Life on the Rails

[Crazy_Ivan80]

  enjoyed these new stories pleny. tnx

[Savonarola]

enjoyed these new stories pleny. tnx

Thanks   

[Savonarola]

I see that I had posted yesterday's story on an actual Colombian holiday.  Columbus Day (as you might expect) is a holiday there.

(Happy Thanksgiving, Canucks  )

[Savonarola]

Chris versus Amex

In our time in Colombia everything was done expense report.  GE uses AMEX as its corporate card; for international travel this is a difficulty since it's not widely accepted outside the United States.  Only the most expensive restaurants, hotels and stores in Santa Marta accept it.  Even that can be a dubious proposition.  Ken and Glen were once out in Santa Marta looking for parts.  It was getting close to dinner so they went looking for a restaurant.  They came to one with a manager trying to get people to come in.  They asked him if he took AMEX; he said he wasn't sure.  They had in the past, but they had problems, and he couldn't tell them if they would take it or not until they paid their bill.  They passed.

Outside of Santa Marta it's difficult to find anyone who takes credit, much less AMEX.  We can get cash advances, but that can prove challenging.  Vinicius could never get an advance.  He had approvals from his manager, HR, his manager's manager and the director of the Sao Paulo office and it still didn't work.  No one knew why, but fraud prevention had stymied him.

Credit card fraud is prevalent in Colombia so fraud prevention was particularly vigilant.  Chris's AMEX expired when he was in Colombia and their fraud prevention wouldn't allow AMEX to Colombia.  He was in the middle of his 90 day stay, so he had it sent to the office and I brought it down for him.  He got it activated and it seemed to work at first; so we went out on Friday night.  The restaurant we were going to, the Bogota Beer Company, did not accept AMEX, but it was in a complex with a number of ATMs.  Chris went up to one while Alejandra and I waited outside, and waited, and waited.  Chris had gotten through three layers of fraud prevention by the time he came out, and still didn't have a working card.  He could make charges on it, but like Vinicius discovered, a cash advance was a separate animal, and one that the many Indians he had spoken to had no idea how to resolve.  Finally someone had sent him an e-mail with detailed instructions and new numbers to call.  He was in high dudgeon and wanted to go back to Irotama to get this resolved.

"I'll pay," I offered; I had cash on me.

"I'm planning on drinking a lot of beer," he insisted.

"If you drink 150,000 pesos worth of beer I'd be surprised," I said.  At the time that was about $75; today it's only about $50.  Even so a pint of beer was around 5000 pesos; we drank a lot that night, but nowhere near that much.  Chris calmed down a lot after that and was able to resolve his card issues the next day.

Even with the headaches, we were lucky to have a corporate card.  Sofia and Alejandra did not due to the unusual nature of their contract.  In the United States there are two classes of contractors, a contractor who is a person hired to do a job and a PSA, which is a company hired to provide a service.  A PSA would usually be used to contract a cleaning service, for example, where it doesn't matter who does the cleaning.  A contractor is a specific individual and, if they work for more than a year for one company they're entitled to benefits.  On longer scale projects we'll PSAs for engineering support; the way to get around the nature of the PSA is to write a very, very specific requirement for the experience and qualifications the people on the PSA will need.  Glen was brought on a PSA; Nick had known him from a previous job and asked Glen for his resume. He copied Glen's experience as the requirement for the PSA.  Our PSA contracting company, Riverside, called us almost immediately and told us they had a perfect fit for our PSA.  What luck!  They wanted Nick to meet Glen for lunch as the way of an interview, but Nick said he trusted them.  He didn't think he could pretend he didn't know Glen throughout an entire lunch lunch.

Sofia and Alejandra started as contractors with Adecco (our default contractor company.  I had started at GE as a contractor through Adecco.)  After a year they were supposed to leave; but finding two Spanish speaking engineers with a knowledge of rail was a challenge, so we had them brought to Riverside as a PSA.  Due to some HR policies, that I don't pretend to understand, they were still under contract to Adecco, contracted to Riverside who then had a PSA to GE.  Riverside does have their own corporate cards, Glen had one when he was in Colombia, but they wouldn't give them to a contractor.  Adecco doesn't have corporate cards for its contractors.  So when Sofia first stayed at Irotama she put her and Alejandra's rooms on her personal card, as well as paying for flights and meals.  This ended up costing nearly $7,000.  GE isn't the swiftest at reimbursing travel expenses, so Sofia had to wait several weeks for her money.  After that trip she refused to use her own card; so Bill ended up putting everything for them on his corporate card.  While my expense reports were large; Bill's were heroic in scale, routinely over $20,000 per month.

