Coal-fired smoke swirls in plumes. The air smells of heat and engine grease. Nearby, a metal behemoth heaves and clangs while 11 men, mostly middle-aged and clad in overalls and steel-toed boots, stand ready for a day of class. The men have come to the tiny rail village of Chama, New Mexico.
New Jersey sheep farmer Tom Chenal gazes at a waiting locomotive. “It’s a strange beast,” he says. It almost seems alive to him, “like it’s got a heartbeat or something.”
Chenal and the others signed up for a rare and remote school near the Colorado-New Mexico border. Over four days at the Cumbres & Toltec engineer and fireman school, instructors will prepare these men to operate a steam locomotive. Before arrival, the students read hundreds of pages of manuals as homework. On day two, they’ll get the opportunity to operate the multi-ton Engine 487 on actual tracks.
The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad dates back to 1880. It was built to help tap the resources of the southern Rockies. Designated as a National Historic Landmark, it’s the highest and longest steam-operated railroad in the country. In addition to the school trains, tourist trains also lumber daily between Chama and Antonito, Colorado, during the summer and fall seasons.
Ed Beaudette manages the railroad’s engineering and operations. He says the “whole operation here is very much a time capsule…. look around and then you are back in 1925.”
Hands-On Work in High Tech Times
It may seem odd in this age of high-tech advancements to think about pursuing a job with a railroad. But for many, the appeal of the train age has never waned. Most of the students in this group operated model trains in their childhoods.
Rather than look at computer readings to gauge speed, power, and navigation, an engineer feels the rails beneath the machine and sticks his head out the window to see the upcoming track and grade.
When the men aren’t in the locomotive, they ride in one of the cars and compare notes. Even Lockheed Martin software engineer Ed Lichtenfels of Littleton, Colorado, appreciates the durability and simplicity of the steam engine. Lichtenfels helped develop software for the MAVEN Mars probe. But here on the railroad, there are no crashing hard drives or out of date computers to worry about. It’s all a matter of hands-on work combined with gaining real-time experience. He finds the total engagement with the job satisfying.
Multi-Sensory Appeal
Operating what one of the men calls “a hulking beast” is both very physical and a delicate balancing act: the right mix of water, steam pressure, and heat.
“This is loaded with subtlety, the sensitively of the throttle, the sensitivity of the brakes. They’re exquisitely sensitive,” Chenal says.
John Grigsby, a saw mill operator from Arkansas, listens to the train. “You don’t have to have a speedometer because there isn’t one . . . the railroad kind of tells you what to do.”
While one adjusts the throttle, another is doing the backbreaking work of shoveling coal into the furnace. A third adjusts the knobs and wheels that let steam into the pressurized engine at just the right rates. Though much of the passing landscape is serene, with alpine meadows, canyons, and aspen groves, instructors say the thrill for new students is nothing short of a mild sort of terror—even when they aren’t passing along the edge of the 800-foot Toltec Gorge. There’s just so much power and potential speed in the hands of novices.
“As soon as they actually get something moving, the terror tends to go away. . . . They come off all smiles,” says seasoned conductor Chris Aira. Then comes the adrenaline rush.
Past Knowledge for Future Achievement
It may seem like a step backward, but retired aerospace engineer Chris Weiser is here learning what the mechanics are that make a locomotive move. That’s because he’s switching from designing and building light-weight aircraft to building a heavy steam locomotive in Ridgway, Colorado. The depot there was once part of the Rio Grande Southern railway which ran from Durango to Ridgway.
Why the change for Weiser?
“We want to put it back,” he says matter-of-factly.
Tom Chenal agrees that the knowledge from the past is valuable today. “I was curious how our predecessors did it, and the more that I learned, the more I am in awe of what they accomplished.”
Let the wise hear and increase in learning. — Proverbs 1:5
