Wrath of Argentine

Argentine Yard. One of the biggest railroad yards in the country. It was originally built by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe and rebuilt by successor railroad BNSF in 1996. It's state of the art, and amazing to watch it work. But I have to spray it. That's not nearly as much fun.

To get an idea of the size of this yard, take a look at this aerial photograph:

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Now I have to admit I don't have it as bad as the previous crew, they had to do pre-emergent spray. This means they had to cover every square inch of the property. It took over a month and included spraying 24 hours a day. Thank God I don't have it that bad. However, there is still a lot of ground to cover and a lot of things to spray. The worst part is we can't just go spray it on our own, we need a railroad pilot for nearly everything we do.

I can understand the need for a pilot, most of the time you are spraying close to active tracks, and there is no shortage of activity in this yard either. It's a pretty dangerous place and if you aren't paying attention bad things can happen. 

The problem with pilots is they often don't want to be there, don't know the whole process of spraying, and tend to get impatient. Our work is tedious, we can only get so much from the truck. A lot of spraying, especially in the tight area of a yard like this, has to be done by hand, which is tedious, time consuming work. But if you want to do a good job and get everything covered it's a necessary evil. Most pilots just don't have the patience for it.

Now when you are on your own doing off-track spraying (without a pilot, as is the case most everywhere else) you can take your time and do a good job. You aren't being rushed by anyone, you can get things covered. All my experiences with pilots have been they want you to skip this or that, or not get out and hand spray, etc., and it just gets on my nerves.

Just as I figured our pilot wasn't much different than the others I've had. As usual it started out good, but quickly deteriorated. This was the last thing this guy wanted to do on a Sunday morning (and who could really blame him?)! I like to do a huge yard like this in sections so that everything can get covered in a somewhat orderly fashion. Today, though, we seemed to just drive around here and there and hit up weeds wherever it was convenient. There was all kinds of stuff that was being skipped just because he didn't want to stop. I know we are going to have to go back and redo those spots now. 

I tried to just simply stop and hand spray where it needed, but it became obvious that was taking up to much time, so soon we were just driving around. It was a really half-assed job that got done today. It irritates me to do such a crappy job, especially knowing I'll probably have to come back and redo it.

Even more depressing though is it's just the first day and we've barely made a dent. There is just so much there. We haven't even got started on the actual tracks yet, there are hundreds of those to try and do! And I know just when we think we've got everything done there will be some new, big section we didn't even know about we'll have to do.

Argentine. It's fascinating to look at, but a real bear to spray.