Life on the Rails

[Valmy]

I believe Cortes and Pizarro were both from the Extremadura.

You are correct.

[Duque de Bragança]

I thought Galicia was the land of conquistadores. 

Dictators maybe, since Fidel Castro and Franco came from there. 

[Savonarola]

The Road

Highway 45 runs the length of Colombia from Cienaga into Ecuador.  For the scope of our project it runs parallel to our track.  From Santa Marta to the mines it runs past a number of small cities.  To the east for the first 150 Km are the Sierra Madre de Santa Marta Mountains.  These are a heavily wooded, isolated mountain range.  The peaks rise up to 5700 m, making them one of the tallest coastal mountain ranges in the world. 

On the first leg of the drive we went along highway 90, which is a coastal highway.  That leg of the drive has the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other.  First you pass the resorts, then the coal ports and finally the town of Cienaga, (which literally means "Swamp" in Spanish.)  It's there we get onto the main highway.

The distance between Santa Marta and La Loma is about 200 Km but, due to the condition of the roads, it takes about four hours to get from one end to the other.  The highway, today, is two lanes for almost its entire length.  This is a main line for truck traffic, and often the trucks are heavy and quite slow.  The trucks are slowed even further as they pass through the little towns along the route.  Every one of the little towns has a set of speed bumps.  Vendors stand their hawking wares in the middle of traffic.  These speed bumps also serve as passing lanes.  Trucks must slow to a standstill allowing people to pass them if there's no oncoming traffic, or if the oncoming traffic isn't going too fast, or if the oncoming traffic looks like it can get out of the way fast enough.

Almost everything is for sale on the roadside.  Most of the hawkers sell ice cream, candy, fruit and coffee; but much more can be found.  I saw a man selling a tame squirrel, another with vulture chicks, a few men with hand carved bats and mallets, one guy selling a hogs head and another trying to sell a live piglet. There are bootleg DVDs and late in the evening women will mill about with a smile and a wink for each passing trucker.

There are a number of shrines to the Virgin along the road.  Since this was a dangerous area until the very recent past a number of shrines are locked up; it's an odd look, the land of the caged Madonna.

This area is mostly banana plantations.  All manner of creatures live in the banana groves.  As we worked upon cases nearby we would hear rustling in the tall grass or from the plants all the time.  Glen, our network technician (who does not speak Spanish) named these "Los niños del bananos."  Workers get paid in bananas here.  It's common to see a man driving home with his daily wages perched over the handle bar of his motorbike.

The first two larger towns one comes to are Aracataca and Fundacion.  Aracataca is the home town of Gabriel Garcia Marquez; but Fundacion claims to be his model for Macondo.  Marquez is a source of national pride in Colombia and all of the drivers pointed to the city out and told us about him.  There are a number of crudely drawn murals of Marquez in Aracataca with quotes from his works of his written on them.

Colombia's tourism council adopted the name of Marquez's style and says "Colombia is Magical Realism."  It might be, but it's the other sort of realism all too often.  In Fundacion, about a year ago, there was a bus full of children who all died.  What had happened is that the driver brought an open container of gasoline on the bus and let it sit.  When he started the bus everyone perished in a fireball.  There's a little shrine, a tent with desktop printer pictures of the children and flowers.  There are a couple bible verses written on a nearby wall.  Fundacion is a small town, so nearly everyone was affected by the tragedy.

South of Fundacion the banana plantations start to give way to forests and range land.  The oil palm is a major crop here and occasionally you'll see trucks overspilling with oil dates moving slowly down the road.  There's also livestock grazing by the side of the road with no one watching them.

While motorcycles are prevalent in Santa Marta, here they become the principle mean of transportation.  It's common to see a family of five crowded on a motorcycle.  Dad drives, the middle child sits in front of him, holding onto the handlebars, the older child comes next, then mom holding onto the baby.  No one wears helmets.

You'll see horse, ox or donkey carts as well.  The carts have rubber tires; but otherwise look like they come out of Little House on the Prairie.

