Gandy dancer

Gandy dancer is a slang term used for early railroad workers, more formally referred to as "section hands", who laid and maintained railroad tracks in the years before the work was done by machines. 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. In the Southwestern United States and Mexico, Mexican and Mexican-American track workers were colloquially "traqueros".

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. The Chinese, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans in the Western United Stares, the Irish in the Midwestern United States, and East Europeans and Italians in the Northeastern United States all worked as gandy dancers. Though all gandy dancers sang railroad songs, it may be that African American gandy dancers from the Southern United States, with a long tradition of using song to coordinate work, were unique in their use of task-related work chants.

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 (1.52 m) "lining" bar, which came to be called a "gandy", as a lever to keep the tracks in alignment.

The term has an uncertain origin. A majority of early northern railway workers were Irish, so an Irish or Gaelic derivation for the English term seems possible.

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.

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