Charlie's Transcript

Interview with Charlie MacDonald, Retired Conductor for the CN

Date of Interview: October 29th, 2001 in Prince George, BC

Interviewer: Shiloh Durkee
Transcriber: Shiloh Durkee

BEGIN SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE

S.Durkee: This is Shiloh and today we’re at Charlie MacDonald’s house 1112 Quaw St. in Prince George and we’re going to be talking to him a bit about what it was like to for the CN and changes he saw in the community and at work while he was there. So, I’ll just ask you a bit about your background, and maybe where you came from, your birth date if you feel comfortable, when you came to Prince George…

C.MacDonald: Okay. I was born Vancouver, on a 23^rd of January 1930. I started on the C.N.R. when I was in Grade 10 in high school in Vancouver working as a red cap in the baggage room in Vancouver for $2.50 a day, split-shifts, left the trains in the morning and put them out at night. Probably worked about three or four hours in the morning and the same in the evening. And, in those days, the tips were pretty good; your tips were somethin’ like your wages. And then when I got out of high school, I hired out as a brakemen in 1950 and worked in Vancouver, Vancouver Island, Jasper, etc.; come to Prince George for the first time in 1954, March. And I wasn’t married at the time. I went back to Vancouver where my girlfriend was and we got married that summer, and got laid off again, and moved to Prince George in January 1954.  No, ’55. And I stayed, worked here until 1988; the end of 1988 and that was forty-three years on the railroad and I took early retirement and stayed here.  Let’s see, what else can I tell you?

S.Durkee: Well, when you first came to Prince George what were your thoughts when you saw the town because there obviously wasn’t that much here!

C.MacDonald: Well, it was a little different from a kid brought up in Vancouver and wooden sidewalks etc. on Third Avenue but we got used to it and the work was good here on the railroad working between here Prince George and McBride, Prince George –Endako; the odd time you go to Smithers or Jasper; it was sort of different. But I enjoyed it and I stayed with it and that’s about it I guess.

S.Durkee: Do you recall what other kinds of employment were here at that time or was it mostly just the railway?

C.MacDonald: Well, it was before…the pulp mills didn’t come in ‘til ten years later. The railroad, the C.N.R. anyway, was a big employer and then there was all kinds of sawmills in the bush. It would be…lumbering would be a big thing too. And then everything died in the spring when the break-up come and they couldn’t haul anything on the road, they couldn’t haul the lumber in so everybody’d be cut back in the spring during break-up and what else do you want to know?

S.Durkee: (Laughing) I’m just having fun listening. Did you ever think about quitting or going over to the pulp mills?

C.MacDonald: No, I never did. Honestly, I didn’t like the smell over there (laughing) and I guess I was confirmed railroader. See, when the pulp mills came to Prince George, I’d been on from 1946 to approximately ’65; when the pulp mills came, I’d been on there twenty years and it was in me I guess.

S.Durkee: So when you came to Prince George, you were saying that you were brakeman, or sorry a…?

C.MacDonald: A brakeman, yes.

S.Durkee: Right. So, what did that entail? What were your duties?

C.MacDonald: Well, there was no…everything is pretty well automated on the west end here now but in those days, nothing was automated; there was no radios; everything was done by hand signals and lamps and so they needed the bodies strung around when they had work to do. But now there’s radios and everything’s fairly simple but it was not in those days. Then they started haulin’ longer trains; there was a fifty-nine car limit.  And then in the mid-fifties, when they got the big 4300 engines up here, they could haul more cars and they’d have trains of a hundred cars in length and there was no radios and that’s almost a mile. And if anything happened, it was sort of a problem, you got a knuckle or anything like that, it was too hectic getting’ things back together again. But we always got from one end of the road to another. So…

S.Durkee: Can you describe a typical day, like when you went to work, what were your actual duties from beginning to end?

C.MacDonald: I don’t know! Be called at some ungodly hour in the morning - 3 o’clock in the morning. Head-end brakeman would go into the yard office and he’d go over to the shops; there’d be a steam engine sittin’ there huffing and puffing; he’d find out where his trains was, take it off the shop track and put it on the train and then he’d commence to have an air-test, which is testing the brakes on all the cars, and when that was finished, he’d jiggle out of town and go to either McBride or Endako.  I worked in McBride most of my time, and approximately, in the mid-fifties, you’d be in McBride.  And then you left that train there and stayed in the caboose with two other guys; conductor, the tail-end brakemen; the head-end brakeman. And then you waited for a train to come from Jasper. When that train came, you’d put your engine on it, and caboose, and jiggle back to Prince George. Probably took, to make a round trip, twenty hours…eighteen. All depends how long you had to wait in McBride for the freight train to come. Sometime you made it, uh, fourteen hours. But then they started to fix the track up in the late fifties and sixties and so you were not takin’ six hours to get over the train or over the road anymore.

