Explaining who I am in one post will be rather difficult, so I will add illustrations to help. Since this blog is called Railgirl, these posts will be mostly about my life at work. First I suppose I should define my job a little better. I work on a construction crew for the signal department at CSX Transportation. This job entails a little bit of everything. Our main purpose currently is to upgrade the signal system to make it compliant with new regulations sent down from the FRA. We are responsible for giving the train a safe signal system to run on. For example, if I do my job wrong, two trains could run head on into each other. Thankfully for me (and the folks running the trains), there are several much smarter people who come behind and check our work to be sure it is working correctly before any trains are allowed to use it. We are also responsible keeping the general public safe at railroad crossings, again those smart guys check up on us.
So what you may ask, does that mean I actually do? We start by reading the prints that the designers send out to us and going into the field and deciding what the installation will entail, what problems we will have and how we can fix them. Then we load up the wagons with cable, signal houses, backhoes etc and go to work. We dig the holes, lay the cable, stand the signals, hook up the power, wire the switches, signals and houses. Some days it doesn't work out exactly as we plan it, and some days it does. Here is a wall we built to set a signal house on.
Here is a day that didn't go quite the way we planned it.
As well as my railroad life I am a life long horse girl, so here is one picture of my on my pony before we set out for a trailride.
I will be back to work on Wednesday after a nice long Christmas break, and I will be blogging about the goings on in my little railroad world.
