Back When We Slept and Cooked on the Caboose

Fri Mar 25 08:19:43 EDT 2022

Abe,When I made my first "emergency" trip to Bluefield, the men stayed at "The West Virginian" hotel. Arriving at the top of the hill, my conductor told me, while he was putting us off, to drop off on the south side, cross the yard and walk straight up the street to the West Virginian hotel, get my room and then go straight to the TV room and turn the TV on to a certain channel so he could watch his "soap opera"!The Milner Matz came sometime later. Neither of the hotels were worth staying in and cemented my hatred for going to Bluefield. I am so glad that my seniority was on the Roanoke District!!!When I was attending school in Winston Salem, my future father in law was a conductor and they indeed stayed on the cab. The cab track was across the yard from the yard office. The engine men had a house to stay in a mile or so away.In Shenandoah, I first stayed in the "Y". The rooms were only about 6'x10', just big enough for a bed and and a chair. Down the hall were common shower rooms. Most crews had boarding houses close by that they rented. After about my first three months, being the youngest man, I was forced to work the Waynesboro Switcher. Since we usually worked overtime on Mondays, we stayed in a bunk room in the back of the freight station on Monday nights. Each of the four of us rook turns driving from Roanoke to Waynesboro the other four days of the week.Over that winter of '73, one of the yardmasters in Shenandoah built the "Shenandoah Motel & Restaurant", made a deal with the N&W and we stayed there for a long time.Jimmy LisleSent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone
-------- Original message --------From: NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> Date: 3/25/22  5:18 AM  (GMT-05:00) To: N&W Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> 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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