Returning to Italy in 1908 because he missed his family, Famiano worked at spading ground for 11 cents a day. After a short while, he told his wife he had to go back to America. This time he stayed until his death in 1951.

Famiano went to the railroad town of Bradford, Ohio in the far western part of the state. Founded in 1866, Bradford was named after a Columbus & Indianapolis Central Railway Postal Agent. Bradford later came to be known as a Pennsylvania Railroad town.

It was 1913 before Famiano had saved enough money to bring his family (eventually to number 12 children) to the States. That was the year of the great flood in Ohio which claimed 350 lives.

Preparing to leave for America, seven-year old Amato Carini (as he was named then) was terrified by the talk in Naples: "Everybody in America has drowned." But his mother, not knowing if her husband was alive or not, boarded the ship to America with her two young sons on April 1, 1913.

Famiano, who had gone to work for the railroad as a section laborer and would retire from the railroad in 1948, was alive and well in Bradford but six members of his section gang had drowned in the worst flooding in Ohio’s history.

Railroad management had determined that flood waters were reaching track level at several creek and river bridges in the Bradford area and ordered extra track patrols to walk the tracks and spot washouts and protect trains.

On March 24 several culverts had washed out, stranding a pair of passenger trains. Famiano’s section crew was sent out with a gravel train to go to the washout and rescue the passengers. Famiano, however, was instructed to walk track patrol in the opposite direction.

In the early morning hours of March 25 came the terrible news that the bridge had collapsed into the creek with the train on it. The engine and first three cars had made it over safely, but several crew cars and the caboose were swallowed from sight.

"Many of the men were washed into a grove of thistle trees and were trapped and badly injured. A rescue train was dispatched from Bradford with men, boats and rope, but their worst fears were realized. The foreman and five laborers from his gang had drowned; fourteen other laborers were injured, along with the conductor and two rear brakemen." (Bradford the Railroad Town, by Scott D. Trostel, 1987.)

It was with a heavy heart that Famiano Carine, the only surviving member of his section gang, welcomed his family to Bradford after they had spent 10 days on the water and two days on the train from New York.

Amato Carini started school the following year and it was there that he underwent a name change. A teacher changed Amato (meaning love) to Amos. Later Amos added it back in by way of the middle initial A. He also dropped the I from Carini (meaning pretty) and replaced it with an E because he thought Amos A. Carine was better suited to his adopted country. (Amos became a citizen in 1945.)

It was also a school teacher that unwittingly led Amos to his railroad career. Not speaking English well his first few years in the U.S., Amos was 17 years old in the 8th grade. That year, 1922, his teacher insisted he be in the school play. Being somewhat shy and not having a suit, Amos balked. Although he had worked that summer for 38 cents an hour, Amos said he couldn’t buy a suit because he had given all his money to his mother.

So Amos left school and went to work for the railroad as a track laborer. In February 1923 he started working in the maintenance of equipment department. It was while he was working in the MofE that Amos met his wife Dorothy in 1926 while she was waiting for her cousin, a co-worker who was "knocking fire" (cleaning out the hot, unspent coals) with Amos that day. "We were supposed to service those engines in just 15 minutes on each engine. Shake them down and dump the ash pans too."

(Amos and Dorothy were married on December 24, 1929, and had been married almost 60 years at the time of her death. Their family included seven children, 30 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren.)

In 1927 Amos was laid off and went to work in a foundry in Dayton, Ohio. After two years he returned and started in the track department of the Pennsylvania Railroad on April 4, 1929.

In those days, Amos says, "there were no machines, we did everything by hand. We would put in ties and you and your buddy would have to put in 20 ties a day. It included spiking them. We had to drive to the worksite, but I worked out there when we used the old handcar. We pumped it about six or seven miles and had to pull a box car with about half-a-dozen men on there."

Another part of a trackman’s job was to feed and water livestock and hose them off. The Pennsylvania Railroad had a pen and runway on the side of the tracks; the pen could hold 11 carloads of livestock.

Amos worked as a laborer until he learned what proved to be a great love of his life--welding. "I’d go down on Saturday morning and my section foreman, Charlie Ramey, a star, a good guy, would help me put the push car on the track, put the tanks on, the welding outfit and I’d play around welding in the yards there. I wasn’t getting paid to do this, I went there to practice because I wanted the job. I did that on a lot of Saturdays."