S.Durkee: How were you paid for that like when you worked fourteen hours, sometimes you worked eighteen hours, twenty hours? How did they pay you? Was it by the hour?

C.MacDonald: The railroad has a mileage system. You got paid by the hundred mile and when you were waiting in the yard, you got an hourly rate, which was twelve and a half miles an hour.  And so, eight twelve and a half’s would make a hundred so for one hour, you got 12.5 miles. And then that was all figured in. So the faster you got over the road, the more money you made. But if you’re sittin’ in the yard, you just make twelve and a half miles an hour but then if you’re puffin’ along on a freight train at twenty-five miles an hour, you were making twice the money.

S.Durkee: On a freight train?

C.MacDonald: On a freight train.

S.Durkee: Did you work passenger as well or was it just freight?

C.MacDonald: Mostly freight. The odd time I’d go to Smithers or Jasper on passenger but it wasn’t my forte. Some people liked it.

S.Durkee: What was it that you liked working about better on the freight versus passenger?

C.MacDonald: Well you…(pause)…you seemed to be away from home more when you went to Jasper; you’d have to lay there for twelve hours. You get in there in the morning and then you lay there until nine o’clock at night. Then you’d work all night comin’ home and that’s the same thing from Smithers. Okay….

S.Durkee: And so when you were paid this every hundred miles, do you recall how much you were paid when you started?

C.MacDonald: On the railroad…

S.Durkee: As a brakeman?

C.MacDonald: No, that’s okay. Let me think now. It was about $8.50 a hundred miles and that was in 1950 and then gradually moved up so $8.50 so for a hundred and forty-six miles to McBride, you made twelve or thirteen dollars? (Laughing) Plus your hourly rate but nobody was making…it was actually a good wage compared to guys that were working sawmills etc.

S.Durkee: Do you happen to know how much they were making?

C.MacDonald: I’d just have to guess, no.

S.Durkee: Yeah, right, right.

C.MacDonald: I can’t say.

S.Durkee: So, how did your wages jump over the years?

C.MacDonald: Oh, well they’re getting’ about a hundred bucks a hundred now so that’s ten times but they went up just like everything else; they went up progressively. And that’s about it.

S.Durkee: Can you tell me about the union when you started in the fifties?

C.MacDonald: Oh yeah, the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen was then and then it changed to the United Transportation Union, the UTU, and they looked after the trainmen and conductors and they’re still going.

S.Durkee: So they looked after the trainmen and conductors; there were separate unions for the different sections or how did that work?

C.MacDonald: There was Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, which looked after the enginemen; Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, which looked after the firemen but they become obsolete after the steam engines; and then there was the O.R.C. which was the Order of Railroad Conductors but they became obsolete about in the sixties, the early sixties I guess; and then there was the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen which was changed to the United Transportation Union and then they took in the conductors and the trainmen. (Pause) Is that clear as mud?

S.Durkee: I was going to say you have a really good memory! So it became more encompassing, they had more people under them as they…

C.MacDonald: Yeah, yeah when they…the United Transportation Union took over.

S.Durkee: And that’s still like that today then?

C.MacDonald: Yup.

S.Durkee: Okay. I was trying to pay attention to how many men there were working when you were on. On an average shift, how many men were working?

C.MacDonald: Well, there were assigned crews. There’d be a head-end brakeman, and a tail-end brakeman…okay, the head-end brakeman, he rode the engine on the freight trains and then the tail-end brakeman; he rode the caboose with the conductor. Cause all these switches had to…if you entered the siding, the train would stop; the head-end trainman would head out and manually throw the switch, the train would enter the siding and then the tail-end trainman would line it back and then they’d wait for the other train they had to meet and then when the train went by, the head-end trainman opened the switch and pulled out and the tail-end trainman lined it back, and that would be with probably fifty-nine cars which is say, a little over a half a mile, and then everything was done by intuition more or less because you couldn’t see anything, you just had to…the engineman had to control the train to come out and you had to line switchback in its normal position then you’d…when the engineman figured you were on, he’d blow the whistle and put the peddle to the medal.