There aren't the same standards of safety in Colombia as there are in the United States.  One time when we were on the highway we saw a white cloud ahead of us.  As we got into the cloud we found ourselves choked by the smell of burning oil and plastic.  At the front of the cloud was a flatbed carrying an SUV which had an engine fire and was then still smoldering.  We followed behind in that toxic cloud for several dozen kilometers before we were able to pass them.  They even drove it through a set of toll booths.

The semi-trucks along the roadside function as a sort of public transportation.  Teenagers and young adults will hop on the trucks to get a ride.  I saw a group of six people climb onto the back of a truck once; five guys and a girl.  Three of the guys climbed straight up to the roof.  Then two guys stood on the hitch, one hoisted the girl up on his shoulders and the guys on the roof pulled her up.  All this happened while the truck was moving.  It was amazing.  They all sat up there as if it were a picnic, unperturbed by the traffic or the movement.

"They're heading to Bogota," my driver told me.  "They're hungry, they're tired, they're thirsty, but what an adventure."

Given his tone I wondered if he had done something similar when he was young.  Hitching rides that way is illegal.  I once saw a group of school kids climb up on a flatbed truck; presumably to play hooky.  The driver saw them and told the police at their next makeshift station.  (The police are stationed along the road under folding canopies; usually with tables and chairs.)  The officers dragged them out and sent them marching.  Javier, our driver that day, told us that the police would likely detain them for twelve hours.  Their parents would be furious with them upon their release.

It's also a dangerous too.  I saw two young teenagers hanging onto the door handles at the back of the semi while the truck was going over 70 KMPH.  They were young enough that they were fearless.  As we got close to pass them one of the kids did a butt dance for us.

Most of the houses in the towns are made of cinder block; usually painted bright colors as is common in the Caribbean.  Poorer houses are made out of wood, sticks, corrugated aluminum or even wattle and daub.  One time some of our workers were uncrating one of our sites.  They turned their back for a second as they got the equipment out.  They turned around and saw two women running off with the crate; that would become part of someone's home.  Glass is a rare luxury; most homes have tiny windows to allow ventilation. 

There isn't a lot for people to do in the area.  You'll often see whole families sitting on their porch watching traffic pass.  As we were going by one truck stop in the area we came across a semi with two of its wheels off the ground.  The entire village had shown up to watch him try to right himself.  That was the most excitement they would have all week.

The largest city on the route is Bosconia, which is about 35,000 people.  A decade ago this was a place to go buy drugs or get murdered.  Today it's much nicer.  There are no traffic lights in town, even though two of Colombia's larger highways intersect here.  A jumble of cars, motorcycles, and bicycle carts dart in and out of the long streams of traffic.  Somehow it all works.

The Sierra Madres de Santa Marta end at Bosconia; south of it the land becomes open range land.  It's here that you find a type of flowering tree with neon yellow flowers.  In the dry season they stand out like a flame in the brown land.

South of Bosconia is El Paso; which is no-man's land.  The police and the military never come here.  Most of the shops here are green plastic sheeting wrapped around a wooden flame.  Everyone sells gasoline; all of it is smuggled in from Venezuela.  Barrels or large plastic containers are lined up in each shop.  The whole city looks like a Shangri-La from Mad Max.  At night the entire city is lit up by strings of electric lights that run from tent to tent.  The gasoline is sold by filling up plastic two liter pop bottles with gasoline and putting and pouring it over and over.  Most of the customers are big rig trucks so the process is long and laborious.  The ground is always wet, soaked in gasoline.  There's no grounding on the containers.  Every so often you'll see charred sticks, the remains of a gas station.

Even with such a questionable operation, there's still advertising.  Some of the signs feature a Madonna and child with a big rig; others have a scantily clad woman and a big rig.

Sofia told me that after the military had chased FARC out of the area they went in to clean up El Paso.  They were met at the outskirts of the town by a group of men with torches.  The men had set up several barrels of gasoline and told the military not to come any closer.  The army backed off and since left them alone.

There's nothing there besides the illegal gas stations and prostitution.  Every day gangs of men gather trying to hitch a ride out; older men, not the kids looking for adventure you see on the rest of the route.

