(The following story by Jonathan Casiano appeared on the Star-Ledger website on August 30.)
NEWARK, N.J. — Peering over a schedule book propped against the control room window, Andrea Vibbert leaned for ward to make the announcement she’d made a thousand times be fore, politely telling a swarm of anxious travelers in Newark Penn Station they had 10 minutes to reach the platform.
“Amtrak train number 2167 to Washington at 5:14 next on track 3. Amtrak train to Washington next on track 3,” she announced, leaning back as her voice echoed across the tracks.
Clicking off the microphone for the last time, the Rahway native stepped out of the cramped booth and onto the bustling platform. After nearly four decades of writing schedules, ushering passengers and announcing trains, Vibbert was now just another passenger in the rush-hour crush, listening to the loudspeaker as she awaited the train that would carry her into retirement.
“Well, this is it,” said Vibbert, 60, tearfully clutching a bouquet of flowers as the Boston-bound train pulled into the station. “It took 38 years to get to this point.”
Vibbert’s retirement marks the end of a railroading era, a time be fore automation when railroad workers knew the trains by nick names and the sounds their engines made pulling into the station. One longtime colleague said he was hoping to bottle her rail knowledge and pass it out to new employees. Another called her a “living legend” as she ran down the platform to give Vibbert a farewell hug.
“She knows everything about these trains up and down,” said Amtrak’s Newark station manager, Richard Martinez. “She knows everything because she’s done everything.”
A third-generation railroader, Vibbert’s retirement also ends her family’s near-century of service on the rails.
Her grandfather, Stephen Bre zina, a Czech immigrant in New York, found work laying tracks along the Hudson River. Her father, Andrew Kriss, shoveled coal as a “fireman” on the old Pennsylvania Railroad steam engines.
As a young girl, Vibbert would often spend afternoons watching the trains pass through Rahway station.
She began a love affair with one particular locomotive in 1964 when a nasty storm forced the Beatles to take a train from New York to Washington, D.C. It was the Fab Four’s first tour through the U.S. and Vibbert — armed with “inside information” from her father — raced to the Rahway platform to watch her teen idols whiz by.
Several months later, Vibbert was on her way to see the Beatles perform in Queens when she no ticed that the same No. 4913 loco motive was at the head of her train. Vibbert tracked the locomotive until its retirement, and in 1980 purchased it from Amtrak for $5,000.
The 235-ton engine now sits in a rail museum in Altoona, Pa., where Vibbert and her husband are fre quent visitors.
Despite Vibbert’s obvious affection for trains, her father initially thought she was crazy to crave a career on the rails.
And he wasn’t the only one who tried to derail her dream.
One of the first railroads she applied to after graduating high school wrote back informing her that “railroading is not a woman’s job.”
She eventually found work with Central Railroad of New Jersey, but was limited to clerical and administrative jobs because women weren’t allowed to be conductors or engineers. During her career, Vibbert did every administrative job there was, from drawing up schedules to announcing trains from a booth high over New York Penn Station’s chaotic floor.
In the face of discrimination, her response was always the same: “Why don’t you let me work the job and find out if I can do it?”
She remembers when the train announcer’s job involved manually changing the heavy metal signs that indicated which train would be pulling in to which track. Her male colleagues insisted the work was too strenuous for her, until they saw the petite-framed Vibbert hoisting the signs onto their hooks.
While some rail men may have been turned off by her brashness, it caught the eye of a young operations officer named Robert who shared the 4-to-midnight shift with Vibbert at Penn Station in New York.
The pair married in 1972 and still have the retired locomotive bell given to them as a wedding present.
They remember the early years well — the cross-country train trips through the Rocky Mountains and Arizona desert; the unpredictable schedules that often kept them apart for days.
“I’d be working the 11-to-7 shift, she’d be working the 7-to-3. We’d just be communicating by notes on the kitchen table,” Robert Vibbert said. “I guess if that’s the test of marriage, we survived the test.”
Thirty-five years later, the Vib berts now have all the time together they want. Robert Vibbert retired two weeks ago from Conrail after spending the past three years as a tower operator on the Jersey City side of Newark Bay.
They sold their house in Rah way and moved into a home in Robert Vibbert’s native New Hampshire, a “handyman special” with a basement big enough for his elaborate model train sets.
And with less time working the trains, the Vibberts expect to spend more time riding them, and hope to take another cross-country journey sometime soon.
“I find it relaxing,” she said wistfully. “You get on a train, sit back and there’s the whole world right outside your window.”