S.Durkee: What if your intuition was off?

C.MacDonald: Then the conductor would have to pull the emergency cord and stop the train and wait for you t’…it used to happen the odd time; wouldn’t gauge right and then you’d be going to fast when you come out of the siding and if you couldn’t run fast enough after you line the switch to catch the caboose, the conductor would have to stop. But nobody liked to pull the air because you were there for say ten minutes ‘til you pumped all the brakes off and then there was always a possibility of ripping something apart like a drawbar or a knuckle and then you were there for an hour or two repairing that and trying to get things squared away.

S.Durkee: So you tried to avoid that at all costs. What do you recall about the types of people working there? The ages, backgrounds…what do you recall of that?

C.MacDonald: Well, ah…with the running trades; firemen, engineman, conductors and brakemen, they were mostly Caucasian. Then on the section, there were mostly ethnic groups like say Italians. Then after the war, Portuguese and they more or less took it over.

S.Durkee: So when you say out on the section…

C.MacDonald: That would be…because you had to be able to read. With the train orders, you had to understand English. A lot of those people couldn’t do it so they’re second-generation, they’re sons are…a lot of them are on the railroad now. But in the early days, they were just mostly on the track. On account of their English anyways cause they had to take a line-up and understand the movement of the trains. So they were…there was a lot of Italians in the early days. There was a lot of Chinese labour when, uh, from reading history books and there’s a lot of stories glorified about the blasting and all that in the canyon but in my time, from 1946 on, I never seen or I can’t remember (pause)…there was one Japanese gang around Boston Bar; it was all Japanese after the war which I’d say was 1950/’49 in there and it was all Japs, or Japanese, but I never seen any Chinese per se working on the tracks. I see a few now on VIA, the passenger train, but they’re in there serving coffee etc.

S.Durkee:  Did you have a chance to work with VIA when VIA came in as the passenger train in the seventies? Were you given that option or did you want to stay?

C.MacDonald: Oh, if you wanted. Well, VIA never took the running crews over until maybe six or seven years ago. But like the guys that stayed on passenger they made more or less a life of it or a career of it and they didn’t want to go back to freight so a lot of them stayed. You always had the option in my time if you wanted passenger you had to change a timecard to give a notice and get off the passenger train and go back into freight.  And they use to bulletin all the passenger jobs and anybody could bid on them like if you’re on a freight train or a work train or anything you could bid on these jobs on the passengers.

S.Durkee: You were just saying freight train and work train, what are the differences?

C.MacDonald: Well, freight trains were your big long freights; they went from Prince George to McBride or Prince George to Endako haulin’ say a hundred cars in the sixties or seventies and then work trains would be out repairing the track; go out to Giscome and pick up a train of gravel and go and dump it on the tracks someplace and then there was a lot of rock hauled out of, well there was a rock pit out at Hutchison which is around Isle Pierre on the west end and there’s a gravel pit at Giscome and then there was another rock pit up at Mile 47 which is Ptarmigan, that’ s forty-seven miles west of McBride; there was thousands and thousands of yards of heavy rock hauled out of there by worktrains and then dumped, more or less, into the river to hold the bank from sliding all up around Le Grand and up in that country. But you haul this rock twenty or thirty miles, say twenty cars of rocks and (indecipherable) which dumped…and then you dump it and then it’d stabilized the track. There was a lot of that being done in the sixties, seventies, eighties and that’s what they called work trains and you’d go out on those trains and stay there maybe ten, twelve days and then you’d have your miles in and that and you’d be off. You work long hours and you’re away from home but some people liked it.

S.Durkee: You were talking about Giscome and all those…did you spend a lot of time out on the east line in those communities at all?

C.MacDonald: No. We never (pause)…very seldom tied up there. In the fifties, see they’d uh, if they tied you up there they have a cook car etc. and all that and that was a lot of bother and a lot of pretty cumbersome…like, to go to Giscome, we’d just drive out there in the morning or take an engine and a caboose out there and do our thing and then tie up in Prince George at night.

S.Durkee: I guess if you didn’t spend a lot of time there but uh, do you recall what the communities were like out there then because they’re almost non-existent now all the little railway/lumber spots along the east line.

