CALL OF THE OPEN (RAIL)ROAD; CHASTAIN LIKES LIFE SERVICING TRACKS

SCOTT CITY -- During his tour in the Army, Jim Chastain was a radio-teletype operator confined much of the time to a dark, windowless, secure room. Maybe that's why he enjoys working outdoors so much.

Chastain is a section foreman for the St. Louis-Southwestern ("Cotton Belt") Railroad in Scott City. He's responsible for maintenance and upkeep of about 130 miles of the railroad's mainline, passing and yard tracks and switches from just north of Thebes, Ill., southwestward to Jonesboro, Ark. So Chastain spends a lot of his time in the open air along with almost 500 section gang employees who maintain tracks between Thebes and Jonesboro.

Chastain went to work on the Cotton Belt after finding out he didn't like being away from home in the cab of a semi-truck. He was born and raised in Star City, Ark., about 30 miles south of Pine Bluff, on the Cotton Belt's mainline.

He hired on with the railroad in March 1978 as a laborer on a switch gang rebuilding mainline railroad track switches to a higher grade classification. Later he became a track apprentice. "That boils down to being a `go-fer' for the roadmaster," he explained. "You do all sorts of odd jobs: welding, working on maintenance crews, mechanical crews and such."

Although it may have been considered a low-scale job, Chastain gathered a wealth of experience about the operation and maintenance of the railroad.

Several months later he bid successfully on a job as track-servicing gang foreman. A year later he moved into the Cotton Belt's huge Pine Bluff switching yards as a section foreman. "I got a whole bushel basket full of experience working in the yard," he said. "It's just a totally different type of railroading working in a yard with that `hump.'"

The hump is a large mound of earth used to elevate rail cars so they can be switched by gravity to different switch tracks in the yard.

Chastain worked in the Pine Bluff yards for two years before a cutback forced him to "bump" up to Scott City in 1982, where he took over as section foreman.

Unlike other jobs, Chastain said the work of a section foreman and section gang is never done. "I was already behind in work before I ever got here," he said during an interview at Delta, where he and his gang were repairing track in a Cotton Belt switching yard.

"There has never been and probably never will be, a day when I can say to the men, `We don't have anything to do today.' We've always got someplace we need to be and should have been there yesterday. As long as they run trains over this track, I'm always going to be behind in my work.

You know the kind of manpower you have to work with and you know what you can do each day, so you take each day at a time," he said. That means keeping the work prioritized to make sure the trains are moving and deferring less critical work for a later time, he explained.

As a section gang, Chastain's Scott City crew is responsible for minor maintenance of one section of railroad. Other section gangs down the line do the same.

If a major overhaul of tracks, ties and ballast is required, management calls in rail-and-tie gangs with high-tech equipment that enables them to lay hundreds of ties and sections of quarter-mile ribbon-rail each day.

"On a good day we (the section gang) can put in about 15 to 20 ties a day. Sometimes when the ground is frozen we do good if we can bust the ground and put in two ties," Chastain explained.

Section gangs work in all kinds of weather. Normally they work a five-day week, but when a derailment occurs they pitch in to help reopen the tracks.

To some the work may seem harsh and unattractive, but Chastain said, because the work is physical, it keeps you in shape. There also is a lot of camaraderie between the men, which makes the work easier. That cooperation is important when two men are swinging steel mauls within inches of each other as they pound spikes into the ties.

Although he is a supervisor, Chastain doesn't hesitate to step in if the work requires an extra hand. When he's not working with the gang, Chastain keeps a close eye on his men. In the summer he makes sure they rest often and drink a lot of water and in the winter he watches for effects of wind chill and exposure that can dull reflexes and lead to accidents. "Safety is our No. 1 priority out here," he said.

When not on the railroad, you'll rarely find Chastain at home, unless he's busy working remodeling the older house he bought on Third Street in Scott City.

Chastain is leader of Cub Scout Pack 214 in Cape Girardeau. He also is local chairman of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way and travels from Scott City to Texarkana, Ark., to handle union business.

He said he also manages to find time for some fishing. "I make time for that," he said.