Becoming an Engineer

Since my last post, there have been a few changes.  First of all, Montana got its first snow fall.  Since then, it has gotten warm enough to partially melt the snow that fell, so the landscape is a speckled brown and white.  Besides the seasons changing, work has changed.

About a week ago, I returned to Montana (to the snowstorm), from Kansas City.  I passed all of my exams and simulator runs in Kansas City, and was only a check ride away from the Engineers' seat.  The day after everyone in class returned home, my Road Foreman of Engines called me up to let me know he was thinking about the check ride and to expect a call the next day to go in and take care of that.  He was going to look at the lineup and we would just jump on a train departing Glendive.  There were two of us, including myself, that had to get it done, so one of us would run westbound, until we got to a point where it would be convenient to jump on an eastbound train, and then the other one of us would run back to Glendive.

The other person I was going with is more senior than me, so he was allowed to choose who would go first. He volunteered, and so he ran an empty coal train westbound, to Blatchford, a siding about 50 miles west of Glendive.  There we caught an empty crude oil train coming east, which I ran back to Glendive.  We both passed out check rides, and our Road Foreman gave us temporary Locomotive Engineer cards, until the plastic ones arrive in the mail.

When I was in Kansas City, and in training before that, my plan was to mark to a Brakeman job when I got out of training, because I wanted a nice, low responsibility job.  Running a train is a lot more work than being a Conductor, though most of it is thinking and planning ahead, and is not physical work.  Being new, it is pretty tiring anyway though!  Despite wanting to work as a Brakeman, I put some bids in on Engineer jobs, mainly to try to avoid being forced to work in another terminal.  I am the least senior engineer in the division, and so if they need engineers in another terminal, I will be the first to be forced over there, if I am not working as an engineer somewhere else.  Basically, they can take qualified engineers if they need them somewhere, but they cannot take them if they are working as an engineer.  Much to my surprise, I was awarded a bid to the Glendive West Pool as an engineer, and have been working in that capacity since Monday morning.

I was a but nervous for my first trip.  I had made that trip lots of times as a Conductor, and about 15 as a student engineer, but getting on a train, knowing there would be no one sitting behind me to offer advice or tips, made me nervous.  As if that as not enough, I got to work to learn that my Conductor had never made a trip to Forsyth before either, at least not as a Conductor.  He had been there only once before, with a qualified Conductor, to get familiarized.  Originally, he hired out in Missouri, but we are so short on manpower than the railroad offered him a temporary position here, which he took.  Since he was furloughed in Missouri, he took it.  I was a bit more nervous about the fact that I would need to run a train and help the Conductor do his job!  Actually, I was more nervous about the trip back, because that would most likely be on a much heavier coal load!

As it turned out, my Conductor was very good.  Despite it being his first trip, he did well.  He needed to ask where we were several times, but that is to be expected.  He did just fine with the track warrants, meets, and other paperwork.  I really did not have to do much besides tell him where we were a few times and let him know when we were clear of our warrants.  For a first trip, he exceeded my expectations!  We had an empty coal train going west, and those are generally pretty easy to run.  They  have a ton of power and are fairly light, so they start and stop on a dime (for a train), so my first trip really was uneventful, which was exactly what I was hoping for.  As it turned out, we did get a coal load coming east, but that was equally uneventful.  As long as I stayed focused and planned things out several miles in advance, we were just fine.

Now that I have made a couple trips without someone sitting behind me to tell me what to do, it does not make me nervous to run trains by myself anymore.  It is still a tiring task, but I do enjoy it.  I certainly would not feel comfortable trying to teach anyone else to do it, and I still feel very new at it, but I feel better about running without another engineer now than I did a week ago.