Life on the Rails

[Malthus]

That wasn't the strangest name I heard down there.  One of our drivers was named William, (not Guillermo, William) and he pronounced it just like the English name (Will-yam, not Weel-yam.)  He spoke absolutely no English.  His father adored the English and gave his children English names and used the English pronunciations.   

Well, the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo had his second name picked after his Dad's favorite actor, Ronald Reagan.

A real fan of Bedtime for Bonzo? 

[Savonarola]

El Mall

My first trip to Colombia was around Christmastime.  There was a huge line at passport control in Bogota with people returning from overseas or visiting family members.  After that, I had issues with customs which delayed me further.  I barely made my flight and my luggage did not.  The Avianca representative assured me that it would come on the next flight.  The SIMS drivers who met me expressed grave doubts that my luggage would arrive that evening, or the next day.  Consequently the first thing I saw in Colombia was the mall.

The mall was amazingly norteamericano, right down to the hordes of bored teenagers wandering about it.  There was a five screen movie theater and a food court.  Even the name "Buena Vista" could be the name of a mall in the United States.  The only major difference is that there's an iron gate around the parking lot, and you need to register to come in, and show your ticket on the way out.

One of the anchor stores is The Home Store; this was El Home Depot.  I had to go there because my safety equipment was in my luggage.  I got some hard hats, glasses, safety vests and steel toed shoes.  I got the largest pair they had; but they were still small and pinched my size 11 US feet.  They were cheaply made too.  Ken, our lead network engineer, had a similar experience to mine, but he kept using his Home Store shoes.  Throughout his time in Colombia he was always complaining about pain in his feet, his back and his legs.  Fortunately for me, my luggage did arrive that night and I was able to wear my Red Wings all my time in Colombia.

There was a store in Santa Marta called "Tauro" which was El Home Depot, but almost all of the other stores in Santa Marta were hole in the wall places.  Often they're completely open in front without any doors.  Prices are never put on the merchandise.  When I would go to shops with Sofia, our project den mother, she would always tell me not to say anything.  "If you open your mouth the price will triple." 

Surprisingly we found a number of electronics and hardware goods needed for the project in a district called El Martelo.  No one had a large or consistent collection of anything.  We'd show up with a fuse or a connector and show it to the shop keeper.  He'd look at it, shake his head solemnly and send us off to another store which he was sure had something like this.  We'd go three or four stores until we found what we were after.  It was surprising what we could find there.  How the merchants got industrial specced coaxial connectors or high voltage fuses was a mystery.  Who the market for this stuff was, besides gringo engineers, I don't know. 

[Savonarola]

The Digs

Our project was headquartered out of a luxury resort in Santa Marta, Colombia called Hotel Irotama (su hogar sur la mer.)  You could tell it was a high class resort because, even though all the guests were Colombian, they were all about as dark as my ghostly Irish complexion.  The help stood out, they were all a deep shade of red.

Santa Marta is built upon a bay.  Irotama was located on beyond that bay on the side facing the coal ports.  Every morning a dozen coal ships would line up down the shore out from the beach.  It looked like D-Day from the German perspective.

A few years ago the water was black from the coal being dumped as it was being moved from barge to ship.  The government required that coal be loaded directly onto ships.  It's helped dramatically, but there's still a thin ribbon of black along the surf from coal dust being washed along the shore.  Children building sand castles will dig up nuggets of coal.

There's rules posted on the beach.  The first two are what you'd expect, (no horseplay, swim when lifeguard is on duty) but then the third rule is "If you see anyone dynamite fishing on the beach please alert the staff."

Irotama was the second headquarters for the project.  The first was Las Ventanas a little further up the beach.  Las Ventanas was a time share, so people staying for any length of time were inevitably shuffled from room to room.  While Irotama wasn't in the best of shape (hot water was a dubious proposition) Las Ventanas was run down.  The team members complained to our management; and they got the "We feel your pain/let's all work together to get this done!" speeches.  Then Kevin, our program manager, got stuck in a room without air conditioning.  The very next day the team was moved to Irotama.

Irotama sells itself as a family resort.  The receptionist told Glen, our network technician, that if he brought strange women into the hotel they'd have to charge him extra.  The beach is closely monitored there and anyone coming in has to be licensed by Irotama.  Las Ventanas didn't have such a strict policy.  Gary, our lead comms engineer, met a girl offering massages on the beach there.  Her pimp called himself "El Rey de la Playa."  He explained that Las Ventanas didn't allow guests to bring prostitutes into their room; so what you did if you wanted to get one was give him a towel.  At the appointed time he would give his girls the towel and she would walk in as though she belonged there.