Once when I was coming into El Paso I saw a line of flame (well outside the town.)  Coming closer I saw they were burning tar in a thin line across the road.  There was a bucket of tar on fire suspended from a tripod.  Later in the day I got an e-mail from Sofia, our project den mother, warning us not to go to La Loma.  Our wayside engineer, Vinicius, had gotten caught in a protest in El Paso.  He said that it was a huge traffic jam of angry truckers and piles of burning tires outside the city.  What should have been a one hour drive from Bosconia to La Loma had turned into a four hour epic for him.

I returned back that evening around six, greatly worried that I was going to be spending the night in El Paso, but the protest had ended, the truckers had all gone home, and the burning tires were nowhere to be seen.  There was still a crowd of disaffected men milling about.  Everyone was staring at us.  My driver locked the doors and looked about warily as we drove through.

South of El Paso the highway changes from a single lane to a two lane road.  Drummond, the largest mining operation, is building a highway in order to facilitate transportation.  Soon (by Latin American standards) all the speed bumps and slow-downs will be no more.

The mines come next.  The area around them is a parched land where the temperature is routinely above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  When I was there I felt as though I was in a spaghetti western; and in the scene where the protagonist is left to die in the desert.

[lustindarkness]

Sav, El Gran Gabo is happy to read this from heaven (they have internet right?).

[Savonarola]

Sav, El Gran Gabo is happy to read this from heaven (they have internet right?).

I hope so, on both counts; although I'm pretty sure they have Facebook and Twitter in hell.

[Savonarola]

Jeff

When I first started on the project we would have a 7 AM "Prayer Breakfast" at which we told about all the things we hoped to accomplish that day.  At 6 PM we had the "Come to Jesus" meeting where we confessed all that we had failed to accomplish.  Usually it was the same list.  It was at one of the morning meetings that I first met Jeff.

Jeff had skipped the evening meeting the day before.  On that day he had asked for dedicated resources (a FeNoCo crew) to meet him early in the morning at some part of the track.  He was four hours late and his dedicated resources had gone off to do their job somewhere else.

"I can't work like this," shouted Jeff, "When I have dedicated resources they need to be dedicated to me."

"We can't waste FeNoCo's time like that," shouted back Bill, "You have to be where you say you're going to be."

"This is a dynamic environment, they need to understand that," Jeff continued.  This went on for a half hour as the rest of the team sat quietly and watched.  There were about twenty of us.  Mommy and daddy are fighting; just keep your head down and keep on eating your Lucky Charms.

It was all about Jeff, all the time.  Every resource was his and everybody worked for him.  My group had set up a cheap laptop with a few applications.  Jeff also had a test laptop but he found it difficult to use since it had Spanish language Windows 8 on it.  So he took our laptop and stuck us with his.  Complaining would have done no good; so we downloaded all our applications again and learned how to use a Spanish keyboard.

Jeff had spent a year on and off in Colombia by the time I first arrived.  He had a great deal of knowledge about how the signaling system worked.  One day I had gotten shanghaied by Jeff out into the field.  We were looking at a rail switch that was stuck into the open position (that is it would send all trains off the main track and onto the siding.)  He knew immediately what the problem was; the relay was stuck in the contact position.  To fix it he took out an Emory board from the hotel and filed it down.  To my amazement it worked.

We had a FeNoCo team with us when he did that work; Jeff called them "The FeNoCo Four."  These were the "Dedicated resources" that Jeff had complained about; they were the track engineers for FeNoCo.  One of the linemen, who was nicknamed "Princesa" picked up the Emory board and made as if he was filing his nails.  Then he blew kisses at everyone and called them "Mariquita" (sissy).  I met up with Princesa again a couple times and he always did the kisses and "Mariquita" thing; it was very strange.

Jeff was a man of enormous appetites.  Every day at breakfast he drank a pot of hot chocolate.  Vinicius, another wayside engineer, would complain about getting stuck with the bill when he went with Jeff to lunch.  "He had 10,000 pesos in limonada de coco alone."

"That's what, $4?"  I asked.

"It's the principle," he replied.

Consequently Jeff was an enormous man.  He was so fat that he couldn't easily walk along the platform around the train.  The guard rails would force his gut right up against the locomotive.  He'd call that "Polishing the loco."