C.MacDonald: Oh yeah, you go east from here, first of all you go to Shelley and there was a big sawmill there but it was just ten miles from Prince George; then you go to Willow River, nine miles from Shelley and there was three sawmills there and that they shipped lumber. And then Giscome was a big one up until, I’d say, the seventies sometime and that was…and then you went to (indecipherable) and Newlands another ten miles, and you went to Tricks and Aleza Lake and then Upper Fraser and then Hansard there was uh, they were loading lumber, not very much, just a couple of cars at each place. There was a lot of work stoppin’; you had to run switchers and way freights and pick up all these lumber – cars with lumber. But in the later days, the small guys all closed down and there was, just say, Shelley, Giscome, Upper Fraser; just the big ones and you’d get twice as much lumber as you did ten years before that under these small places.

S.Durkee: So do these areas just get bypassed now? You just go from Prince George to McBride for the most part?

C.MacDonald: Well they…I think they still ship lumber by train out of Upper Fraser which is past Aleza Lake there and (pause)…see, when Giscome sawmill closed down, C.N.R. opened a big gravel pit there and they shipped gravel from there to say Kamloops or Edmonton or all over the country cause it was hard, good rock; it was a big mountain and it’s practically gone now. Or it was practically gone the last time I looked a few years ago! Okay…

S.Durkee: What do you recall when diesel came in? How did that change things at work? Better…worse?

C.MacDonald: Oh, better cause you didn’t have stop for water for one thing and they seemed to…well, when the diesel…it was no fun riding a steam engine. People maybe glorify it but it was a stinkin’, dirty job; you were bouncing around and you were either hot on one side or cold on the other. But when the diesel came in, it was very…you had a seat and you actually had armrests on them which was just more or less a bench you sat on in a steam engine. But uh, I wasn’t sorry to see them go. I like listening to the whistle on a record but that’s all I liked about steam engines (laughing).

S.Durkee: How did your job change when diesel came in?

C.MacDonald: (Pause) Well, there were more powerful; they didn’t require so much servicing as a steam engine and you just…and they had the track fixed up and you were going faster so you were getting over the road a little faster. And they never seemed to run out of water or oil like steam engines used to. It wasn’t coal up here. It was always oil.

S.Durkee: Where was the coal used?

C.MacDonald: Like down in Vancouver to Edmonton I guess or Vancouver the mainline, Jasper; they had coal. But up here for some reason, it was oil.

S.Durkee: Would oil be a cheaper way of running?

C.MacDonald: Crude oil, black…I don’t think…they said something about it used for fire and it didn’t have so many sparks and it was uh…you can ask Ron Walker. He’s the engineer.

S.Durkee: So thinking back, what were your best memories of working for the railway? The people, the job…

C.MacDonald: (Pause) Oh, getting’ home about four o’clock in the morning, deadbeat, and then you didn’t have to get up when everyone else got up. And your family got up at eight or nine o’clock, you could lounge in bed. And payday.

S.Durkee: When you think back, are they fond memories of working for the railway?

C.MacDonald: I got nothing…I was always content. I never minded going to work. See, when you worked the freight trains, you would go to McBride one day and let’s say, three o’ clock in the morning and get back midnight or something, and then you’d be off for a day and a half. So you had plenty of time off to go and do your own thing. And you weren’t regimented from nine to five and the running crews pay on the railroad was considerably more than the, let’s say the people in the office that worked nine to five. We got reimbursed for all these rotten hours that we worked. That was the worst thing about it. You’d go to bed at night and you’d never…you might…you figure on going to work at six o’clock in the morning and somethin’ would happen and you’d end up going to work at three o’clock in the morning. But the phone rang, you just went. That was it.

S.Durkee: Sounds like a doctor except then you didn’t have the pagers! So, did you find that uh…well, it sounds like you didn’t mind the hours but was it hard to raise a family when you were never really knowing when you were working?

C.MacDonald: Oh, as long as you had a wife that could drive (laughing) and you had a car. No, I can’t say it was. We had four children and they were all raised pretty good.

S.Durkee: And your worst memories?

C.MacDonald: Not working like you’d come in, like when you’re on the spareboard, you’d make your trip on the weekend and then you’d have to lay around all week until the next weekend…

END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE, BEGIN SIDE TWO

S.Durkee: Okay, this is Side Two…whoops, for some reason, okay, there we go! This is Side Two. We’re just continuing on our conversation with Charlie and we’re just talking about some of the not-so-good aspects of working for the CN, rotten hours and whatnot… Did you ever have to go out on the wrecks? Did you ever have anything to do with…?