GE allowed people staying in Santa Marta for any length of time to bring their spouses.  Only two engineers took advantage of this; Kumar and Vinicius.  Kumar is from India and his wife wore the traditional garb of their region; gold earrings, a long silk skirt and an ankle bracelet which gave a melodious chime with her light step.  They had a young daughter who was dressed identically.  The girl thought the chime was the greatest thing in the world, and would constantly stomp her foot; much to the annoyance of everyone around her.  Vinicius is from Brazil; his wife, at least in his stories, was demanding.  This posed a problem as Vinicius was constantly gone down the track and had to spend a length of time at our second approved hotel in Bosconia.  GE didn't allow the wives to leave the resort without security; so they were trapped there during the day.  Vinicius's wife constantly complained about boredom when he was away.  He invited her to Bosconia.  A week later Jeff, our senior signaling engineer and project drama queen, saw the wives returning from Bosconia.  He asked them how Bosconia was, and they both just glared at him.

I got to stay in Bosconia later myself, at the Hotel Jorlin.  Bosconia is a noisy, chaotic city.  There's a constant ocean breeze in Santa Marta; not so in Bosconia.  That is 150 Km inland and is always hot and stifling.  The hotel doesn't have hot water at all, or cold water, the water is always lukewarm.  The showers don't have heads, showering is like standing under a faucet.  Water and electricity cut out from time to time and the air conditioning units are inadequate to cool the room during the day.  The hotel did have a pint of Aguardiente (literally fire-water, it's the national liquor of Colombia) in the mini-bar.

Bosconia isn't a very safe city; the ATM right next to the hotel had a guard with a stockless shotgun resting on his shoulder.  There's a sign right at the hotel that discourages trafficking of minors.  Inside the hotel there's not much to do; there's a pool and restaurant but no other amenities.  When I stayed there I was in the field all day every day.  Vinicius's and Kumar's wives, though, were trapped their all day long without anything to do.  That this didn't end up in divorce court is miraculous.

"You have to go through the hell of Bosconia to appreciate the heaven of Irotama," explained Vinicius.  His wife never again complained about being left alone at Irotama.

The only other place I stayed was at the Marriott in Bogota, just one time when I had to get there early for a flight.  It was opulent, well maintained and a world apart from the other hotels.  The only thing which separated it from a large hotel in a major American city was the drug sniffing dog at the entrance.  Once you got passed him, the security guard said "Bienvenidos a Bogota."

"Bienvenidos a Bogota," I thought.

[Admiral Yi]

,sardonically.

Very noirish fade-out.

[Savonarola]

Chikungunya

The trip to Colombia doesn't begin with the mall or even the airport.  Before I went I had to get my shots.  Yellow fever, hepatitis, malaria and typhoid are all endemic to the part of Colombia where our project was located.  GE requests that we go get these at a "Health Center" which is a mall of doctors.  The company nurse assured me that they'd have everything I need.  Of course they didn't, they only had Hepatitis A and B; and the doctor wrote me a prescription for an anti-Malarial medication.

My doctor wasn't bad, but Jeremy, one of our office engineers, got a strange one.  When he told the doctor he was going to Colombia, the doctor replied, "That's fitting, you look like a Colombian drug lord."

"That's an odd thing to say to a stranger," replied Jeremy, and he got another Doctor.

In order to get the shots for yellow fever and typhoid I had to go to a Community Health Center; which is where you go if you don't have regular insurance.  The one located in my city of Melbourne was dingy, squalid, and filled with unwed Latina mothers and their brood of children.  They only had the typhoid shot.  They sent me to Vierra for the yellow fever.  Vierra is a more upscale city and their community health center is a gleaming, antiseptic palace filled with old people.

Then upon arriving in Colombia I discovered that there was a new epidemic, chikungunya.  Chikungunya originated in the 1950s in Tanzania and Mozambique; and has since spread throughout the developing world (including south Florida.)  The disease is spread by mosquitoes and is characterized by severe pain in the joints.  Its symptoms are similar to dengue fever; so similar that one of the rail shops had a poster listing symptoms of the two diseases so you'd know which one you had.

The disease was epidemic along Colombia's Caribbean coast and along the border of Venezuela.  The ports were on Colombia's Caribbean coast and the rail line ran near the border with Venezuela; so we were in the high risk zone.  The disease was so prevalent that it became the subject of jokes.  Computers, cars or phones that didn't work had chikungunya.  One day one of our driver's kids came home in tears.

"What's wrong?" Cesar asked him.

"Kids at school told me Santa Clause isn't coming," his son replied.  "He has chikungunya."

At times our rail crews were down ten percent due to the disease.  Sofia, our project den mother, was deeply skeptical that so many people were ill right before the holidays.  She attributed it to another of Colombia's endemic disease chikulaziness.  She had known people who worked six weeks out of the entire year; the rest of the time they got doctor's notes and sat at home.  After the holidays passed the number of chikungunya cases the rail crews experienced dropped off dramatically.

