(erielack) Team Tracks & Manpower

["Richard Recordon" <recordor_@_comcast.net>]

In the summer of 1967 while waiting for a good job to open up 3 friends and I filled our days by reporting to the Binghamton, NY Manpower office each morning. There we four clean-cut, healthy looking specimens of American manhood would take our places in the rows of chairs among the winos and other down and outers. We always got work and it was always the hardest or dirtiest jobs because the assignor knew we would do the day's work, which was not the case with our fellow petitioners. They always split us up into two teams.

One day my companion and I were assigned to a lumber company over on the North side of Binghamton. The other two dropped us off (we had one very clapped out Jeep station wagon between us). The lumber company guy drove us over to the D&H Bevier Street yard to unload a boxcar of lumber on the team track. The track was on the East side of the yard and fronted on a weedy lot that ran perhaps 30 yards to a street that paralleled the yard. There were no platforms of any kind other  than several groups of two ties about 6' apart on the ground near the front of our boxcar.

Our "forman" explained we were to stack the lumber on the ties so many boards wide and so many high. He showed us how a steel strap binder worked, told us the D&H guys would let us get water from the roundhouse and use the toilet, and that a mom&pop grocery store across the street made good sandwiches. He said he would be back after awhile to pick up the stacks.

Being young and enthusiastic we set to work. The lumber was bigger that 2x4s and you could really only handle one at a time off the loose stack in the car and pass it out to the ground guy who would carry it to the ground stack. We started with the furthest ties and moved in taking turns in the car and on the ground. Closer the stack, faster we filled them. I also stopped to watch every RR movement in the yard on either the D&H or EL side.

By the time the guy came back with one of those drive-over the-pile loaders he told us to throttle back. He could only carry two stacks a trip and we were on #5 when he showed up. We took a break and went down to the roundhouse where the D&H guys there told us we were working to hard for the $1.25 an hour. They let me look over the Alcos in the roundhouse, and then we went back to work.

There were two other boxcars on the track near ours. One was an empty and the other was closed with its door still sealed. The whole day we worked there  we were the only thing that moved in that team track area.

We had lunch over at the grocery where we got huge sandwiches and a soda for around a buck. Worked a pace the rest of the day to keep just ahead of the loader as he told us he wanted to pick up the last two loads on the ground around 4:30 PM and not have any on the ground over night. 

When he signed our work slips at the end of the day he wrote on them that he wanted us back the next day to finish the job. Told us we were the best crew Manpower ever sent over. We handed them in at Manpower looking forward to another day in the sun at Bevier St. Next day we got assigned to stacking cinder blocks in a block plant somewhere in East Binghamton with no rail connection. Following week I started working for the consulting engineering firm doing the Appalachin-Owego section of the Route 17 Quickway at $400 a month plus overtime. Manpower and I parted company.

In the future trips I made over toward Bevier St while railfanning I never did see the team track there any busier than the day we worked there. My sense was EL pretty much had the local business sewed up either through former Erie or DL&W trackage. Seemed like D&H mostly interchanged with EL and the two a day run with the LV to Sayre.

Rusty Recordon

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