For anyone in the Washington D.C. area interested in actually seeing this
there
is a team of reenactors that demonstrate at the Manassas Railroad Festival
each
year. You can even buy a tape of the songs. It's a fascinating
demonstration,
and as Lee says "extremely galootish".
Rob
rob@p...
At 11:35 AM 10/30/98 , Lee Sudlow wrote:
>Gandy dancing was an extremely galootish activity. It was a practise used
>on the railroads in days of yore in which a gang of laborers would be
>sent out along the tracks to check for the alignment of the rails. The
>men would use large pry bars to move the tracks laterally in their
>beds of crushed rock. The pry bars were reputedly manufactured by, you
>guessed it, the Gandy Co., hence gandy dancers. One man alone could not
>budge the tracks, but the men would work in concert, usually to some sort
>of chanted rhythm (kinda like Bill Murray in Stripes). The force the
>men would apply to the rails was usually done at certain parts of the
>verses that the foreman was chanting. These guys were able to move
>70-120 lb rails this way. The rail inspectors would use the gandy dancers
>to fix alignment of the tracks in the curves. Misaligned tracks in curves
>are a bad thing, very bad.
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