Not for the faint of heart

[Gymrat]

I worked on a railway summers during college as a Gandy dancer. Made good money, but that's rough work.

That just sounds a little dirty, but hey if you were just experimenting and it paid the bills, who am I to judge.

Gandy dancers are the guys who pull out old ties, put in new ones and pound the spikes in with 10 lb mauls. And carrying a 39 foot section of rail with 5 other guys (if my math is right, that works out to about 250 lbs each; maybe there were 8 of us per rail for a little less than 200 lbs each). And those ties aren't exactly light, either. Although there were tricks to making those sail a long way by yourself as long as you were careful not to get caught between on the hook like tool and go sailing off the flatcar along with the tie. Not that that ever happened to me. At least not a second time.

I imagine much of that is automated these days, especially on larger railroads, but back then, it was mostly manual (we'd sometimes use jackhammers to drive the spikes in, but sometimes, two guys who were really good could keep pace with the guys setting the spikes and the guy on the jackhammer; at least for a while).

The story I heard on the phrase Gandy dancer is that at one time, the company that supplied nearly all the tools to railroads was named Gandy. When you walk down the tracks, you don't really want to walk in the gravel, because that's a sure way to twist an ankle. So you'd walk on the ties. But the ties are spaced such that you're either taking steps that are too short, or you're skipping a tie and taking steps that are too long. Or a combination. So you end up doing sort of a hopping skipping gait that almost looks like a dance of sorts. Since you do that while carrying a tool (or a few tools) made by Gandy, you're a Gandy dancer.

All of that is automated on the BNSF except small patch jobs.