For anyone in the Washington D.C. area interested in actually seeing this
there
is a team of reenactors that demonstrate at the Manassas Railroad Festival
each
year.  You can even buy a tape of the songs.  It's a fascinating
demonstration,
and as Lee says "extremely galootish".

Rob
rob@p...

At 11:35 AM 10/30/98 , Lee Sudlow wrote:
>Gandy dancing was an extremely galootish activity.  It was a practise used
>on the railroads in days of yore in which a gang of laborers would be
>sent out along the tracks to check for the alignment of the rails.  The
>men would use large pry bars to move the tracks laterally in their
>beds of crushed rock.  The pry bars were reputedly manufactured by, you
>guessed it, the Gandy Co., hence gandy dancers.  One man alone could not
>budge the tracks, but the men would work in concert, usually to some sort
>of chanted rhythm (kinda like Bill Murray in Stripes).  The force the
>men would apply to the rails was usually done at certain parts of the
>verses that the foreman was chanting.  These guys were able to move
>70-120 lb rails this way.  The rail inspectors would use the gandy dancers
>to fix alignment of the tracks in the curves.  Misaligned tracks in curves
>are a bad thing, very bad.