(The following story by Kim Briggeman appeared on The Missoulian website on October 14.)
MISSOULA, Mont. — Funny thing about trains.
They’re too huge, too powerful, too romantic, too graceful and all too familiar to be of much interest these days.
Take the coal train puffing west from Big Timber the other day.
Who cared that it was 125 cars long, and that at any one moment it occupied more than a mile and a quarter of track?
That three giant locomotives pulled the train, but they weren’t going to be nearly enough after it cleared the yard in Livingston and approached Bozeman Hill?
That the two engineers in charge had to be off duty and on their way home by 7 p.m.?
Don Smith cared.
His domain is the nearly 1,000 miles of track controlled by Montana Rail Link. In the company’s 20 years of existence, Smith has been a clerk in the Missoula yard, a dispatcher at headquarters off North Reserve Street and, since 1992, director of train movement.
“If it’s happening within 4 feet of the rail, it’s being funneled through this office,” Smith said.
The process has changed substantially in 20 years. Gone are the handwritten train orders and hand-pulled yard switches.
These days, siding switches are remote controlled from the Missoula office, sometimes 350 miles or more away.
These days, there are 17 laptops dispersed throughout an MRL system that stretches from Huntley, 17 miles east of Billings, to Sandpoint, Idaho, and includes some 330 miles of branch lines. Repair and maintenance workers in the field can see what’s happening at any given time on the line, just as Smith’s staff of 18 can.
“Technology has just been unreal for the railroad business,” said Smith. “Everything’s computer-driven and computer-operated.”
He sat in front of a computer console, in the subdued recesses of the MRL dispatch office, tracking our coal train, which hauled a monstrous payload of 17,777 tons to somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
Smith layered in some of the nuances of the dispatcher’s task.
On the monitor were four mostly white horizontal lines, representing the Helena-to-Missoula subdivision.
A slice of one line turned blue at 10:17 a.m. and would remain that way until 1:30 p.m. Those were the “protected” hours, when a rail inspector could do his thing between West Bonner and West Nimrod east of Missoula without fear of, say, a 17,000-ton coal train bearing down on him.
A red section on the computer reflected steel work under way at the Mullan Pass tunnel west of Helena. Trains had been idling since morning — four eastbounds in the Missoula yards, three heading west from Helena — to give maintenance workers an eight-hour window of unmolested rail time.
Once 2 p.m. hit, the orchestration would begin.
“We’ll run two fairly close together out of Missoula, and two fairly close together out of Helena,” he said. “Then we’ll hold the other two at Missoula 45 minutes to an hour.”
The third train in Helena would have to wait for “helpers” to get back off the mountain.
“So there’s a natural space in there,” Smith said.
Mullan Pass is a 1.4-percent grade on the west side, he explained, so the SD70 diesel-electric locomotives MRL brought new to the line two years ago can usually make it up the hill without a boost.
It’s different from the other side. There, trains face a 2.2-percent grade.
“At Helena, we either add helpers to the rear of the train or cut helpers into the train two-thirds of the way back,” he said.
A few basic principles govern the art and science of train control, and have from the earliest days of railroads.
Trains travel in both directions, largely on the same track.
Someone pays good money to travel or, in MRL’s case, ship freight from Point A to Point B.
Collisions are bad. Delays are not good.
And finally, tons of train in motion are capable of wreaking havoc on tracks and themselves. Repair and maintenance are daily facts of life.
What did they do before computers?
Listen to what an early-day manager of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company in New York City said: “When we once launch a Canal Street car from the barns, its future career rests with God. If it turns up in the course of the next two days, we consider ourselves lucky.”
Then came the first train order via telegraph, by an impatient railroad superintendent in New York in 1851, and later telephones and two-way radios.
Smith said a refined version of the telegraph was still being used when he followed his father and two brothers into the railroad business at the Milwaukee Railroad yard in Deer Lodge nearly three decades ago.
The Montana Rail Link era dawned bleak, long before the sun came up.
There were 15 to 18 trains running just after midnight on Oct. 31, 1987, when the line changed hands from Burlington Northern to the infant (and lower-paying) Montana Rail Link, one of a number of companies owned by Missoula industrialist Dennis Washington.
Pickets went up across the state as union demonstrators rallied against the BN spinoff. At 3 a.m., three engines in the Livingston rail yard were sent hurtling by vandals. They wrecked on Bozeman Hill at nearly 100 mph, costing BN some $3 million and launching an FBI investigation.
Helper engines in Helena were sabotaged.
Windows were broken at the yard office in Missoula, and by mid-day someone had released the brakes on six cars in Missoula. The rolling convoy was spotted and stopped.
Former Burlington Northern employees were slow to show up for work in face of protesters, who claimed the new line was a union-busting “puppet railroad” to BN.
“It’s been some kind of weekend, but everything is running properly now,” then-MRL president William Brodsky said the following Monday.
The storms weren’t over. Derailments and communications snafus plagued the early years, most notably the cold winter day in 1989 when an unmanned MRL train rolled into Helena, collided with a work train near Carroll College, exploded and knocked out power to much of the city.
Other well-publicized disasters dotted the ensuing decades, including a devastating chlorine spill near Alberton in 1996 and a runaway train in 1997 that flew backward down the Clark Fork Valley from Garrison before a forced derailment east of Rock Creek near Bonita.
Still, MRL’s legitimacy as an independent business was proved early on. Ron Dean, international vice president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, said as much in 1992.
“Prior to startup and after startup — for months and months — the criticism was just heaped on Montana Rail Link. Political pressure was used. Any opportunity to criticize them in the media was used. The critics have absolutely been proven wrong,” said Dean.
Safety remains a hot-button issue. The public often hears about MRL only at times of accidents or incidents.
Company president Tom Walsh points to encouraging trends: Worker injuries are down 36 percent in 2007, and there were just four “reportable accidents” — damages totaling $8,200 or more — in the first nine months of the year.
That compared to 21 over the same period last year, and MRL is positioned to break its previous 12-month mark of 11 reportable accidents.
In its rocky first weeks 20 years ago, Rail Link employed between 600 and 700 people statewide. Twenty years later, a remarkable 274 of them are still with the company.
“That’s an amazing statistic,” said Walsh, one of the 274.
Walsh was hired in the accounting office at MRL two weeks before the first trains rolled. He’s in his fourth year as the company’s third president, succeeding Brodsky (1987-98) and Dan Watts (1998-2003).
“We’ve been blessed with some tremendously loyal employees who have really made this a huge success over the last 20 years,” said Walsh. “Our people for the most part are really kind of passionate about the business that they’re in. The railroad business has got that kind of nostalgic part of it. People really do enjoy working for the railroad.”
Count Smith as one of those people. His work day is hectic, and like many railroaders, he’s always on call.
“To me, I like that,” he said. “It don’t bother me to do that. Different things for different people.”
Though it’s a computer-driven world, the human element remains — for better or worse.
“It’s kind of funny,” Smith said. “Over the years, we’ve all gotten to be pretty good friends, so we can joke with each other. Years ago, we fought and battled it out to get our (way). Now that we’ve gotten to know each other, we do it differently.”
But that doesn’t exclude needling the people he works with up and down the line.
“I always tell them this time of year I’m hoping and praying for winter because I’m so sick of you guys I can’t stand you any longer,” Smith said. “But come about April or May, I’m hoping and praying that they’ll start track work again, because I’m sick and tired of the wintertime beating us up.”