Engineer’s Job Hard, Perilous : Livelong Day Working on the Railroad Takes a Toll

Ronnie Lee will never forget Super Bowl Sunday, 1983, the day his train got away. It was foggy that morning as Lee, a locomotive engineer, guided 89 cars piled high with cement through the Tehachapi Mountains.

The trip had gone smoothly, but when Lee braked on a hill to control his gathering speed, there was no response. Moments later, the train became a runaway, hurtling out of control for miles until it rear-ended another freight in Bakersfield and derailed.

“I was standing on the side of the engine at one point, ready to jump at 50 m.p.h.,” recalled Lee, who chose to take his chances on board. “You just can’t imagine what that’s like. You just can’t imagine.”

The crew survived, but it was five months before Lee summoned the nerve to climb back behind the throttle of a locomotive. And even now the 17-year veteran gets jittery while traveling tricky stretches of track on misty mornings.

Still, Lee, 38, was one of the lucky ones. Just last month, a runaway Southern Pacific train plunged off the tracks at the foot of the Cajon Pass, crushing two trainmen in a pile of wreckage.

Few engineers encounter such harrowing ordeals. But the punishing work they do leaves them ever vulnerable to disaster.

Today’s western railroaders--much like their hardy peers of an era long past--endure rigors that truly set their profession apart.

Long, unpredictable hours are routine, and make holding a family together a struggle. When an engineer has a day off, it is often spent recovering from 12-hour shifts in a noisy, hot cab vibrating with the power of a train’s throbbing engines.

Engineers do not get sick leave, and dismissals in the industry are so rampant that most buy union insurance to protect against lost wages in the event they are fired.

Then there’s the stress of the job, the draining anxiety that can grip an engineer as he gingerly eases a hissing behemoth down the side of a mountain. As one old-timer put it: “On some of these hills, you’re on the edge of your seat, praying, the whole way down.”

So why do it? For starters, there is a romance about the railroad, a magical attraction deeply rooted in folklore. Some engineers proudly savor their place in history, noting the railroad’s vital role in shaping the country’s settlement. Others merely exult in dashing across the desert.

Still others point out that the rewards can be great: “Where else can a guy like me with an AA degree go and make up to $70,000 a year?” said Bennie Loudermilk of Bakersfield. “The money is darn good.”

But although technological advances and organized labor have improved their lot considerably since the gritty days of coal-powered trains, many railroad workers say it is a life they would not choose again.

“My father worked for the railroad, and when I started back in ‘61, it paid a heck of a lot more than I was making parking cars,” said Southern Pacific engineer Ray Brown, 46, of Banning. “But I won’t let my son work there. . . . He’s going to get an education and make money the way normal people do.”

There are few American historical figures as legendary as the locomotive engineer. Recognizable by his cap and famed for his friendly wave and persistent tugs on the whistle cord, the engineer has been embalmed in a nostalgic glory nearly rivaling that of the cowboy.

And no wonder. In the late 19th Century, railroaders were society’s true adventurers, admired for their daring in riding primitive machines across rickety trestles and tracks often hastily laid.

Theirs was an envied fraternity, and one not easily joined. Only after years of back-breaking labor as a fireman--feeding seemingly insatiable engines with endless shovelfuls of coal--could a man be worthy of the rank of engineer.

Though exhilarating, the livelihood was fraught with peril; in a single month in 1887, 34 railroaders died on the job. Such hazards were memorialized in a song, “The Wreck of the Old 97,” written to commemorate the derailment of the Southern Railway’s Fast Mail train in Virginia in 1903:

He was going down grade making 90 miles an hour when his whistle broke into a scream. (Wooo! Wooo!) He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle. And a-scalded to death by the steam.

To be sure, the risks of riding the rails have eased considerably since the Age of Steam. The Federal Railroad Administration reports that rail accidents have declined steadily in the last seven years, although there was a slight rise in 1988.

Moreover, labor unions have wielded their considerable power to usher in improvements and preserve seemingly anachronistic traditions cherished by workers. Indeed, some industry experts argue that “featherbedding” by organized labor over the years crippled railroads fighting to stay alive in the highly competitive freight hauling business.

Nonetheless, today’s engineers hardly live the easy life. Perhaps most taxing, many say, are the unpredictable and long hours required to keep the nation’s freight rolling around the clock.

Although veteran employees can use seniority to win positions with relatively normal hours, younger engineers complain that they are virtually held hostage by the uncertainty of their schedule. Many frequently work 12-hour shifts and are off just eight hours--the minimum break required by law--before being called back.

“You’re married to the phone, basically, and there’s no regularity because you could be called in at midnight one day and 4 p.m. the next,” said Loudermilk, 34, who works the San Joaquin Division for Southern Pacific. “You can’t plan your life. I was all dressed up for a wedding a few weeks back and then the phone rang. So much for that.”

Fatiguing Schedule

The tumultuous schedule--coupled with the battering a body takes when subjected to hours of the ceaseless din and shuddering caused by a train’s powerful engines--unavoidably causes fatigue.

To combat the problem, Southern Pacific provides lodging for its employees to use between shifts away from home. Next to the railroad’s sprawling facility in Colton, for example, sits a row of motel-style rooms, complete with a television lounge and a restaurant, the Milepost Inn.

