Working on the Railroad : Despite the Long Days, a Trainman’s Life Is the ‘Closest Thing to Play You Can Get’

Once inside the cab of Santa Fe Locomotive No. 2566, your first impression is that the controls are amazingly like a toy train’s.

One lever makes it go; if you click it to “1” the train goes slow, to “8,” it goes fast. One lever controls its direction, forward or reverse. One lever makes it stop. One lever blows the horn.

Despite its size, 249,000 pounds, this locomotive is like the toy versions, for it, too, is electric. Its 1,500-horsepower diesel engine--just one of its 16 cylinders has more displacement than the largest automobile engines--drives a generator. It is the generator that drives electric motors at the wheel axles.

At that scale, this electric train transcends the toy category. Still, after some persistent questioning, its crew will admit that running it is, well, it’s fun.

“If a guy’s got to work for a living, this job’s hard to beat,” said Jim Stansberry, the conductor. “It’s the closest thing to play you can get.”

12-Hour Days

Mondays through Fridays, he, his four crew members and No. 2566 become Santa Fe’s Fifth Fullerton Road Switcher, delivering and retrieving freight cars along the Santa Fe tracks in Orange County.

It doesn’t sound like fun.

It is a long day, usually 12 hours, and begins at the regional freight office in Fullerton before sunrise at 5:30. Much of the day is spent outside the locomotive cab and the caboose, regardless of heat, cold or rain.

There is no other road to travel but the railroad, and the view along the way soon becomes as familiar as the back of a boxcar.

The tracks take the train through the industrial sections of Fullerton, Anaheim, Orange, Tustin, Santa Ana, Irvine and El Toro, where factories and warehouses turn their good sides to the streets and hide their clutter at the rear by the tracks.

“Yeah,” said Stansberry. “You see the (fundament) of the city from here.”

The train itself is hardly more attractive. The sheet metal locomotive cab suggests the inside of a tool box. Everything is coated with chipped gray paint, and the only decorations are stenciled notices (“DANGER 600 VOLTS”) and posted railroad regulations. The locomotive roars and vibrates and pitches down the track. And the roof leaks.

The caboose (“the original motor home,” according to Stansberry) is old and austere. Its oil stove smokes, and its lavatory smells like a boat head that hasn’t been tended for a while.

But in reality, the austerity of the train is one of its virtues, Stansberry said. “I love trains,” he said. “I am just fascinated by trains. Maybe it’s just the mass of things.” He has been railroading for the last 26 of his 44 years and wants many more years of it, he said.

“I can’t think of anything I’d rather do,” said brakeman Dave Windbigler, who at age 47 has been at it for 21 years.

“I went to Cal State L.A., but I didn’t want to get into the world of finance. You kind of fall into it (railroading) and discover you like it.

“It’s hard to beat. You’re working outside. You’re not stuck in an office or a production line. If you get tired of working this area, you can bid out (transfer) somewhere else. There’s a certain amount of freedom.”

“Yeah,” said brakeman Herb Blanthorne, 50, who with 28 years of railroading is the crew’s senior member. “Fair money, but freedom. And seniority rules.”

The freedom begins when the train crawls away from the Fullerton station.

Stansberry has a pocket full of orders that specify the locations of pickups and deliveries according to the number of telephone poles past a certain milepost and down certain branch tracks. But the real address is much more informal. “All you really say is, ‘Go to Weber.’ Everybody knows where it is,” Stansberry said. “Everybody knows where everything is.”

Work at Own Pace

The Santa Fe dispatch office has constant radio contact with the train, but it seldom calls. The train’s position is shown as lights on the dispatch board in San Bernardino, but only while it’s on the main line. When it turns onto a branch, it’s on its own.

The crew is left to devise its own schedule and pace. “As long as you do your job, they’re satisfied,” Windbigler said.

And the pace is always deliberate and typically low-pressure. The speed limit on tracks leading away from the main line is usually 10 m.p.h. Sometimes cars must be pulled and shoved in intricate maneuvers to arrange them properly in the train, a time-consuming procedure.

“You can only go so fast safely, because of the equipment,” Windbigler said. Because the machinery is so huge and powerful, mistakes are particularly dangerous.

“About a year ago they had a time-and-motion crew out here. They threw up their hands. There’s no way they could figure out to make it more efficient,” Windbigler said.

Dan Robertson, the crew’s fireman, who shares the job of driving the locomotive, is the youngest of the crewmen. But at age 34, he still has put in a lot of service--15 years.

“Yeah, it’s fun,” he acknowledged. It is challenging to run the seemingly simple locomotive with a soft touch, he said. There is satisfaction in coupling to a car far down the track that you can’t see and know of only because the brakeman is coaching you over his radio: “Four cars, Dan (meaning four car lengths to go), . . . two cars.”

“You know an engineer’s good when you couple up and that car doesn’t move,” Stansberry said.

Each railroad car has about a foot of “slack,” meaning a locomotive can pull forward a foot before the coupling will take hold. “So 60 cars have 60 feet of slack,” Robertson said. “If an engineer doesn’t take that into account, he can start up and throw everyone in the caboose on the floor. You can easily break a train in two.”

And there’s that feeling of power. Driving a locomotive “becomes just another job,” Robertson said--but then there was the time he was sent to bring a string of locomotives from a roundhouse. Eight of the big “road units” were coupled together with no cars to pull.

“Yeah, and you talk about power. You just touch that throttle and it just leaps!” Robertson said. He spent time as a jet engine mechanic in the service, “but this is a whole different concept of power.”

Switcher crews have the advantage of being able to park an idling train and have lunch in a restaurant, if there’s one in the neighborhood. “How many good restaurants do you know next to the railroad tracks?” Stansberry said.

There are two along this switcher’s route, Stansberry said, and their location affects the day’s scheduling.

Full-Throttle Trip

On this particular Thursday, Stansberry announced that “we got a good trip today. We’re going to Lucky’s.”

The huge supermarket warehouse is in easternmost Irvine, and the trip there gives the crew a rare chance to get onto the main line and open the throttle full. And unlike the usual urban deliveries, this trip offers as scenery orange groves, open fields and nearby mountains.

The trip ended this particular day, and on the way back to Fullerton, Stansberry perched himself in the caboose cupola to take in the view. It was exactly where he wanted to be at that moment, he said. “There is no better seat on any train.” From its window, he waved at a small boy who greets the train almost every day at that spot.

“One of the great things is you’re kind of a hero to kids,” Robertson said. “They love it when you wave to them--if they’re not throwing rocks at you.”