With the outbreak our project safety group leapt into action.  We all got an official GE e-mail saying chikungunya is a threat in Colombia.  Don't get bit by mosquitoes if you're there.  Later on I met the project safety leader, Ricardo.  The other members tried razzing him about that e-mail, but he was oblivious.  He really believed he had accomplished a valuable service by telling us not to get bit by mosquitoes.

[lustindarkness]

[Savonarola]

Training Days

In order to go into a port or onto the train lines you need to go through inductions.  Every company has its own inductions, so I had to go through four different courses.

The first was the rail line itself, FeNoCo.  Their course is all day and conducted entirely in Spanish.  I didn't get a lot out of it, and neither did anyone else in my group.  The gold standard for rail safety in the Americas are the Canadian regulations.  So FeNoCo took safety videos developed by CNR and dubbed them into Spanish.  Consequently we learned about the hazards of snow and ice in a land where it never gets below 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

The other memorable video there was one about hand safety.  In order to drive the point home they held up hands and moved them up and down as though they were talking.  Most of the hands were missing digits.  While it was supposed to be horrifying, watching a single pinky "Talk" in high pitched Spanish was actually hilarious.

The next day we went to Prodecco.  My name had been left off the list to get into the port.  Fortunately Sofia, our project den mother, was there with us.  She told the guards at the gate that I had come all the way from America just to take this class.  They remained unmoved.  Then she said that I was their boss and they couldn't do anything without their boss (a real concern in Colombia; initiative is not a national trait.  I've seen the escalator stop at the Bogota airport and everyone just stood there until the security guards told them to start climbing.)  That didn't get us anywhere either, so she told them that I was the son of the president of GE.  Not only did that get me in, the port director came by personally to give us our certificates of completion.

CNR had about two hours' worth of video for us to watch.  All of the ports and the rail had a video telling about the extensive lengths they went through to protect the environment.  The longest and the most prominent was CNR; which was funny since their port had been shut down due to environmental violations.

Drummond had two trainings, a twenty minute one for English speakers and an eight hour one for Spanish speakers.  Everyone on our team denied they could speak any Spanish in order to get into the shorter course.  Even Sofia's daughter, Alejandra pretended she could not speak Spanish.  The secretaries at Drummond were skeptical; "Your name is 'Alejandra', and you don't speak Spanish?"  She just stood there with an uncomprehending gringa grin on her face.  They shrugged their shoulders and let her into the English course.

[Admiral Yi]

   She's not your den mother; she's your fixer.

[Savonarola]

  She's not your den mother; she's your fixer.

She was both:

Sofia

Sofia's real masterpiece of fast talking wasn't getting me into the port, but getting our project manager, Bill, out of trouble.  There's a direct flight from Miami to Barranquilla.  Without traffic it takes about 90 minutes to drive from Barranquilla to Santa Marta.  So it seemed like a good idea to go that way, rather than flying all the way south to Bogota and then back to Santa Marta.  The problem is that the airport is so much smaller that both customs and security have little to do.  Gringos aren't a usual sight in the airport, so the agents are suspicious. 

On Sofia's first trip to Colombia she and Bill had come on the same flight to Barranquila.  Bill had got sent to the x-ray machine.  Customs mistook the skate antennas (so called because they look like an inverted ice-skates) for a gun.  They thoroughly searched Bill's bags after that

"What's this?" the custom officer would ask.

"It's coaxial cable for a GPS," said Bill.

"How much is it worth?"

"I don't know, ten, fifteen dollars."

It was actually worth more like a hundred.  They were really starting to pressure him over the many goods he was bringing in.  He was just about to tell them to go ahead and seize it when Sofia stepped in.  She told them that she was Colombian who had lived in the United States for 30 years.  Today was her first trip home since she left.  Her mother, who lives in Santa Marta, is going to be 90 years old this week.  She wanted to show her mother what she did, but now they were going to take that opportunity away from her.  Not only did they allow Bill to bring his cables into Colombia; but they also packed his bags and apologized profusely.

It was actually Sofia's mother's 90th Birthday when we were there.  She did visit her mother, but left the GPS cables with us.

The strange part is that Sofia was supremely confident when dealing with Colombians; she was often at a loss when dealing with Americans.  She's married to an American, and has lived in the United States on and off for three decades, but she wouldn't do something as mundane as changing tickets.  I always had to call the GE travel desk for her and change her flights.  Our project leaders changed her schedule so often that by the end of the project the GE travel agents knew who I was.

[Admiral Yi]

Does she also handle the baksheesh?

[Savonarola]

Does she also handle the baksheesh?

"Local customs" are what we call that at GE.  We're not allowed to bribe anybody; but we are allowed to follow "Local customs."   

In any event, no the drivers took care of that.

