Trains are so much a part of a railroad town they tend to blend in with the background. But author Scott Thybony became curious about those who drive them. He sat down with one of the first female railroad engineers in the U.S. and listened to her stories of the home road. Thybony recounts their conversation in this month’s Canyon Commentary.
We were sitting by the restaurant window at La Posada in Winslow, Arizona. Sue Kislingbury, a retired railroad engineer, told me it used to be the dispatch office for the Santa Fe Railway. She wore a fleece vest and her gray hair cut close. In 1969 Sue began her career in the relay office around the corner.
“I hired out,” she said, “as a printer clerk and train order operator. I was going to be nineteen that July. The first place they sent me was San Francisco. Country girl became a city woman in about twelve hours,” she added with a laugh. “It was a huge city, and the end of the Hippie movement was happening, Haight Ashbury.”
Sue became one of the first female engineers, but refused to take credit for opening the job for women. “The women they hired in World War II,” she said, “broke it open.”
Initially I contacted her to learn about Frederick Kislingbury, her great, great grandfather. The Arctic explorer had died of starvation on a polar expedition. But now I wanted to know about her railroading days.
“How much skill is involved in running a train?” I asked.
“You have to control the slack,” she answered, “because it’s ever present. That’s what makes a good engineer. If you don’t control it you get a knuckle, one part moving faster than the other. If you’re not paying attention . . .” She broke off and recalled one trip in particular.
The dispatcher gave her an all clear ahead as she was leaving the station. With every signal showing green, she was not expecting any delays. “So I have this clear track,” she said, “and there’s a 30 mile an hour curve coming up. I’m up to maybe 27 because I want to run up the hill, and I come around the curve and – boom – there’s a yellow block. And right beyond that is a red block. Once you commit yourself, you’re done. You just got to ride it out. So I come off the throttle. And I went, ‘Oh my God, hold on!’ I could feel it in the seat of my pants. I said, ‘Hold on, here it comes!’
“I could feel the slack coming in from the rear end. And I tell my conductor, ‘Here it comes, hold on!’ I couldn’t believe it.” She described the back and forth motion of the train as being similar to a marble rolling in a bowl. “It did it about seven times, and we just settled right down to a stop. I said, ‘Man, when we get in we’re going to Vegas ‘cause we are the luckiest people that ever took a breath on the railroad.” Sue paused. “Yeah, I learned more in that five minutes than I learned in twelve years.”
As we talked, a long train rumbled by on the tracks outside the hotel. “I was really one of the fortunate ones,” she continued. “I took ‘em to the edge on everything. I never hit a car, I came very, very close. I came close at times with people, and that’s horrifying. I tell you, I put together words God never meant to be put together.”
The two of us walked outside where I learned about her family’s strong connection with the railroad for generations. “I’ll tell you this,” she added. “It has to be in your blood to stick it out. It’s a tough job, that 2:00 am call to go to work at 3:30. The people who are raised as rails, we understand the life. I did a lot of traveling, but it’s a hard life.” In her railroading career she worked throughout the West, but still had a special regard for the stretch of track running between Los Angeles and Chicago. “That,” she said, “is the Home Road.”
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio.