(The following article by Maria Elena Baca was posted on the Minneapolis Star Tribune website on September 14.)
MINNEAPOLIS — Dick Kolter swivels in his engineer’s chair to peer through a narrow window as river bluffs and woods rush past the roaring diesel locomotive. A couple of hikers are loitering on the tracks just past the trestle bridge ahead. He leans on the whistle and a loud, throaty note fills the engine.
With his three-sided safety glasses, a striped cap atop his grizzled hair and neat navy blue work clothes, Kolter, 62, of Winona, Minn., looks the part. But Kolter is not a railroad man. He’s a retired junior high math teacher.
Kolter is superintendent and jack-of-all-trades at the Osceola & St. Croix Valley Railway, a branch of the Minnesota Transportation Museum. As the leaves turn to scarlet and gold along the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, the living-history museum enters its liveliest season, trundling tourists from the recently renovated historic depot in Osceola, Wis., to Marine on St. Croix and Dresser, Wis., and back — 10 or 20 miles, round trip, via steam or diesel power.
The museum’s two steam locomotives are currently being overhauled; on this day, Kolter was at the controls of the Burlington Northern SD9 6234. Built in 1959 and donated by Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co. in 2003, the engine has a 16- cylinder, 1,750 horsepower engine. It began service on the Osceola & St. Croix Valley Railway in 2005, and runs as the museum’s secondary engine, along with the 1951 Soo GP7 559.
In his many roles, Kolter runs the engine, punches tickets as conductor, oversees tracks and switches as brakeman, and manages the organization’s nearly 50 railroad cars and locomotives and 100 volunteers.
He also occasionally reprises his teaching role. On a recent Sunday, on an excursion to Marine on St. Croix, he was training Greg Kryzer, a student brakeman who works during the week as an attorney in White Bear Lake. In a clear voice developed over 23 years of explaining algebra to preteens, Kolter guides a visitor through a busy morning routine that involves a blur of gauges, levers, tanks and cylinders (there are 16 of them on this engine).
Engineers always waved back
And there are stories about how Kolter grew up about a half-mile from the Milwaukee Road tracks in Winona. As a boy, he’d memorized the schedule cards. Sometimes with a buddy, sometimes alone, he rode his bike to the tracks to watch the passenger trains hustling down the line between Chicago and the Twin Cities. He always waved at the engineers. They always waved back.
When Kolter came of age in the 1960s, trains were on the decline. He already had decided he didn’t want the constant traveling and long hours of a railroad job, so he attended Winona State Teachers College in his hometown and taught at Winona Junior High School.
He became involved in the Minnesota Transportation Museum’s train division in Osceola and at the Jackson Street Roundhouse in St. Paul after the museum lent a train for Winona’s Victorian Fair in 1990. It took about five years for him to train through the ranks: student brakeman, brakeman, student conductor, conductor, student engineer and finally engineer.
Single, with no kids, Kolter has the freedom to follow his interests. So when he retired in 1997, he decided to go into management at the museum as an assistant superintendent. Now, as superintendent, he makes the drive to St. Paul or Osceola a couple times a week; his administrative duties — done by phone or e-mail — are a part of each day.
His favorite duty is as conductor.
“The conductor deals with the passengers, the customers,” he said. “It’s tremendously important that you socialize with them, if you will, so that they’re having a grand time, too. … When I’m in the engine, it’s a lot of fun to run that big equipment and to feel that power, but you’re kind of trapped there.”
As Kolter guides the train back to Osceola, coach attendant Dan Fortin leans across a table in a passenger car to answer questions from a couple of elementary-age boys. He nods attentively as the two debate about a favorite cartoon. Younger siblings race up and down the aisle, between the baggage-car canteen on one end and the mail car on the other.
In the next car, an older couple contemplated the vista across the St. Croix River Valley as the train pulled across the bridge.
Finally, the woman spoke: “Now that’s a view, huh?”