Pauline Barker Booth: I was working as a waitress during the war in Winslow, AZ. I had two children. My girlfriend was working for the railroad and she asked me to come and work with here, so I did.
The pat was okay and there was a place to live, rent-free. There were 3 girls at each station, and stations were 10 miles apart. The station itself was an old diner car, with an office in front and an apartment in the back of the car. There were always two trailers on site and they were nice. Each girl had her own place to live. I thought it was a good deal for the kids and me.
I loved it at first, but we poor girls didn’t know what we were in for. We were at the mercy of anything that came along. The office was all windows, and at night you didn’t know who might be watching you. A lot of people knew we were out there by ourselves.
I took the night shift because I could be with the kids all day. While the kids were in bed, I would walk a few feet to the office. I could see my trailer out the window.
The train orders were given to us by a dispatcher over the phone, and we had to write out what he said and hand that message up on a stick to the engineer (called the Hog Head) at the head of the train, then stay there by that train in the dead of night to hand the same message back to the brakeman in the caboose. Some of the girls were crushed to death under the wheels of the train while doing this. We also had to stop a lot of trains and put them in the siding so another train could go on. To keep them from a head on crash, we had to throw a switch to make the train go into the siding. It wasn’t easy to do, a switch took all the strength I had.
One night the dispatcher called and said there was a train on its way that had missed its message at the last stations and that I was to head him off at the siding. I would have to run as fast as I could to meet the train about a mile away, or there would be one big wreck with another train and some lives lost, because the other train was a passenger train.
I told the dispatcher I couldn’t do it, I was too frightened. He told me that the lives lost would forever be with me and that I *could* do it. So I took myself out of the office with one last look at my trailer with my sleeping kids. I thought I might never see them again.
I had my lantern and flares to break open. I did make it just in time to get the train on the siding, then we saw the lights of the passenger train coming. I couldn’t believe I did it. The men on the train couldn’t believe it either. They all gave me a hand and said what a brave girl I was, but I didn’t feel very brave. I was the talk of the town in that small railroad town of Seligman, Arizona.