[Savonarola]

Night of La Loma

The southernmost station for our project was called La Loma.  This is where the rail entrance to the three mines is located.  The track line does continue further south; at one time a passenger train ran all the way to Bogota.  Sofia remembers when they did run passenger trains on these lines, but that ended forty years ago.  Today only coal trains use these tracks and everything south of La Loma is still abandoned.

There are a series of spurs that go out into the ports and into the mine.  Before a train goes from the side track onto the main track it has to run a departure test.  The test verifies that all the equipment on the train is good, and it downloads the track database.  In our system the database download is done over a WiFi network.  I went to La Loma many times in order to test this network; in order to verify we had sufficient coverage and capacity to do the departure test.  FeNoCo gave us a rail crew and an ancient train called the GR-12.  We had a crew of three crammed into the tiny cab.  The locomotive had been retrofitted with an air-conditioner; but that broke constantly.  Even when it was working it was insufficient for the cab.  Frigid air blew on you if you were standing directly under it, but the rest of the cab was blazing hot.  The difference was so great that when I was working near the air conditioner one arm would be frosty, and the other was roasting; I thought I was going to go into thermal shock.

This was the hottest and driest part of the track.  There was almost never a breeze.  Temperatures routinely soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  Throughout most of the year it was in a drought, so magnificent, tall palm trees stood dead along the sides of the track.

Because there were three rail entrance points near the same location it was difficult to get track time.  There are trains going in and out of the mines almost constantly so we would have to wait on the sidings as they passed.  Sometimes we'd do nothing all day but wait; one day we were stopped on the old main line immediately before the project track entrance.  For all day the track was either being worked on, or trains were coming out of the mine.  All four of us stared at the red signal flags for eight hours, as if that would change them to green and we could proceed.  Even when we did get out on the track it was only for brief snatches; we'd have to rush back to the sidings whenever a train was set to be released.  Even in these conditions I found problems.  Every time I found one I had to go back to Irotama and analyze it; apply a fix and then return to see if the problem was solved.  My stay in La Loma became an ongoing saga; a heroic waiting game.

This was wild country.  Glen said that one time he found a rattlesnake living under our cases.  Fortunately there was a FeNoCo security guard with him; the guard picked up a stick lying near the case and killed the snake as it came out.  The guard left the stick there as a trophy, still covered in snake blood.  Another time Glen opened a case to discover an entire family of iguanas living there.  He said it made him jump, scared out of his wits, as they all rushed right at him.  One night when Bill and I were there we found a highway of ants carrying leaves far out into the jungle.  They had completely cleared their path of vegetation and marched straight up and down a path.  Every so often there were rest circles of ants milling about until they got back onto their highway.  This was the area that I found a hornet's nest in one of our cases.  Even in the parched land there were still cattle grazing along the tracks.  Colombian cowboys wearing the sombrero vueltiao would drive the cattle from time to time. 

This area couldn't be entered from the regular two track.  Instead you had to go onto the mine property and present you're your credentials to a security guard.  We had to pre-register in order to get authorization to enter; but they could never get our names right.  Consequently all of us were los gringos de GE.  Once we had gotten permission to enter the guard would walk us down to the entrance point, which was a chain stretched over the two track.  Sometimes the chain was locked, but usually it was just secured with a bolt that could be easily lifted.  As a security system it left something to be desired, but what there was down there to steal was also a mystery.

Every time I left La Loma I said I was never coming back.  I was hot; I was frustrated; I had had enough.  Of course I always ended up returning.  I thought I had reached my last time there the night we switched fiber.  That was one of the final tasks before we turned over the system to the customer.  Ken and I were assigned to the task; he volunteered me to start at the south end of the track.  I figured I had been there enough that I knew the location by that point.

The work had to be done at night.  La Loma is so far from anything but the mines that it's complete inky blackness there.  It was a hot night and heat lightning lit up the areas all around us; changing the area to as bright as day in brief flashes.  I arrived at the station to find an install crew sleeping on the floor.  They were there to install back up batteries.  That was supposed to be done earlier in the day; but this being Colombia, of course it wasn't.  I sat around and waited as they woke up and installed the batteries.  It was fortunate they installed the battery, for the drought finally ended, the rains fell and we immediately lost power.

For my task I swapped over the fiber and demonstrated the functionality to the FeNoCo representative; but the FeNoCo mostly just played on his phone and signed off on the document.  We were supposed to go from station to station; but we didn't make it very far the first night due to the rain.  The second station that I was supposed to go to, Canoas, was far off the highway, and meant going around on the two-track for a long distance.  Even during the day it's a rough ride; but at night in the storm it became frightening.  The parched ground became soaked; ponds formed over what had just been the road.  My driver had to keep getting out to find the trail.  Finally he got to a wide marsh and pulled over.  I went the rest of the distance in the FeNoCo witness's truck.  We got there to find that there was no power and the generator wasn't working.  No one at the station had any tools; they had to rely on my set of screwdrivers to get the generator running again.