Jeff was often a source of irritation to FeNoCo.  When he wanted to work on the electronics he'd tell the FeNoCo representative that he needed half an hour.  During that period they couldn't run trains along that part of the track.  If there were no trains coming they'd let him; but if there were they'd say no.  When they'd say no, Jeff would ask for fifteen minutes instead.  They always agreed to that, and at the end of fifteen minutes they'd tell him his time was up.

"I'm not done.  You can't run the train because it's not safe," he'd say.  Which was true; and Jeff would then take his full half hour or more to finish up the work.  He did this multiple times, and FeNoCo never seemed to catch on, or so we thought.  Then one day on the radio, Glen, our network technician reported that he couldn't get into one of the stations.  "They're telling me that they had another GE engineer here and he did something so we can't go in."

"Who was there?" Gary asked.

"No one," said Ken, "Except Jeff."

Then the radio traffic fell to silence as everyone realized what must have happened.  Jeff had thrown a switch at one of the yards and wouldn't put it back; this prevented the station master from moving trains about the yard.  Jeff got all huffy when confronted about this, saying the system wasn't turned over to the client yet and they had no right to interfere with his work.  FeNoCo wouldn't let us stop trains, though; that took precedence over our work.

So for a month every time we went into our equipment room in the three northernmost systems we had to have a babysitter from FeNoCo.  It couldn't be just anyone either; it had to be one of their IT people. It didn't matter what we were touching in the system room; (in my case it was usually a radio system completely unrelated to the switching), we still had to make an appointment and inevitably wait until the FeNoCo IT team showed up.

This lasted about a month before FeNoCo finally relented.  That was probably a bad idea because Jeff threw another switch that he shouldn't have from the same station.  This time the switch was under a train.  Fortunately the train was stationary otherwise he would have caused a derailment.

That was the end for Jeff on this project.  A week later we got a notice in writing that FeNoCo wanted Jeff kicked off the project.  When he left he took eleven suitcases with him.  He had kept his room at Irotama for over a year, so he did have a lot of his own personal effects stowed there; but he also had a lot of equipment that belonged to the project.  We ended up missing a number of items, only to discover that they were with Jeff.  He went to another GE project, and it wasn't worth the effort to try to get them back.

[Malthus]

This is an awesome read, Sav. I haven't made any comments because I have nothing to add - just to say I am following yout thread avidly. Keep posting! 

[Savonarola]

This is an awesome read, Sav. I haven't made any comments because I have nothing to add - just to say I am following yout thread avidly. Keep posting! 

Thanks, Malthus 

[Savonarola]

WD

The drivers were not the most politically correct of people.  One time when we were setting out in the morning Glen, WD and I were going in the same car.  To indicate who was going Ricardo pointed to Glen and I and then pulled his eyes back to indicate WD.  The drivers had nicknames for all of us.  Glen was el hombre gordo, Jeff was el hombre muy gordo, Ken was el hombre con gafas, Sofia was Doña Sofia and WD was el chino.  In time all the Spanish speakers started calling him that; suppliers, linemen, men in the shops, conductors, everyone.  Simply say "El chino" and they knew exactly who you meant.  This was a problem, briefly, when WD's mentor, Felix, joined us.  That was resolved quickly, though Felix was Señor Chino.

WD is an expert on the messaging our system generates and receives and so works on all aspects of the system.  He is a dynamo routinely working very long hours.  Sometimes he crashed out on the concrete floors of the stations to get back up in a few hours to continue a multi-day shift.  He seemed to be everywhere at once and always working at a lightning pace; this is why everyone knew "El chino."

WD always saw his work as the highest priority, and any tool needed to get the job done was his.  The standard voltage on a train is 74 V DC.  Gary, the lead communications engineer, had worked in another department at GE before becoming part of our team.  They had an inverter that would go from 74 V DC to 120 V AC that you attached by alligator clips to the main knife switch on the train.  For long trips on locomotives this was necessity; otherwise you couldn't keep your laptop powered up.  Even better, if you put a power strip on the inverter it you'd become Mr. Popular with the FeNoCo engineers as they would power up their phones.

