Tellin' tales from ridin' the rails

Andy Johnson recalls 33 years with the Great Northern Railway

By DAVID ERICKSON - Whitefish Pilot

Andy Johnson, a longtime Whitefish resident and railroad track inspector, recently celebrated his 90th birthday at the Moose Lodge.

Johnson was born in Nebraska on Nov. 15, 1917. The U.S. had just entered World War I and gasoline sold for 8 cents a gallon. The Spanish influenza broke out that year, killing 20 million people by the time Johnson was three.

Johnson spent time cutting logs with the Civilian Conservation Corps in Minnesota and working on the Hungry Horse Dam before moving to Whitefish in 1947. He went to work for the Great Northern Railway that year as a laborer and track inspector.

"I inspected 70 miles of track every day," he said with pride from his home on Highway 40 where he lives with his daughter Cheryl Frye. "We had to use motorcars, and the year after I retired (in 1980), they gave all the track inspectors nice big pickup trucks. How about that?"

The motorcars had open cabins and rode on the tracks. Johnson said he wore a pilot's flight suit made of sheepskin during the biting cold winter months. His route took him from Whitefish to Eureka every week, and temperatures were often 20 degrees below or colder.

"It was the only way you could keep warm," he said.

Johnson said he had several close calls while he was out on the tracks.

"My motorcar got hit by a train two times," he said. "I got the hell out of the way, but the motorcar went 30 or 40 yards off the track and got all smashed up the first time, and the second time it got stuck right up front on the train."

Johnson, who also cut ice from Whitefish Lake to refrigerate railroad cars, worked his way up to a foreman position after three or four years and started a family of six children. He said he often took his gun and hunted when he was out on the tracks.

"You can't do that now, but I got a lot of deer and elk and saw mountain lions a couple times," he recalled. "I used to have to clear the tracks of animals the train hit by hand."

Although Johnson suffered a serious work-related back injury that forced him to retire early, he still has a sense of humor and a vivid memory. When asked to recall his birth date, he said with a laugh, "I remember when I was born, I was there!"

Johnson has a vast repertoire of interesting stories from his nine decades of experience. He recalled the time in the early 1960s that he and friend Art LaBrie helped out with a deer that was running through The Toggery one night. Johnson ended up lassoing the frightened animal.

"Well you can't catch a deer, you know, and this thing was running through all the clothes, so I grabbed a men's belt off a rack, and threw one end over the damn thing, so I had him by the neck," Johnson chuckled. "Then we took it out to the country and let it loose." The details of how the deer ended up in the store have been lost in the fog of time.

Johnson has fond memories of his time in Eureka, where he used to "raise elbows" at the local saloon with his friend Martin McCann, another railroad foreman.

Johnson made news in 1950 when he survived a hotel fire in Eureka by jumping out of a second-story window. The fire, which started when a furnace exploded, claimed the lives of a Browning basketball player and a team manager.

"Those boys woke me up in the middle of the night, screamin' and hollerin', and the room was all hazy from smoke," Johnson recalled. "A friend of mine had told me the hotel was dangerous, so I had requested a room in the front that had a window."

Johnson's daughter Cheryl said his father had the respect of the men who worked for him because he never asked them do anything he wouldn't do himself.

"He always worked beside his men," she said. "They all liked working for him."

Before his back injury, Johnson won a spike-driving contest in the Whitefish Winter Carnival, and he has the award to prove it. He also saw more than one train derailment over the years.

"I saw train derailments all the time," Johnson said with a grin.

Johnson is a living piece of history, and if one judges history by his life story and present attitude, the last nine decades have been a pretty good time.