PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES / LINDA BLANDFORD : Moving the World Is a Loner’s Job

Walking through the city, it seems so often as though man has been whittled away, decision by decision. As though it were the curse of our time to make no difference, to be a face in the crowd. Who still walks alone? Who thinks for himself?

At the back of Union Station, on the banks of the Los Angeles River, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Co. operates a tiny outpost: Mission Tower. It is old and dusty; its quaintly tiled roof bakes in the sun. Tangled railway lines run around it in all directions, and in all directions there is ugliness, brutish concrete, power-line pylons, devastation.

Through the darkened windows of the tower, through the grimy old blinds, one man’s head lifts as he adjusts the signals and switches. As a huge engine rumbles by on its way to the roundhouse, he waves. Railroad men, American folk heroes.

All day, all night, trains pass by. Commuter trains to San Diego, a Desert Chief to Chicago. Freight trains, red and silver, bound for Kansas, massive and lumbering, 120 cars long. They haul what men need, as they always have. Cattle, grain, barbed wire once; chemicals, scrap metal, cars, munitions now. Men who work alone, nights, days, odd hours, running their isolated worlds.

Here is Dave Schenk, small, round, dark, unexpectedly graceful. He grew up in Orange County, but his forefathers travelled great distances: from France, Spain, Mexico, Germany. It is the tradition of the Santa Fe that he relishes, its certainty--the 807 operating rules in a small blue book, each rule “written in blood,” as railway men say. He joined the company as yard checker, quickly marked himself as a leader, a smart, steady man able to take pressure. Sheer chance took him from his father’s crowded days selling furniture.

Here is Mike Plumlee, assistant superintendent, a rangy, gray man, shy and clipped. His grandfather farmed at Yarrow, Mo., his father farms still at La Plata, Mo., pop. 1,337. He grew up working alongside his dad, raising corn, hogs, cattle, and he dreams of the land still. And only dreams. “Ah, nothing holds you back but fear . . . .” A man whose boyhood friends were all kin comes hard to a new life. The railroad is family. He works most days, most holidays. “I just got my work. I don’t have any desire to do anything else much.”

Here is Ray Barlow, 24, an Army veteran, in the National Guard now. He went through school in Compton and Carson and saw few choices but the military for a young black man. The Santa Fe saw more: a man who could keep the trains moving, who could walk alone.

The signal room sits high above the tracks, machinery for 200 or more levers, points, lights, grinding beneath it. Crackling radios, phones, boards lighting up as trains near, trains cross. The trick is to keep them moving. The signalman’s curse: to stop a train down the track at Broadway and watch as the bandits swarm aboard, prying open the cars, looting and plundering. Or to see, as dots in the distance, transients shuffling over the ties, trying feebly to clamber aboard as the cars slow down. Bloodied legs and broken bodies--the nightmare of railroad men.

Those in Mission Tower see many worlds: the town of cardboard under Aliso bridge; a sofa floating away when the river runs deep; the homeless children, aimlessly alone, playing on the tracks--safer there than on the streets. The luckier children across the way in the projects, coming home from school (and the gentleman caller who leaves just before). Boys and girls from Dogtown stealing baby pigeons from nests in the bridge.

The men who see all, trained to miss nothing, have a stillness about them. They see the world not as crowded city blocks, but as miles of desert and prairie just down the way, and trains hauling 10,000 tons snaking toward them down the one line through the Tehachapi pass.

A hawk circles over Mission Tower. “The bird always impresses me,” says Dave. “Maybe it’s because he’s got to work all by himself, too.”

The romance of the railroad, whistling in the dark.