Finis/413 my uncle Clifton, who retired as a fireman on the Indiana Harbor Belt, always called ACL The Big Purple. And always talked about it with admiration.
The Rathole is sweet when big freights are pulling hard upgrade and I was indeed fortunate both to grow up there and to have so many kinfolk that worked the rails. Beside my cousins and uncle, one of my Grandads was a car wiper for N.C.&St.L. They were always glad to talk railroads with me.
Johnsironsanctuary, a track transit was mounted on a seat that sat down on the rail. When the foreman was looking through the transit his butt was only an inch or so off the rail. I had 2 cousins who were Southern section line foremen.
I have a spike carrier like the one you show but I didn't display it because Cowan was also a lumbering center and I used it in the lumbering display as a log carrier that I'll show later. The first 3 track tools to the left, on the rack, are on the far left a National Pattern Combination Tie and Rail carrier, a long handled Tie carrier and a short handled Tie carrier. Too show how physical track work was, a section hand started the day with a 12 pound spike hammer and an 8 pound track wrench over his shoulder and his pockets full of track bolts, nuts and railroad spikes. The foreman would drop them off a mile apart and each man would walk a mile in one direction inspecting each track bolt and driving down each loose spike then turn around and do the same thing on the other side of the track back to where he started. Then the foreman would pick them all up and do what ever he had planned for the day. Seems like more than lumbar to me. I applied to Southern when I got back from Nam in fall of '67 but they had done away with section line crews and had gone to area crews. To build seniority to get on an area crew you had to go on a road crew and be on the road something like 20 days and back something like 10 days. As I was getting married I decided to take a job with Southern Bell Telephone as a Lineman instead.
