(The following story by Brent Hunsberger appeared on the Oregon Live website on June 4. Portland & Western engineers Matt Adams and Skip Stein are members of BLET Division 416 in Portland, Ore.)
PORTLAND, Ore. — Three years out of high school, Matt Adams found his career riding high above a bed of gravel and a pair of rails.
Adams, 24, is a conductor and engineer with Portland & Western Railroad, shuttling freight trains from Albany to Portland. He recently got a permanent post after logging more than a year as an extra.
“I eat, sleep and breathe it sometimes,” Adams says of the job.
He takes the railroad with him even on vacations. On a recent weeklong break, he spent 12 days in Montana with a friend, photographing trains.
Adams says he was drawn to the railroad as a kid, watching freight and commuter trains with his dad, a train buff.
He figures his job is a decent way to make good money without a college degree. But it has downsides: Getting assigned to nights — sleeping in sunlight doesn’t suit him — and the long days. His shifts last 12 hours, and he sometimes works six days in a row for the overtime.
People and their cars can get in the way, too, and a train can’t stop on a dime. Last Wednesday, he and engineer Skip Stein at one point spotted the tiny silhouettes of two people standing on the tracks at the end of a tunnel, prompting Stein to pull back on the train’s throttle and sound the whistle.
Adams and Stein that morning had climbed aboard a locomotive in Portland’s Linnton neighborhood that was coupled to a 30-car train loaded with 3,300 tons of logs. Adams kept an eye out the engine’s left door as it chugged 10 miles per hour up a 3 percent grade, rumbled across wood trestles spanning verdant canyons and snaked through the 4,000-foot-long Cornelius Pass tunnel to Banks, then to Beaverton.
As conductor, Adams made sure the train didn’t have cargo, especially hazardous chemicals, it wasn’t supposed to. Occasionally, this means spending time on a cell phone ironing out paperwork mistakes from the office, as it did before his train left the Linnton area.
“This list is completely wrong,” he tells Stein after walking the length of a 2,000-foot train. “Some of these cars are here, some of them aren’t.”
By Thursday, his day off, it didn’t matter. Adams headed for the gorge. Not to windsurf, hike or fish. To photograph trains.