C.MacDonald: Oh yes. Well, if there was a wreck, if you weren’t involved in it yourself, the first out crew in the pool would be called for the auxiliary and you might be…you just went out there and you’d be on continuous pay for the first forty-eight hours which was nice but you might be out there for five or six days cleaning this wreck up. I’ve been in lots of derailments but they happen. I was never injured; I was always…the car that always derailed in front of me or behind me (chuckling). So…

S.Durkee: What were the main causes of derailments?

C.MacDonald:  Well, sometimes a burnt-off journal…

S.Durkee: Journal?

C.MacDonald: Axel. Something would happen and there wasn’t enough lubrication and it…you didn’t see it, or the sectionmen didn’t see it, it would break off and the car would derail and then if you didn’t see it, it would leave a mark on the track.  Sometimes you’d see it from the back of the caboose, then you stop the train, but sometimes you didn’t. And then the odd time a rail would break or a wheel would break, numerous things. See, in the early days, there was no hotbox detectors like they have now where they go over a certain spot and if anything is hot, it rings a bell in some office someplace and they can notify the rail by radio. But in the early days, that wasn’t done. Sometimes there’d be a soft spot and then you’d just…(chuckling). I was in one at Shelley on Good Friday of 1966 and we’re comin’ home on a freight train and there was a washout. The engines got over it, I was on the caboose at a hundred and twenty cars; it was a big long train, but the engine…we had radios at that time that just come in but the engines were going fast enough that they bounced over this washout but the next fifteen cars went in the Fraser River. So we were out there from oh, Friday night ‘til Monday morning. And then I think I got my miles in so I come into town and somebody else went out. They sent the Jasper auxiliary out from Jasper and our crew went and took that and they had the Prince George auxiliary from Prince George. But anyway, they cleaned it up and these cars were down quite a ways; they were all grain that went into the river.

S.Durkee: When you say Prince George auxiliary and Jasper auxiliary, what does that…is that a group of people that went out?

C.MacDonald: That’s a…each auxiliary in those days had a crane and a crew of men that would operate it and they had a cook car and everything; they were self-sufficient and they’d be out at these wrecks and they stay there for as long as it took. And then, I think in this case, they needed the tools in there because they had to pull the cars up a long ways; they were down probably sixty-seventy feet and they had to pull them up with these hooks. Big steam driven hooks.

S.Durkee: Sounds like that would’ve been quite the job.

C.MacDonald: Oh yeah, especially on the back of the river and the wind blowing and it wasn’t too much fun!

S.Durkee: You were saying that for the most part you were content working there; were there ever any management issues that you recall that you were unhappy with; the way things were run…

C.MacDonald: Well, you get irritated sometimes when you when you went to McBride and there was no freight trains coming and then you had to lay there for ten hours which you’d get in there in the morning and you just sleep so long. That’s the only thing I used to gripe about. And then about ten o’clock at night, when you’re ready to go to bed, you’d have to go to work. But there was nothin’ you could do about it, just go. No, the management was all…I never any beefs with them too much.

S.Durkee: And if you did have a problem, who would you go to?

C.MacDonald: Yeah, the local chairman of the union?

S.Durkee: Can you tell me about the strikes when you were working?

C.MacDonald: Oh yeah, first one I was involved in was in the summer of 1950. It lasted  for nine days and then there was another one about 1966 and they tied her up for oh, probably a week that time. [1]

S.Durkee: What were the main issues behind the strikes?

C.MacDonald: Oh, wages.

S.Durkee: Did anything good come out of the strikes? Did you get what you wanted?

C.MacDonald: Oh, more or less, yeah. They increased your wages. (Pause) That’s about it.

S.Durkee: Would it just be certain, or different branches of the CN that would go on strike at one time or was it a collective strike?

C.MacDonald: I think in 1950 it was everybody and ’66…I just can’t remember. I think it was mostly everybody was out. If they weren’t working, there could be no trains moving. The running crews were out so no trains.

S.Durkee: Now you were here from 1950 to now, what have been some of the biggest changes you’ve seen over the community since you’ve been here, for good and for bad.