WD was going on a long ride in a loco, so Gary let him borrow the inverter.  As Gary was leaving Colombia he asked for the inverter back.  WD told him that he'd give it back when he was done with it.  Gary tried to explain that's not how it works, but that didn't sway WD.  So Gary had to go hat and hand to apologize to his old teammates.  Right after Gary had returned WD sent out an e-mail asking if that team had any more inverters they could loan out.  Gary wrote a couple drafts of e-mails mostly consisting of curse words before finally settling on "NO!"

We had difficulty with shipments, so our equipment didn't always arrive when it was supposed to.  There was a shipment of EPROMs that WD needed to program.  They were supposed to be in country, but no one was sure where.  WD questioned everyone over it; no one knew where they were.  He went to the warehouse and started digging through things; and even tried to lift loaded pallets by hand.  Fortunately someone stopped him before he injured himself, but there were still no EPROMs to be found.  He kept calling our project manager, Bill, in greater and greater desperation.  Bill tells the story with such an amazing caricature of WD that I'm sure some day he's going to have to do it for HR.  Finally Bill told WD that he couldn't crap out EPROMs, there was nothing he could do.  In desperation, late in the day, WD decided to look for the EPROMs in one of the stations 100 Km down the track.  He and Glen had shared a driver that day; so WD drove up and Glen thought his ride home was there.  WD told Glen he was going to Aracataca and he drove off leaving Glen stranded on the line.  Fortunately for Glen, Jeff was working three Km down the line, so Glen picked up his equipment and hiked the distance.

Glen usually seemed to be the victim of WD's monomania.  We had a shipping container turned into an office at one of the stations.  Glen walked in and WD said "Give me your laptop."

"What's wrong with yours," Glen asked.

"When I plugged it into this cable it fried my board."

"You are not touching my laptop," Glen replied.

We had taken one of our components from a different project.  The engineers on that project had put floating power on two of the pins, but didn't tell us about it.  We discovered their change the hard way.

Glen did finally get his revenge later.  WD had borrowed one of Glen's laptops, and, as usual, refused to give it back.  Glen had ended up with an additional radio.  Our office needed a radio but when Alejandra, who was then an office engineer, called for it, Glen refused to turn it over until he got his laptop.

Alejandra was furious.  The radios were catalogued by Gary, so Alejandra called Gary.  Then Sofia, Alejandra's mother, called Gary.  Then Kevin, the program manager, called Gary.  What Gary was supposed to do, or how this was his responsibility wasn't clear, but it escalated all the way the way to the top.

I met Glen for dinner that night.  He said that he had actually agreed to turn over the radio to Alejandra, but Alejandra was in the middle of ranting at him and didn't listen.  WD called Glen while we were out and agreed to give his laptop back.  We told Glen that he should do it in an area with plenty of witnesses, where they each take their item and back out slowly.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

heheh. Excellent stories
They remind me alot of the stories my uncle tells about his work all over the globe.
Kudos for sharing.

[Savonarola]

heheh. Excellent stories
They remind me alot of the stories my uncle tells about his work all over the globe.
Kudos for sharing.

Thanks 

I have a nephew whose too young now to tell these stories to; however he does have a fantastic collection of Colombian Peso coins. 

[Savonarola]

The Two Track

Throughout most of the system there's a dirt road that runs alongside our track.  Sometimes it's a narrow two track, other's it's a wide city street.

At points along the road, or on other side streets off the highway, women or children will put up a rope in front of the car and demand a toll.  This happened to Jeff one time and he was outraged.  He got out of the car and started cursing out the rope holders.  His driver told him to come back into the car, but he didn't.  Men started coming around, they're the muscle watching from the shadows as their wives and children work the roadblocks.  Jeff started cursing out them too, by now his driver was begging him to get back into the car.  They let him pass without paying anything, probably muttering something about gringos locos under their breath.

