2073 Days to Go

I picked up Colleen's daughter after school recently. She attends an after school daycare which is right next door to her school here in Mimico. I was feeling fine, relaxed, enjoying the last few days of my vacation, and looking forward to spending some time with Ivy. As I approached the door to the school, I noticed a bright yellow sign on the window.

Bombardier Classes – Room 10

My good mood evaporated instantly. Bombardier is the company responsible for maintaining GO’s fleet of coaches and locomotives, and is now the company that won the contract to operate our commuter trains. They’re the people who’ll be taking my job away next summer. Actually, they'll be replacing about 130 people, coworkers and friends. I tore the sign off the window, wrinkled it up and tossed it in the parking lot. Then I opened the door and walked down the hall to Room 10.

I stood for a moment in the doorway and looked at the faces looking back at me. I felt anger and bitterness toward each one. And a deep sense of betrayal both by my employer, and by GO Transit. How could this have happened, Ms J? How could a business partnership that has existed for forty years be suddenly dissolved? And what manner of insanity would replace experienced railroaders with train mechanics?

I looked at the study material piled on a table near the teacher’s desk. Railroad manuals. Training material. Operating Rules. Passenger evacuation procedures. Radio regulations. All the stuff these grease monkeys will have to know in order to operate trains.

Grease monkeys.

Next summer, they’ll be locomotive engineers. It took me seven weeks of intensive classroom and simulator training, followed by a year of on the job training. And all this after about eight years of railroad experience.

But these ... these GREASE MONKEYS will be qualified in six months! That’s the plan, Ms J.

Angry? Nooooo, not me.

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