Gandy Dancer - Racine (just for Jay) Traditional Cache
rogheff: I'm archiving all my caches to make way for a whole new series. This container is now gone.
Gandy Dancer - Racine (just for Jay)
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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The 2006 Wisconsin Geocaching Association Cache of the Year was between a local geocache - Matchead and a cach called Gandy Dancer Gordon Sumner, a cache up north.
It got me wondering, what the heck is a Gandy Dancer?
From Wikipedia:
Gandy dancer is a slang term for workers who maintained railroads in North America.
The term originates from the late nineteenth century. It is often said to derive from the Gandy Manufacturing Company, a Chicago-based tool manufacturing company, but several sources cite an absence of any record of this company's existence. Hand crews used specialized hand tools known as gandys (of unknown etymology) to lever rail tracks into position.
Though rail tracks were held in place by wooden ties (sleepers outside the U.S.) and the mass of the stones (ballast) beneath them, each pass of a train around a corner would, through centrifugal force and vibration, produce a tiny shift in the tracks. If allowed to accumulate, such shifts could eventually cause a derailment; work crews had to pry them back into place routinely.
For each stroke, a worker would lift his gandy and force it into the ballast to create a fulcrum, then throw himself sideways using the gandy to check his full weight (making the "huh" sound recorded in the lyrics below) so the gandy would push the rail toward the inside of the curve. Even with all impacts from the work crew timed correctly, any progress made in shifting the track would not become visible until after a large number of repetitions.
Rhythm was necessary for this process, both to synchronize the manual labor, and to maintain the morale of workers whose exertions produced only a minuscule effect; hence "gandy dancers". The songs sung in this occupation have been recognized as a major influence on later blues music.
When you enter this housing development, look over at the old building to your left.
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