Velociworld

Cinder Dicks

My friend Dax has a post up about railroad hobos, and it rang true with me. God knows I've chased a few away in my time. I'm a Home Office fellow now, but I've run a railhead, and know exactly what he's talking about.

After World War I, and again during the Depression, men took to the rails as hobos, looking for work, or escape from debt, or a reason to live. Precursors to Kerouac. Now they ride the rails as varmints and thieves. What was a boxcar of cotton in 1932 is now a container full of DVD players, or plasma TV's.

Rail terminals, by their very nature, are located in bad neighborhoods. If it was a good neighborhood before the railroad showed up (unlikely) it would fast become a bad one. It's just the nature of industrial blight. You can't stop that.

Those areas where a train slows down to enter a terminal, or exits slowly from the other side, are known as Indian Territory. That's where the cinder dicks come in. They are railroad police. Well trained, conscientious, and armed with a license to bust head upon company property if necessary. They are called dicks because they were historically considered detectives in the olden days, when Pinkertons guarded the Union Pacific from Butch and Sundance. The cinder part comes from the fact the grade was covered in cinders from coal powered locomotives, and sooted their brogans.

This will sound racist, but I don't care. The white men I chased off my ramp were all bums. Drunks, misfits, basically harmless. They wanted a free ride from Nowhere to Nowhere, and were in no hurry to get there. The blacks were swarming over the containers like the skinnies whooping it up on the helicopters in Black Hawk Down. They were unabashed thieves. Some were quite industrious, and would hijack UPS loads at gunpoint as they arrived for loading.

Cinder dicks are hard-working cops. Good people. They are constrained by jurisdiction, and tradition, and often have to give up the chase when a perp crosses into civilian authority. But they always did me right, and did their best to keep my ramp punk-free.