"Then they put me out on the arc welds (arc welded through the prairie from 1936 to 1939 that had failed). Harrison Blithe showed me how to wash all that arc weld out of there and build it up. Well, the supervisor said, ‘that next joint, go down there and try it.’ So I tried it and we were using that ribbon rod and that double-headed torch. The more I played with it the deeper the hole I’d get. So they sent me to Columbus to learn to weld."

"But on the arc welds, the grinder said you pile that on and I’ll take it off. I was leaving a rough weld to start with. I was letting him earn his money. He would polish it all off, he was a good grinder. After I got done with that three miles there, I could weld. There was a lot of joints in three miles and after I got out of there I was qualified."

"A sad part of my learning to weld was what happened to Harrison Blithe. A gang from Indiana couldn’t get their darn motor car started and they called Harrison’s helper off from watching to go up and start their motor car for them. They never told Harrison to get off the track and a passenger train came up going about 65 miles per hour and wiped him out. He’s the one that broke me in to weld. They said they had some hose cut off just a week before in the Columbus yards and Harrison was trying to save his hose when the train ran over him."

Amos described three of his own close calls but said his worst experiences were working derailments as a welder. One particularly bad accident occurred when three trains collided on May 21, 1939. "Before the night was out, four crewmen would be dead, four more injured, three locomotives, two cabooses and 46 cars wrecked and an unknown number of livestock dead." (Trostel, 1987.)

Amos says, "one engineer parked his train west of town (he stayed out of the corporation towns so he wouldn’t block up the streets) and came down to get some cold water. It was foggier than the dickens and another train came in behind the first one and plowed into it. The flagman tried to get him to stop, but when he saw that he couldn’t, he took off running. If he could have made it five or six more steps, he probably would’ve been all right but a car got him out there in the field.

"Those days, they ran these meat train specials out of Chicago; all meat trains and they kept them moving. They decided to run the meat train down around the other two--they didn’t know there was a wreck--and that train plowed into the same pile.

"They called me out about 4:30 in the morning. The engines were blowing, there was all that steam, the fog was still heavy, the wounded cattle were crying. You couldn’t hear anybody hollering.

"My sergeant was trying to cut a fellow out and he had an arc torch to cut with. You can cut with an arc torch but you can’t cut as close as you can with a straight torch. He was a big man, weighed over 200 pounds. The tender had come around and pressed him right against the fire door and it just cooked him. I had to cut the whole corner to get him out; it took several hours."

At 91 years old, Amos Carine has the grip of a man half his age and a sharp mind to match. One of the first things he said when this reporter came to visit was, "Your contract to 2000, you’ll make as much in an hour as I made in six days. When I retired in 1970 I made $3.66 an hour as a gas welder, three cents more than a foreman."

For 12 years, from 1922 to 1934 Amos earned 38 cents an hour. Because the men weren’t organized then, he says they didn’t get a raise until "President Roosevelt got in there." When he went from trackman to welder he doubled his pay, from 43 to 86 cents an hour. He said at the time he secretly thought "no man was worth that darn much money."

But, Amos says, things "get better all the time with the union." He talked about being able to take trips with his family beginning in the 1940s after the National Vacation Agreement was signed. He talked about working five days instead of six. And, he talked about wage increases.

Amos always went to local union meetings and remembers the organizing days when the men met in a room upstairs over Paddy’s Pub. Later union meetings were held at the Fort Piqua Hotel.

Amos said he only went on strike for one or two days at a time but "you had to threaten to strike or call for a strike vote to get any meetings out of them (railroad management); it was the only way they’d come to the table."

Both Amos and his father were charter members of Subordinate Lodge 3017 (Pennsylvania Federation). The lodge’s first officers’ list noted that on November 1, 1937, Amos took office as Executive Committee Member and Famiano as Outer Sentinel. Amos’ brother-in-law and close friend, Glenn Weyant, first served as recording secretary and then secretary-treasurer for almost 40 years. Brother Tommy later joined the union and was a member until he became a supervisor. Over the years Amos held the positions of Grievance Committee Chairman, Executive Committee Chairman, Vice President and President of Lodge 3017. Amos spoke with pride of attending, along with Weyant, the 1970 Grand Lodge Convention in Detroit, shortly before his retirement in October that year.

Still active, Amos walks to church two or three times a week. He visits often with members of his large family and gardens with his great-nephew Jim Thomas, a railroad fan. Jim likes to hear Amos talk about his railroad days and after 47 years and three months on the railroad, Amos has lots of railroad stories to tell.