scanned the job application of a ’farmer’ wearing a thousand-mile shirt.”
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Thank you for sharing.