Outside the cities the road wasn't always well maintained.  Ken and Glen would drive down the track into progressively worse areas.  One time they came across a river; the trail started back on the other side.  They were in a sedan at the time and the driver was obviously frightened about going in.  He got out and walked down the shore until he found a couple men bathing.  They told him that he could cross the river, just a ways down.  The driver needed quite a bit of reassurance from the men that his little sedan could make it.  They told him it was no problem  and walked over the shallow spot to show him.  He was still nervous and drove in cautiously; then gunned it when they were in the water.  The car made it without problem.  Glen and Ken tipped the two men generously.

Some time after that I was given the task of installing fiber jumpers at a number of cases on the southern part of the line.  To get to the cases we had to drive that dirt road.  Fortunately my driver had an SUV, so that we were able to make it past most of the obstacles.

We got to an area that the trail was deteriorating badly.  It would branch into different directions, some which led to dead ends, others that led to the barbed wire "Gates" onto cattle land.  We went down and up dry runoff ditches.  My driver kept asking the FeNoCo security guards posted along the tracks if we could make it to the next case.  They kept assuring us that we could; so we kept going forward.  At points my driver had to get out of the car to look around and find the way forward.  We kept going until we got to an unpassable obstacle, there was a tree in the path and there was no way around.  My driver turned around and as we were going back across the first runoff ditch on our return we heard a bump and it sounded like we were dragging something.  We had lost the muffler.

My driver took his Leatherman and snipped off a piece of the barbed wire on a nearby fence.  He then made a ramp out of a discarded rail tie and some rocks and drove the car up that.  We found a long sturdy branch and levered the muffler into place as he got beneath the car and tied it on with the barbed wire.   That held for about a kilometer before it fell off again.  We did the same thing again, but this time we only had rocks to hoist up the car with.  He tied the muffler on with an Ethernet cable rather than barbed wire and that held on until we finally made it to a ranch.

The ranch was just a collection of little houses made of rough wood.  Most of the family was sitting about when we arrived.  One of the children ran and got her father.  Then the entire clan gathered to watch as he, his eldest son and my driver attached the muffler with baling wire.  They had a ditch that they had us drive across and they were able to get under the car with ease.  That held and we were able to drive the rest of the day without issue.  We were nearly one hundred fifty Km south of Santa Marta when that happened, and even went a little further south before heading home along the highway.  Even with all the speed bumps we made it back to Irotama.

[lustindarkness]

Was it a Toyota?

[Savonarola]

Was it a Toyota?

Yes, it was a RAV4.  Almost all the driver's cars were Toyotas and the trucks were GMCs.

[Savonarola]

Colombian Engineering

Rigging things like the muffler with an Ethernet cable is called "Colombian engineering" even by the Colombians.  It's not easy to find parts in Colombia and even when they are available a lot of people can't afford them; so they have to Colombian engineer their way around many issues.  Everyone was adept at this sort of rigging.  I had a two hole power supply into a four hole plug which kept falling out.  One of the drivers took it, twisted a couple pieces of insulated wire about and it held to the plug just as if it were made for it.

Our security company did almost all their own auto repairs just as if they were field repairs even when we were in Santa Marta (though without barbed wire or Ethernet cables.)  One time I was waiting at a station wile two of the drivers put running boards back on their car using a rail tie and a long metal pole.

Even the rail companies were adept at this sort of innovation.  When we were first working at CNR it was Christmastime.  In the spirit of the holidays they played Christmas carols throughout the day on a Colombian boom box.  It was made by putting a smart phone inside an orange traffic cone.  Whenever we needed to find someone at a rail shop the easiest way to find them was to ask one of the workers.  They'd get on the Colombian PA by cupping their hands over their mouth and shouting out the name of the person we were looking for.  The other workers would do the same until we located the person we were looking for.

Traffic cones were among the favorite items for Colombians.  One time when we were traveling down the highway I saw a truck carrying a wide load of timber.  In order to insure that it wouldn't be damaged they had attached bumpers of orange traffic cones on each of the corners. 


Some of the results of this ingenuity were spectacular.  Along the road I came upon a man with a foot powered rotating press that squeezed juice out of sugar cane.  It was made out of wood entirely carved by hand.  It was probably ancient; the man was quite old and looked like he had been at this job for a while.  That he could keep it running throughout the years was amazing.