STOPPING THE TRAIN

A disturbing, though overwrought, odyssey through same-sex harassment in the workplace, in this case the improbable, dangerous setting of an Alabama railroad yard. Martin was a third-generation railroad man, with 14 years on the job on the Norfolk Southern line, when his position in South Carolina was eliminated and he was offered a promotion and transfer to the high-volume Birmingham yard. Because he thought tradition and the work’s inherent stress had made the railroad an amiable fraternity, he was shocked to find hostility, expressed by three workers in grossly sexual terms. The harassment followed a well-established pattern, both in its escalation and in the futility of Martin’s complaints to supervisors, and when he finally filed a lawsuit, his confidentiality was breached and he ultimately became a pariah at work after the union employed heavy-handed tactics to protest the harassers— termination. Martin’s detailed narrative shows how, despite nightmares and social paranoia ultimately diagnosed as PTSD, he rebuilt his life with the aid of a woman he met and married in Birmingham. When Martin’s case came to trial—at the same time as a more widely reported case stemming from same-sex harassment on an offshore oil rig—he emerged triumphant with a six-figure settlement despite a hostile judge and a phalanx of opposing attorneys whose defense largely consisted of distraction and smear tactics. Martin is an enthusiastic but trying author, resorting frequently to purple similes, repetitive emotional rhetoric, and a general air of strident alarm (e.g., a chapter titled —The Diesel Shop of Horrors—). For all his hand-wringing, however, he offers a telling account of the world of contemporary railroading, evoking both its romance and its potential terrors. Indisputably an important window into a little-discussed social abuse, fed here by gender and class volatility and contemporary blue-collar angst.