The next night we got permission to work as long as we needed.  That night we got a nail in our tire on one of the two tracks.  The driver, this time, had a jack and a spare; but unfortunately the spare had a slow leak.  We had to find a late night "Service station," that is a little plywood shack by the side of the road where they had air and tires.  They didn't have the right tire for us, but they did have materials to patch the leak.  Somehow we were back up and running, a couple hours behind time.  We didn't get back to Irotama until noon.  I collapsed into a dreamless sleep; again vowing never to go back to La Loma.  Once again that turned out not to be the case; two days before I left Colombia at the end of the project I was still going to La Loma.

[lustindarkness]

Am I the only one that follows Sav's stories on Google Maps? I have learned so much about Colombia thanks to these stories.

[Valmy]

Am I the only one that follows Sav's stories on Google Maps? I have learned so much about Colombia thanks to these stories.

Huh. That is a good idea

[lustindarkness]

Am I the only one that follows Sav's stories on Google Maps? I have learned so much about Colombia thanks to these stories.

Huh. That is a good idea

Yeap, just follow 45 south to La Loma. BTW, I count more than three big holes in the ground, and you can zoom in and see the coal trains.

[Savonarola]

Am I the only one that follows Sav's stories on Google Maps? I have learned so much about Colombia thanks to these stories.

Huh. That is a good idea

Yeap, just follow 45 south to La Loma. BTW, I count more than three big holes in the ground, and you can zoom in and see the coal trains.

Some of the places I describe you're probably not going to be able to find.  Canoas, for instance, has nothing around it.  There's a station there; so there must have been something in that location in the 1940s when the line was built.

The easiest ones to locate are Bosconia (crossroads between highway 80 and highway 45) and El Paso (crossroads between highway 43 and highway 45).  Bosconia has a lot of truck traffic on both roads, but El Paso is on a dirt road.  We were working there late in the night and about once an hour a bus would come by.   I had to look up where that led (El Banco along the Magdalena river) since it looks like you're staring out into the heart of darkness that way.  The highway goes between two swamps, I think that's what "El Paso" refers to, since it's well out of the mountains.

Anyhow I'm glad you've been following along.   

[lustindarkness]

Damn, my lunch break is over. Canoas, far from hwy, nothing around. Can I just follow the line from La Loma? Somewhere after it turns north I guess?

[Savonarola]

Damn, my lunch break is over. Canoas, far from hwy, nothing around. Can I just follow the line from La Loma? Somewhere after it turns north I guess?

If you follow the track about 10 clicks north from the final spur at La Loma you'll see what looks like a river.  It's actually (usually) a dry river bed.  Just north of that is Canoas.  Like I said, there's nothing there.

[lustindarkness]

Damn, my lunch break is over. Canoas, far from hwy, nothing around. Can I just follow the line from La Loma? Somewhere after it turns north I guess?

If you follow the track about 10 clicks north from the final spur at La Loma you'll see what looks like a river.  It's actually (usually) a dry river bed.  Just north of that is Canoas.  Like I said, there's nothing there.

Everything looks like a dry river bed with nothing around. LOL I think you and google are playing with me. Is it the nothingness just north of Rio Calenturitas? Or farther south just after the rail line turns north? How about I get back to work instead?

[Malthus]

How about I get back to work instead?

That's just crazy talk. 

[Savonarola]

Damn, my lunch break is over. Canoas, far from hwy, nothing around. Can I just follow the line from La Loma? Somewhere after it turns north I guess?

If you follow the track about 10 clicks north from the final spur at La Loma you'll see what looks like a river.  It's actually (usually) a dry river bed.  Just north of that is Canoas.  Like I said, there's nothing there.

Everything looks like a dry river bed with nothing around. LOL I think you and google are playing with me. Is it the nothingness just north of Rio Calenturitas? Or farther south just after the rail line turns north? How about I get back to work instead?

Look up Puente Canoas, Cesar, Colombia.  Follow what Google is calling the "Rio Cesar" west until you reach the train tracks.  The "Rio Cesar" is the dry gulch that had turned into a pond in my last story.

[Berkut]

Sav, this is great stuff.

I wonder if there is a specific term for the ability to tell what is basically a mundane story well enough to make it interesting anyway?

I have an ability to tell an interesting story in such a way that it bores everyone listening anyway.

You really should be writing for a living.