The Reclaim Yard (part 1)
The Transcona bus was full as it pulled up to the stop at the corner of Pandora and Day. Most of the passengers poured out the doors making their way toward the main gates of the CN railcar repair shops. I was one of the few passengers still left on the bus and felt the last to disembark give me a look that said, “you poor schmuck”. He knew that the next stop was the end of the line, the gates of the CN Reclaim Yards. Prairie winters start early. Halloween had arrived and the first snow of the season refused to melt at the edges of ditches on either side of the unpaved road leading up to the last stop. I stared out the window at the snow that lay on the ground knowing that it would likely remain until spring. I looked at the long rows of mangled railcars blocking much of the mess inside the Reclaim Yard from being seen from the street. I wondered if I could stick it out here until that snow melted in the spring.
Start time was 8:00 but that really meant you punched your timecard by 7:45, were dressed for work and waiting in line to file outside to start work at the 8:00 bell. The machine operators, crane crews and “burners” made their way to their equipment stations. The labourers assembled in the open area next to the diesel fuel storage tanks to find out the work assignments for the day. Most days were predictable. Those assigned to a special task or team in the previous days or weeks would luck out again. Some of the stragglers would be recruited to new work. If your name was not called, you were banished to work on the “pile”. If your name was near the bottom of the seniority list, the “pile” was your expectation likely for months without end. My name appeared second from the bottom of the list.
Willy Pasternak, the sub-foreman, led ten to twenty of us out to an open area about the size of a football field nestled in a valley between two mountain ranges of every kind of scrap the CN operations could generate. It all came to the reclaim yard to have the last of its value squeezed out, either to be salvaged for re-use or to be sold as scrap metal. We watched the cranes roll up the tracks, swing their arms out above the “pile”, lower a massive electro-magnet to grab as much as would cling to them. Load after load was hoisted up, swung out over the field and sprinkled on the ground. The crane scurried away, switched tracks and rolled back to the mountain on the other side to complete covering the field.