C.MacDonald: Ah…(Pause)

S.Durkee: Just like in terms of employment and growth in the city and uh…

C.MacDonald: Well, when the pulp mills came in, that created a lot of new subdivisions etc. And the city continually expanded all the time except for maybe the last few years; there hasn’t been too much going on.  One of the most laid-back places in BC I guess is where the lumber industry is calm. And the pulp mill always used to keep it going but I gather from reading that the pulp prices are not that great either. But uh, no Prince George is a…I always liked living here. I go back to the city of Vancouver now and you gotta drive miles to go anywhere, do anything, traffic drives you crazy. I guess I’m in a rut. Okay.

S.Durkee: So this is a good place to be retired.

C.MacDonald: Oh yeah! I planned to be in a warmer climate but we have four children and they’re all married in Prince George so we go away in the wintertime.

S.Durkee: When you retired, what kind of a, if you feel comfortable talking about it, what were the bonuses or benefits that you got when you retired?

C.MacDonald: Well, I got a good buyout at fifty-eight years old. And I got a substantial pension… approximately two-thirds of my wages. [2]   And I was happy with that; I’m not starving to death.

S.Durkee: Were buyouts common?

C.MacDonald: Yeah, well they were reducing the crews then eh? Takin’ the brakemen off and that and so they had they had to offer some incentives to the unions so I guess buyouts were common. They started probably about 1970. Now, there are just two people on the freight trains now and one time there was five but that’s another story.

S.Durkee: Why is that?

C.MacDonald: Well, they’ve done away with the caboose. In my time, the main track switch had to be lined with the main line all the time. But now it doesn’t. If you follow me…say they’re meeting a train someplace and that train comes and then continues on and then now they’re going to have to get out of the siding.  So, there’s just the conductor and engineman on the train now. The conductor will go out, he’ll open the switch and that is between here and Prince George and Harvey or Tete Jaune, up in there because it’s not automatic eh? But between Prince George and Prince Rupert is “Centralized Traffic Control”; nobody has to throw a switch manually. But this little pocket between Prince George and Tete Jaune, there’s no signals in there. But they pull out of the siding and they leave the switch open and then they put a train order out on them. If you…not too…if you can understand it…so the switch is open so a train comes along, maybe twelve hours later, he’s gotta stop and throw this switch cause it’ll put him in the siding. And then if he was going too fast, there’d be a derailment cause they’re not made to make quick turns eh? You can’t be going forty miles an hour; you have to be going ten or fifteen.

S.Durkee: Why is that one little area that doesn’t…is still manual?

C.MacDonald: Ask management, I don’t know (laughing). It’s controlled, well manually. Everything is done manually; they give the engineman and the conductor on the engine an order by radio to go from Point A to Point B and then when they get to Point B, they tell somethin’ else. But between Prince George and Prince Rupert, it’s all signals. If the signals green you go; if it’s yellow you slow down; if it’s red you stop.

S.Durkee: When you weren’t working and had time off, what did you do?

C.MacDonald: Let’s see… Well, we had four children; there was always something to do if you were inclined to do it. I was in the pipe band for years playing the pipes. Always worked the church bingo and (pause) always found something to do.

S.Durkee: Did you stay involved with railway? They’ve got the railway museum and whatnot… Or when you finished was that it?

C.MacDonald: No, when I was finished, that was it. I’d been down to the railway museum a few times. One time in the seventies, around Isle Pierre, I notice a three-wheel jigger in the bush there and I was lookin’ at it so one Sunday, myself and one of the brakemen and we yarded it up and put it on the, I forget, front of a caboose or an air dump or something and brought it into Prince George. And we had a truck that took it up to Lawrence Popovich who was involved in the railroad museum; he worked in the ticket office and gave it to him. I think he painted it up and I’ve seen it down at the museum. Lawrence said they’d write me a letter thanking me for it but I never got the letter. The jigger’s down at the museum anyway.

S.Durkee: Well, I know they are just going through the archives down at the museum and sorting everything out so they’ll probably come across it and realize who’s it was.

C.MacDonald: Oh yeah, okay. It was painted green; I think the forestry must’ve had it. Anyway, I think Lawrence fished it out and cleaned it up. We were going back to work at six o’clock the next morning so we more or less had to do something with it that night. It was a Sunday night, about eight or nine o’clock in the summertime. Anyway….

S.Durkee: What is a jigger?

C.MacDonald: A jigger is a three-wheeled… there’s one down at the museum…one guy sits on it.

S.Durkee: Right.

