Portal:Trains

Gandy dancer is a slang term used for early railroad workers, more formally referred to as "section hands", who laid and maintained railroad tracks in the years before the work was done by machines. The British equivalents of the term gandy dancer are "navvy" (from "navigator"), originally builders of canals or "inland navigations", for builders of railway lines, and "platelayer" for workers employed to inspect and maintain the track. In the Southwestern United States and Mexico, Mexican and Mexican-American track workers were colloquially "traqueros". In the United States, early section crews were often made up of recent immigrants and ethnic minorities who vied for steady work despite poor wages and working conditions, and hard physical labor. The Chinese, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans in the Western United States, the Irish in the Midwestern United States, and East Europeans and Italians in the Northeastern United States all worked as gandy dancers. Though all gandy dancers sang railroad songs, it may be that African American gandy dancers from the Southern United States, with a long tradition of using song to coordinate work, were unique in their use of task-related work chants. There are various theories about the derivation of the term, but most refer to the "dancing" movements of the workers using a specially manufactured 5-foot (1.52 m) "lining" bar, which came to be called a "gandy", as a lever to keep the tracks in alignment.

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A South African Railways Class 26 4-8-4 steam locomotive pulls an excursion train near Perdeberg in 1999.

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• ...that Gants Hill on London Underground's Central line is the easternmost station to be entirely below ground on the London Underground network?
• ...that although George M. Pullman introduced his patented vestibule cars in 1887, the London and North Western Railway was the first British railway to introduce gangway connections to allow passengers to move from one coach to another whilst the train was in motion?
• ...that Washington Metro's Gallery Place station has been used a testing ground for new station features including tactile edging, new signage and LED platform edge lights?
• ...that until as recently as 2006, Gainsborough Central railway station was shown to be one of the least busy in England as trains only call there one day a week?

October 9

• 1865 – George Hughes, Chief Mechanical Engineer for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway 1904–1922, the London and North Western Railway 1922–1923 and the London, Midland and Scottish Railway 1925–1931, is born (d. 1945).
• 1877 – The steam locomotive Countess of Dufferin (pictured), the first locomotive to operate in Manitoba and the first locomotive on the Canadian prairies, arrives aboard a barge in St. Boniface (now an electoral district of Winnipeg).
• 1909 – The Alaska Northern Railroad Company (a predecessor of the Alaska Railroad) purchases the assets of the bankrupt Alaska Central Railway and subsequently extends the line northward another 34 kilometers (21 mi).
• 2001 – Canadian National Railway (CN) purchases Wisconsin Central for $1.2 billion, giving CN a direct rail link to Chicago, Illinois.

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