The Chicago Historical Society has been asked for information on the company so many times that they have said, "It's like a legend," but they have never been able to find a Gandy company in their old records. Some sources even list the goods manufactured by the company, i.e., "tamping bars, claw bars, picks, and shovels." But others have cast doubt on the existence of such a company. īut most researchers have identified a "Gandy Shovel Company" or, variously, "Gandy Manufacturing Company" or "Gandy Tool Company" reputed to have existed in Chicago as the source of the tools from which gandy dancers took their name. Others have suggested that the term gandy dancer was coined to describe the movements of the workers themselves, i.e., the constant "dancing" motion of the track workers as they lunged against their tools in unison to nudge the rails, often timed by a chant as they carried rails or, speculatively, as they waddled like ganders while running on the railroad ties.
A majority of early northern railway workers were Irish, so an Irish or Gaelic derivation for the English term seems possible. Published in Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Journal, 1921 The title and caption of the photo refer to union membership. Photo shows what appear to be heel claw bars used to pull up spikes. Ī "wide awake gang" of section crew workers. There are various theories about the derivation of the term, but most refer to the "dancing" movements of the workers using a specially manufactured 5-foot (1.5 m) "lining" bar, which came to be called a "gandy", as a lever to keep the tracks in alignment. The Chinese, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans in the Western United States, the Irish in the Midwestern United States, African Americans in the Southern United States, and East Europeans and Italians in the Northeastern United States all worked as gandy dancers. In the United States, early section crews were often made up of recent immigrants and ethnic minorities who vied for steady work despite poor wages and working conditions, and hard physical labor. In the Southwestern United States and Mexico, Mexican and Mexican-American track workers were colloquially " traqueros". The British equivalents of the term gandy dancer are " navvy" (from "navigator"), originally builders of canals or "inland navigations", for builders of railway lines, and " platelayer" for workers employed to inspect and maintain the track. Gandy dancer is a slang term used for early railroad workers in the United States, more formally referred to as "section hands", who laid and maintained railroad tracks in the years before the work was done by machines. Photo of railroad maintenance section crew, Lake Erie & Western Railroad, Rawson, Ohio, 1920
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