Though Spartan, the rooms are clean. But many engineers lament that their location just over the fence from the bustling rail yard subjects them to a continuous clicking and clanging that makes sleeping a challenge.

The bottom line is “you get a lot of men who are pretty much always operating in a sort of jet-lag situation,” said engineer Albin Szulc of San Bernardino.

Frank Holland, the engineer controlling the Southern Pacific freight train that derailed and mowed down a row of homes in San Bernardino on May 12, had been on the job for 11 hours when he began his fateful descent down the Cajon Pass grade. The previous day, Holland had worked a 12-hour shift, quitting at 12:45 a.m.

Although federal investigators have not discussed whether weariness may have played a part in the deadly wreck, some of Holland’s colleagues say shifts like the one he worked can rob an engineer of alertness and quick reflexes.

“At the point when you tip over at Highland (and start down Cajon Pass), you’ve been fighting your train for eight or nine hours already, and you’re bone tired,” said one seasoned engineer familiar with the hill. “But the toughest part of your trip is dead ahead. It’s a lousy situation.”

The rigors of life in the cab are compounded, engineers say, by workplace irritants that may seem minor but can make the day downright unpleasant.

Although locomotives have been equipped with air conditioners for about a decade, several Southern Pacific workers estimated that only one in 10 cools properly. On summer days, when the temperature may hit a searing 110 in the desert, the cramped confines of a cab can be nearly unbearable, especially if a train is stopped on a siding, deprived of a breeze.

Toilets are conveniently located in the nose of the locomotives. But the bathrooms can get so smelly--especially on hot days--that they are frequently sealed off, Southern Pacific employees said.

On a more serious note, equipment troubles, often caused by poor maintenance, can mean extra tensions--and sometimes injuries--on the job. Loudermilk, an engineer since 1981, recalls the time diesel smoke filled the cab of his locomotive as it crawled through a tunnel on a mountainous route.

“The windows didn’t fit snugly, so all this smoke started pouring in on us,” he said. “There were no oxygen tanks in the cab, so we got hit pretty bad.” Loudermilk was hospitalized for the night with smoke inhalation.

High Divorce Rate

The crazy schedule, the stress, the fatigue--all can combine to take a heavy toll on family life. Indeed, railroaders are rumored to suffer a divorce rate second only to police officers.

“Our marriage nearly collapsed many times because I just wasn’t there,” Brown said. “I missed all sorts of things when my daughter was in school. I had to work, so I couldn’t make the open houses. It’s tough.”

Brown, a brawny man with a penchant for storytelling, was also on the job when his mother died. His wife called the railroad and asked them to pass on a message, but Brown, who was working near Yuma at the time, never got word.

“I should have been with her,” he recalls, “but because of the job, I wasn’t. Those things start to get to you.”

Although many of the hazards of the railroader’s life have faded, so too has a lot of the luster that initially accompanied the job. Once enveloped by a romantic aura and worshiped by wide-eyed children, engineers have been eclipsed by a new generation of heroes--astronauts, professional athletes and rock stars.

These days, many engineers glumly note, theirs is a trade blemished by accusations of drug use stemming from a 1987 train wreck that claimed 16 lives. Ricky Gates, the Conrail engineer blamed for the accident, admitted smoking marijuana on the train before the collision and was sentenced to five years in prison.

“Now when you tell someone you’re a railroader, the first thing they want to talk about is the drug and alcohol testing,” Ronnie Lee said. “Our pride’s really taken a beating.”

Most engineers say they wholeheartedly support the screening, noting that their safety too is in jeopardy if drunkards and drug users are loose on the rails. And they contend that narcotics and alcohol--once popular among some railroad workers seeking to induce sleep or relieve boredom--have all but vanished given the threat of testing today.

“You used to see guys tanking up pretty good during layovers,” said one Los Angeles trainman who asked not to be named, “but now it’s 99% stopped. People know that if there’s an accident . . . they’ll take you right down to the clinic for a sample.”

Despite the gripes, most modern-day engineers concede that there is a joyful side to their work. Ray Brown recalls with a chuckle the words of a colleague, who said that “running a freight train between Indio and Yuma, Ariz., was the most fun you could have with your clothes on.”

But the remark, Brown notes, was made “in the days when you could take ‘em out and let ‘em go, running at about 80 or 90 m.p.h. We were young then, and all that power and speed was pretty exciting. It was like we were getting paid to race.”

That’s all changed now, with tight limits on speed. But there is still the enchantment of snaking through the Sierra after a fresh snowfall or whizzing past a blur of wildflowers in spring or hearing a train whistle echo through a lonely canyon.

Family Tradition

And there is the sense of tradition that permeates the pursuit.

“Historically, it was something that ran in a family, a tradition passed from father to son,” Szulc said. “They might not say so, but I think there are some engineers who keep the job because there’s still a bit of glory and grandeur in it.”

For Ronnie Lee, who followed his father onto the rails at age 18, “the railroad is America.” Despite its rough edges and trying conditions, Lee said the life of an engineer is one he’d be hard pressed to give up.

It is only when friends are lost--like brakeman Alan Riess and conductor Everett Crown, found crushed amid the steel ruins of their derailed train May 12--that Lee starts to wonder.

“I was watching CNN in Roseville when the first reports came in,” Lee recalled. “We saw the paramedics trying to get one of the guys out of that cab, and I’ll tell you it was an awful feeling. It brought it all back.”