BILLINGS, Mont. — When Matt Schalk isn’t home, his answering machine picks up with the wail of a steam locomotive and clanging bells. Why not? His telephone is shaped like a train, the Associated Press reported.
Schalk, 73, is a retired Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway engineer. And like most of his fellow retirees, the love of the rails still runs through his veins. “You gotta love it,” Schalk says. “I’m a real fanatic on steam power. You gotta love the locomotives, the trains, the passenger trains. It’s just the whole concept of it. It’s the whole idea.” Another Anacondan, John McNay, started working for the BA&P Railway fresh out of high school, more than 50 years ago. Even with passing time, he said the bonds among railroaders stay strong and so does their passion for their vocation.
“There’s something about railroad people,” McNay says. “It’s the romance. It becomes a part of your life, and you enjoy every part of it. And that’s standard everywhere in the United States.”
The last of the BA&P old-timers – 15 of 30 or so living in the area – still get together once a month for lunch at Butte or Anaconda eateries. They’re gray-haired now, some wearing hearing aids, some moving gingerly, favoring bad backs or knees or hips. But when they gather as a group, the men are back in their element, and the years melt away. At a local restaurant on a recent Tuesday, Don Loranger straggled in a little late.
“You run on BA&P time,” a pal in the group ribs. Loranger grins. “Did you ever see a switchman that was on time?” someone else jokes. Before long, it’s 1960 again, and they’re all speaking railroad at once. “What kind of tender did 33 have?” Schalk asks Steve Lane, another engineer. “The 33 was the U.P. 566,” Lane answers.
“It was a 33 that had a round tender. Thirty-one didn’t last long, did it?”
Inside frogs, outside frogs, speeders, drivers, rip track, sand house, spiking the rail: “We all talk the same language,” Schalk said. “We could hold a conversation, and no one else would know what we were talking about. It’s just like a couple of ironworkers talking.” And because they often worked farther apart than words would reach, the men relied on hand signals they flashed back and forth, umpire-style.
“If someone gave you a sign like this, it meant the main line,” Lane says, cupping a hand behind his ear. “We had all kinds of them.”
For many years, the BA&P helped form the backbone of the local economy, employing around 500 workers at the peak of its operation. From the gandy dancers – men who labored maintaining sections of track – to the company clerks and administrators, the group was close knit, according to McNay.
“We were close because our jobs were all so dependent on each other,” he said. “It just follows that we were friends for a lifetime.” And not just the menfolk.
Their families were close, too, and big gatherings were common. The turnover rate for employees at the BA&P was practically nonexistent, as generation spawned generation of railroad workers. Father and son teams included Pete and Don Layton, Bert and Al Sinz, Bill and Don Earhart. Trainmaster Paul Everett Jr.’s great uncle, Paul C. Everett, went to work for the BA&P in the 1890s.
His father, Paul J. Everett, started in 1917, and retired in 1963. There were the Shannons, the Murphys, the Kanthacks, Greenoughs and Lorellos. There were so many Jones that they all had nicknames – Farmer, Society, Silent Tom, Windy and Nosey Jones. The late Mario Ungaretti was best known as an expert mechanic and machinist, but his nickname, The Instigator, came from his reputation as a practical joker.
Often, newcomers were the targets of his good-natured pranks, according to co-worker Floyd Collins of Butte, retired BA&P head machinist who started his railroad career at 16.
“Mario used to send the young kids up to the store room for a can of compression, or a left-handed monkey wrench,” Collins says with a laugh.
After the Anaconda Co. shuttered it smelter here in 1980, the BA&P was leased, then sold and renamed Rarus Railway. Today, instead of tons of copper ore, Rarus hauls slag and tailings in the Butte-Anaconda area. Instead of hundreds of men, the company manages with a work force of 12, says co-owner Bill McCarthy. The cars pull mining waste from remediation sites along Silver Bow Creek to repositories at the Opportunity Ponds. In its glory days, the rail ran some 1,000 cars filed with copper ore from Butte mines to the Anaconda smelter each day, then ran the empties back again. Lime rock and silica used in the smelting process came from west of town on the Quarry Line. Two thousand carloads to rustle in all, McNay says. Schalk says he has passed his passion for trains down to his sons.
“Some of the old stuff rubbed off from the old man,” he said. “We went train chasing about three weeks ago. We spent all day, and we got some dandy pictures.”