At the controls of '16,000 horses'

Locomotive engineer loves running trains

K.C. Warner, an engineer with BNSF Railway, wasn't named after Casey Jones - but she should have been.

"I love running the train," she said. "You've got 16,000 horses in one hand. The power is staggering."

From her locomotive "office," she takes in magnificent vistas, all manner of wildlife including wolves, moose, grizzly bears and the odd "flasher" floating down the river on a raft. Like a lot of people, the women on the rafts assume a man wears the engineer's mantle.

Things have changed enormously since Warner, 53, joined the first vanguard of women allowed into the hostile territory of male jobs. At the time, she wasn't trying to break new ground for women - she just wanted a decent-paying job.

According to Warner, her sister, a lawyer, carried the torch for the women's movement in her family.

"She was the bra-burner," Warner said. "It's a little different down in the trenches."

That's just about where she started when the railroad first began hiring women in the 1970s. After applying months earlier, Warner finally got called for the steel gang, known as gandy dancers, in June 1977.

She was used to hard work from growing up on a farm. Warner had also worked at a lumber mill, but driving steel was a new dimension.

"Your hands would go numb all the time," she said.

Getting hired by the railroad, she learned, wasn't a one-way ticket to Easy Street. She got laid off the first winter.

The second winter, Warner went to work on the summit of Marias Pass cleaning snow off switches and other work needed to maintain the rails.

"It never got above 30 below for six weeks straight," she said. "It was five guys from Browning and me."

Warner said that she learned persistence from her parents.

"My dad was so hard working," she said. "Up until five years ago, my mom was on the farm."

From her mother and father, she learned to "get back up on that horse, work real hard and people will forgive your mistakes."

She admits that she has made her share. But she picked herself back up and got back on the train and tried harder than ever.

Warner now lives on a 40-acre piece of her family's working ranch in the area behind the Blue Moon. Her brother Jim and his family now run the ranch while also working other jobs.

"I'm just a barnacle on the ship," she said with a laugh.

She enjoys showing people through the new log home that she had built on her property. Her new place dwarfs the little cabin where she lived for many years.

Her home represents the fruits of her career with the railroad. Warner said people need to understand that railroaders endure layoffs, hard work in bad weather, crazy hours and family sacrifices to earn their comfortable incomes.

"The kids of single parents really make the sacrifice," she said.

As a single mother of one daughter, Rusti, Warner found herself torn over staying with the railroad with her many days out of town and the many years of layoffs.

"In 1979, I finally hired on as a brakeman in Whitefish," she said. "I worked two months and was laid off all winter. I never worked again for five years."

She said she considered quitting but heeded her dad's advice to hold on through the tough years. A job with the railroad was like gold in the Flathead.

While laid off, she worked for Stoltze Lumber three different times. Finally, in 1984, she got back on with Burlington Northern in Whitefish.

Four years later, she was forced to move to Havre, where she worked as a brakeman/conductor for the next eight years before returning to the Flathead in 1997.

"I loved the people over there and the wide-open spaces," she said. "But this is home."

By hanging in long enough, Warner qualified in seniority for engineer training in Havre in 1994. Her timing was impeccable because technology replaced rear brakemen and cabooses around that time with FRED, an acronym for fixed rear end device.

Engineer training was tough. She said it's a lot harder than it looks when people see the train gliding by on level ground.

"It's the slack that's complicated," Warner said. "A 6,000-foot train can have a couple of hundred feet of slack."

Between Shelby and Havre, the undulating track creates a roller coaster effect. She said coming over hills was the worst part.

"You have to control the slack to keep from damaging the freight," she said. "The revenue on a train is pretty staggering."

Along with freight like tons of grain, the engineer also has control over the fate of several multimillion-dollar engines.

She said it's difficult to describe the technical process of running a modern train. Warner sits in the locomotive surrounded by the latest in technical equipment such as the FRED, which reports to her the status of the brake air and the motion of the last car.

She watches her speed recorder at all times. At the same time, Warner monitors an automatic alert system that she must contact every minute or she gets first a warning light, then an alarm.

"It's a piercing alarm," she said.

If no one acts to stop the alarm, the system stops the train. The fail-safe system kicks in if the engineer and conductor become incapacitated.

No matter what time of night or how remote the location, Warner also must blow the train whistle for 15 seconds before each intersection. She gets a lot of static from the public about the ear-splitting modern warning.

"The whole point is we want to save lives," she said

Warner wants people to know that engineers have no discretion about blowing the whistle. Rules require that they blow the whistle at midnight in the middle of a prairie even if they have never seen a car at that location.

She describes herself as lucky so far when it comes to train wrecks with no major incidents. Warner has had a finger smashed now and again and once got her hand crunched in a switch.

Otherwise, she describes herself as healthy as a horse, a condition she hopes to maintain for a few more years.

"I just want to retire," she said with a smile. "I've got six and a half years to go."

At the time of the interview, she had just started under a new union contract. Warner opted for a regular job after years of working "the extra board" with no set schedule.

She said that freight traffic had slowed in the past year but she expected to keep busy.

"We're going into the peak season with UPS," she said.

According to Warner, American's railroads serve as "a land bridge" ferrying sea containers between the West Coast and the East Coast because it costs less than a sea route. Railroads only compete with each other for this business.

"Railroads are so much more cost-efficient than trucks," she said.

Even with a regular job, Warner still faces days away from home. It's easier now with her daughter grown with a successful career of her own as an artist.

Over the years when she left her daughter with relatives, she got a lot of flak that men never heard.

"No one thinks anything about it when a guy leaves kids with grandma and grandpa," she said.

She also faced a lot of general harassment when women first began hiring on to railroad crews.

Her daughter said the men were ruthless to her mother. Warner agreed, but holds no resentment.

She said the older guys were tough and determined to fight the female invasion. But she was just as determined to work hard and earn their grudging respect.

"You had to be tough to the core," she said. "You had to be physically and mentally tough. They put you through the ringer."

According to Warner, men and women have an easier time on the railroad today. They don't start on the steel gang because a contractor does that work.

"The biggest difference is getting on and off moving equipment," she said. "You stop and people get on and people get off. Injuries are probably a third of what they were."

It's still crazy hours and difficult on a person's social life. She looks forward to a cosmic shift when she retires to enjoy her home, gardening and a celebration trip with Rusti and Rusti's husband.

Warner said she would miss running her 16,000 horses under the Big Sky.

"It's afforded me a good living over the last few years," she said. "But I'm sure not going to miss getting up in the middle of the night."

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com