C.MacDonald: And they used to have them, like a lot of these places say around Crescent Spur and Loos, before the road came in; the forestry used to use them and they were trained to operate them because it was pretty hard for them to move around out there because there was no road before they put the highway in the sixties. So they all had these jiggers.  Don’t ask me where this one came from at Isle Pierre, it was just laying in the bush there and it was in fairly good shape and it must’ve been there for years or somebody put it there. That was in the bush. Anyway, I happened to notice it from the cupola, which is the upstairs in the caboose.

S.Durkee: So now the cabooses are gone, why…just sort of backtracking, why are they gone?

C.MacDonald: Well, you can’t run an engine along with just one person on it. And the dead-man controls never seemed to work; that was a pedal that the engineer was suppose to keep his foot on. But just a reduction in men and well, they’ve got Centralized Traffic Control which is everything is controlled by signals and we didn’t need anyone on the tail-end to line the switches back and actually, I have a son who’s an engineer on the trains (in Prince George). [3] I talk to him once in awhile, and they’re hauling trains well, twelve hundred feet. [4] They’re close to two miles long. I wouldn’t want to be on the caboose at the tail-end of that because of slack action. (Laughing) They snap.

S.Durkee: Right.

C.MacDonald: Oh, I guess every industry’s changin’ and the caboose had to go the way of the wind.

S.Durkee: I had been unaware that the caboose was gone and I was thinking that when people think of trains, you know, they think of the caboose at the end and waving as you go by.

C.MacDonald: Oh, they’ve been gone for eight/nine years.

S.Durkee: You were just saying that your son works for, is it the CN? Or the BCR?

C.MacDonald: Yes (the CN). [5]

S.Durkee: I’ve noticed that every single person I’ve interviewed, someone has followed in their footsteps working for the CN. What do you think the draw is?

C.MacDonald: Gosh, ah…money I guess!

S.Durkee: Yeah?

C.MacDonald: The other two boys, well they worked on the section and one of them was a trainmen. But they wanted to be schoolteachers so they didn’t like the railroad; the oldest one did and he’s been there for twenty-five years.

S.Durkee: Is it still secure today? When you go on, are you expecting to be there for twenty-five years?

C.MacDonald: Well… (laughing). You seem to hear the railroad laying off people but they still gotta have somebody on the engine for another few years to run it, like an engineman. And they can’t be by themselves; it’s just too much power in one person’s hand. If he has a heart attack or anything like that, you have this monstrous thing going along… But I know they got the track fixed up very good around here like so they’re cutting the sectionmen back and then they’ve done away with a lot of the paperwork on the railroad from what I…there’s no more operators. See, they just give the information directly to the engine. In the bygone days, there would be an operator out on the line that would copy these train orders and you could just get your instructions every twenty miles. The operator, he lived right out there with his family, like say Giscome, Upper Fraser, Penny, Dome Creek, Goat River etc. He’d live there then he’d give you your running instructions; they abolished that.

S.Durkee: Did you just go by and grab your orders?

C.MacDonald: That’s right, they’d have a hoop out there and they’d hoop them up to you and they’d tell you what to do. Then you stop at the next station and leave the train or go into McBride or etc.

S.Durkee: I notice you have some stuff there…

(Tape recorder off)

S.Durkee: So we’re at the end of our interview now with Charlie and we just had a good time looking through some of his old pictures and whatnot but we’ll just end the interview by asking, “How do you feel looking back now at your long career? If you could sum it up, how would you sum it up?”

C.MacDonald: Well, I think I worked on the railroad when it was fun. I enjoyed the forty-three years I spent there; I didn’t mind going to work; I liked the time off. I wasn’t sorry that I chose, or it fell into my lap actually, working on the railroad. And I liked railroading in Prince George because it was a lot better than Vancouver or Vancouver Island. That’s about it.

S.Durkee: If you have the choice, would you go by car or by train?

C.MacDonald: Well, we don’t go to by (laughing)…if you wanna go…we made a lot of trips by train; my wife is from Winnipeg but if you can get yourself to Jasper and get on that transcontinental train, you can be in Winnipeg in about twenty-three hours which beats driving! But the problem is getting from Prince George to Jasper; you have to take the bus. I don’t like travelling on buses! So, we generally end up driving.

S.Durkee: There you go.

C.MacDonald: There you go.

S.Durkee: Thank you very much!

(Laughing)

END OF INTERVIEW

---