(The following story by Rachelle Treiber appeared on the Quad City Times website on November 7. Dan Quick is a member of BLET Division 200 in Davenport, Iowa.)
DAVENPORT, Iowa — On instinct, the Iowa, Chicago & Eastern Railroad locomotive engineer — Dan Sharp of Rock Island — quickly pulls the window nearest his head tightly shut.
“It’s bulletproof glass,” Sharp explains nonchalantly. “Some people get very unhappy when we block the tracks, although most of them stick to what I call ‘digital communication.’ ”
The 52-year-old Sharp says he would not trade his job for any other — except maybe to be a transcontinental engineer.
“That would be great, because I would still get to do this, but I could see the world,” he said.
As a kid, growing up in Portsmouth, Ohio, tucked into the Ohio River Valley, he was infatuated with trains.
“I remember the neighbor lady taking us to see the passenger trains come through town,” Sharp said.
At the time, his grandfather worked as a railway postal clerk, picking up mail as his train passed through each town.
But it was not until he finished high school and was offered $4.30 an hour for train yard labor that he considered a railroading career and started on the road to becoming a locomotive engineer.
That was 1973.
“I was a typical kid with no direction in high school, and I couldn’t turn the offer down — that was great money at the time,” he said. “I bought a new car with that and gas was 29 cents a gallon.”
For the next 23 years, Sharp worked “on the ground,” training for what he does today.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, locomotive engineers are among the most experienced and skilled workers on the railroad.
Most of them, like Sharp, began as yard laborers.
“It has been almost all on-the-job training,” he said. “And when I started, we had five people on the crew, and now it’s down to two.”
The trains used to have cabooses, Sharp adds, but “now we have telemetry equipment that gives us so much information.”
The second crew member on the train is called a conductor or assistant engineer.
The engineer and conductor — who on this run is Sani Turcinhodzic, a Bosnian refugee who now lives in Davenport — are responsible for most every aspect of a train’s run.
On this day there is another person helping out as part of his switch training, which includes overseeing switching operations and working track switches and derails to change routing of the train or cars.
Doan Gunderson of Davenport seems like he already knows what to do as a switchperson, but in the interest of safety, the training is ongoing.
“This is a fun job, and I learn a lot from working with these two,” Gunderson said of his engineer and conductor.
The crew works five to seven days a week, typically 12-hour shifts.
Although Sharp works on as many as five different trains each week, they are always the same five and always are “local trains,” meaning they travel about 60 to 70 miles and then return to where they began.
“We haul scrap steel up to Ipsco Steel (near Montpelier, Iowa) and bring out the finished plates,” he said. “We board here at Nahant Marsh, and we have one overnight trip to Savanna (Ill.)”
Getting to the company’s mini mill plant is complicated in its own way.
“Between here and Montpelier, there are probably 30 crossings to get through,” Sharp said. “And there is a hill before you get to Ipsco that is a 2.25 percent grade, which you wouldn’t even notice on the highway, but it is huge for the railroad.”
The trains are very heavy as well, so the crew puts sand under the wheels for traction to get moving.
“And if we are going to Ipsco, most of the time we have to cut the train down into one or two pieces to make the hill,” he said.
The hours before each run are spent “building the train.” The engineer drives the train back and forth as cars are added.
“Last week, the train was 9,800 feet long, which is one of the longest I’ve pulled,” Sharp said. “It’s usually 7,000-foot-long and 7,000 to 8,000 tons.”
The process of adding cars can take about two hours, and then it’s just 10 minutes to get to Ipsco, load the train and come back to the railroad yard.
Talking back and forth via two-way radios, he and his conductor know good communication is the most important aspect of their jobs.
“I repeat everything the conductor says to me. It’s redundancy for safety, because if you ever get in trouble on the railroad, it’s a breakdown in communication,” he says.
In his career as a locomotive engineer, he has hit about 15 vehicles that blocked the train’s path for whatever reason.
“Honestly, I have no idea why it happens so often,” he said. “Our speed limit is 40 mph, and if I’m going at that rate of speed, it takes me between a mile and a mile and a half to stop my train. And let me tell you, we can’t swerve.”
Wearing a Quad-City Thunder concession’s T-shirt and khaki pants and carrying a cooler covered with Ron Jon Surf Shop stickers, Sharp isn’t what you might imagine a locomotive engineer to look like.
There is no hat or striped overalls — just a man with a lifetime of knowledge about trains.
“Trains built this country. And being a locomotive engineer has been a good career — with a high school education you can make $50,000 to $60,000 or more a year,” he said. “There are some beautiful runs, too. It’s a good job that is boring most of the time, but real exciting for at least a few minutes every day.”