[Iormlund]

German

He also loved music.  He asked me what sort of music did I listen to, Reggaeton, Salsa or Champeta.  I told him I didn't think I could tell the difference between those styles if my life depended on it.  He played some samples of the different genres; and I still couldn't hear the difference.  He could, though, and could tell if the song was more typical of Cartagena or Baranquilla or Bogota.  I was with Javier (our supplier's project manger and a Spaniard), and asked him if any of this music ever made it back to Spain.

"No," he said, "This is the reason why we left.

Reaggeton is everywhere, unfortunately. There are few things I hate more.

[Savonarola]

Reaggeton is everywhere, unfortunately. There are few things I hate more.

 

[Savonarola]

Project

Our project was to upgrade the TETRA system and install an Intelligent Train Control System between the port of Santa Marta and the coal mines in La Loma.  There are three mines which operate in La Loma; (CNR, Prodecco and Drummond) and each of these mines has a port in Santa Marta.  The mines jointly own the rail company FeNoCo.  This system has led to squabbles between the individual carriers as Prodecco and Drummond both accuse FeNoCo of favoritism.  They'll go so far as to block one another's entrance points while they're delayed in order to make sure the rival company's train doesn't get out first.

Upgrading the TETRA system was necessary because the original system was installed in such a way that there's an ongoing investigation over fraud and corruption.  There wasn't continuous coverage, the backbone system fails regularly and some of the point to point microwave dishes which point directly into mountains.  While fraud and bribery seem likely in this case; in Colombia you can never rule out incompetence.

Intelligent Train Control System is one of GE Transport's major products.  It allows an operator to know where a train is at all times, to operate gates automatically and to operate rail switches remotely.  Before this all the switches on the line were thrown by hand and trains had to call in at routine intervals in order to give their location and request permission to advance.  Even today all crossings require security guards to manually put up barriers before the train approaches. 

These products were mandated by the government after a number of bad accidents had occurred on the line.  FeNoCo was given three years to implement it; but put off doing anything about it until they had only a year and a half left.  (Sofia, our project den mother, compared that to a kid with a looming homework assignment.  He puts it off and put it off until the last minute.)  By the time contract negotiations were completed we had a year to implement a program which should have taken two.

I was brought into the project in December; when they were looking for warm bodies to send to Colombia.  My area of specialty is analysis of radio propagation and radio traffic; suddenly I found myself a field engineer.  At least we had someone to send in our group; for most teams had no one.  In those days our project manager, Bill, tried to impress upon our leadership the dire straits of the project by holding 7 AM and 6 PM meetings with the outside world.  They felt our pain.  Sometimes they even sent managers to find out why we were so far behind schedule.  In the end the government allowed us additional time and we were able to get our product into commercial service at the end of May.

Our product allowed trains to run quicker and safer with smaller crews.  The latter turned out to be a huge cost savings for FeNoCo, since they no longer had to have people in the field to throw switches.  Naturally they boasted about their increased profitability due to all the people they were able to lay off at their all employee meeting.  For about a week after that it was hard to get any worker from FeNoCo to help us.

That sort of tone deafness defined FeNoCo.  For forty years no trains had run on the tracks in our area.  Shanty towns of illegals squatters had sprung up along them and people used the tracks as a road.  Then the trains started again and trouble began.

Colombian culture is based upon consensus.  Sofia gave us an example that when she was younger the government built a highway over the grounds of the Wayuu Indians.  The government held numerous town hall meetings and, afterwards, offered the Wayuu a school with a couple teachers speaking the native language and a detailed archeological excavation of the graveyard.  The token payoff at the end was important, but what was much more important for the Colombians was holding a meeting and listening to the people.

FeNoCo did none of that before running trains.  Now people had trains running right next to their houses at all hours and trains baring down on the trails they and their donkeys had taken the day before.  To make matters worse the trains were overfilled and coal dust flew about covering the surrounding villages.  The people exploded in rage.  Fiber was dug up and equipment was vandalized.  FeNoCo had to post a guard every kilometer and keep them there at all hours.

They've since calmed down the natives a little.  Fiber cuts are now much less prevalent.  Guards are posted every two kilometers.  We did have someone attack one of our poles with a sledge hammer.  It stood, battered and dented, but it still carried fiber.  In some cities there were days of unrest, where we were told not to go there, especially after dark.

The real contentious issue became trees.  As we were running new strands of fiber along poles we ran into areas where the lines were blocked by branches.  Cutting a tree down, or even cutting branches came with a risk of a lawsuit, (or worse, one of our sub-contractors was thrown into jail for cutting down trees.)  So every time we cut down a tree we had to take a FeNoCo lawyer with us and get his explicit written consent to cut down the tree.  This was to insure that FeNoCo had clear legal right to the tree; or would accept responsibility if it turns out they did not.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

great reads, all of them.