Whistles while they work For the railmen who journey the historic Cascade and Columbia River route, their job is on the line every day By K.C. Mehaffey, World staff writerPosted May 19, 2007 The Cascade and Columbia River Railroad freight train heads south along the Okanogan River at its top speed of 25 mph. (World photo/Don Seabrook) OMAK -- It's still dark at 5 a.m. when Ryan Lovelady and Aaron Stanley pull into the four-car parking lot next to the Cascade and Columbia River Railroad's two-room office in Omak. It's a Thursday in mid-April, and Stanley arrives first. He unlocks the office, turns on the lights and heads outside again to Engine 1758, parked a few feet from the office door. Grabbing the metal railings, he hoists himself up a short ladder. Moments later, the north-facing locomotive roars to life, its four headlights cutting through the darkness. Audio slideshow: http://ret.wenworld.com/galleries/train_051907/index.html Every weekday, this train makes a 274-mile round trip from Omak to Oroville to Wenatchee and back to Omak. Generally, it hauls empty cars going north, but once in a while delivers raw materials at U.S. Castings in Entiat and propane to distributors in Brewster and Okanogan. The full cars -- loaded mostly with wood chips, lumber and calcium carbonate -- are almost always headed south to Wenatchee, where they'll be hooked onto a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train to reach their final destination. This stretch of railroad track has been used for nearly 100 years -- there are still several miles of the original steel track laid by Great Northern when it built the line in 1914 to connect its lines in northern Washington and British Columbia. "My dad worked for Great Northern Railroad and Burlington Northern before he retired," says Buck Workman, who has worked for this rail line for more than 30 years and is now general manager. "Historically, this branch line and the Kettle Falls branch line were the highest-paying branch lines on the Great Northern system. We had the timber and the apples," he says, and both industries relied heavily on railroads. That was a time when roads were rough, and the trucking industry was in its infancy. Things have changed a lot since then. But the train remains a fixture on this Western landscape. Today, the railmen who operate this train say some days they haul 20 cars, other days, 40. On this day in April, it's considered a light day on the Cascade and Columbia River Railroad, with 25 cars ready to pick up and take to Wenatchee. When Lovelady arrives, he goes straight for the office fax machine, sets down his lunch and grabs a list of the day's work. "It takes a stack of paper like this to get a train moving," he says, holding his thumb and forefinger 2 inches apart. He calls a private dispatch center in Vermont to get a track warrant, which gives them the authority to move the train onto the track. Like every other day, theirs will be the only train on this isolated stretch of railroad track that runs through cattle pastures, past junkyards and across 173 private driveways and 34 public roads. With permission granted, Lovelady closes and locks the office, climbs aboard the train, deposits his lunch and paperwork and hops back off. Stanley sits ready in the engineer's seat, and the two talk over a hand-held radio -- often in one-word sentences -- working through the morning routine of checking brakes on the engine and railcars, and hooking up empty cars before heading north. Soon, Lovelady is back on board and the train with 15 empty cars ventures north. Lovelady -- who is conductor today -- takes his seat on the left side of the cab and leans back in the well-cushioned seat, resting his steel-toed boots on the narrow door in front of him. "It should be a pretty good day," he says, sipping coffee and looking at their workload attached to a metal clipboard. By the time they pull away from Omak and pick up speed, it's nearly 6 a.m. Dawn has turned from black to dark gray as the gentle click-clack, click-clack of metal wheels on steel track breaks the morning silence. At 25 miles per hour -- the fastest they'll go today -- the train rocks them from side to side, at a pace much too fast to lull a baby to sleep. But Lovelady and Stanley are like sailors on this train, well used to the motion after 10 years on the job. Like the other two railmen here, they switch off every two weeks between the morning and evening shifts, and take turns as conductor and engineer. All were hired soon after RailAmerica bought the branch in 1996, and the change keeps the job from getting too monotonous. "We've all had about a million schemes to get out of railroading, but the security's pretty hard to give up," says Stanley as the train rambles north. It's still chilly, but he's stripped down to his Omak Volunteer Fire Department T-shirt. "When it comes right down to it, I have no college education, and I've made good money and full benefits for 10 years," he says. "I'm a third-generation railroader," Lovelady says. "My grandpa was a railroader. My dad was a railroader. I've been around it all my life," he says, then adds, "It wasn't something I planned on doing from day one, really. I just kind of ended up here." The train passes Colville Indian Precision Pine, a regular shipping customer. Outside Lovelady's window, a light morning fog rises off the Okanogan River, while Stanley's side offers up a view of white steam from the lumber mill and a dozen sprinklers wetting pile after pile of stacked logs. "Wood chips are the No. 1 thing we haul. No. 2 would be calcium carbonate," Stanley says. "We also haul tons of lumber out of Canada, and recently they started shipping wood pellets. They truck it all to Oroville and load it onto train cars there," Lovelady says. Just past Riverside, they travel through several miles of undeveloped countryside. They've seen cougars and bobcats back in here, Stanley says. As the train rounds a corner, a dozen deer decide to cross the tracks. Stanley pulls a lever and the engine lets out a breathy, low-pitched, "toot-tooooooooot," and the deer scamper across the tracks. A hundred more are already on the other side, blending with the shaded hillside. They've hit deer before, Stanley says, and horses. In winter they have to slow down for bighorn sheep below Oroville and near Rocky Reach. But their biggest worry, by far, are the cars and trucks that race across the tracks at private drives and public crossings. A near miss happens almost daily, both railmen agree. Fortunately, there have been only a few times when the train has actually hit a vehicle. "If you've got 40 loaded cars, it can take a quarter of a mile to stop," Lovelady says. "If you see it, you're going to hit it," says Stanley. "We've saved hundreds of lives by blowing the horn." Five miles south of Tonasket, Stanley slows the train at Janis to drop one of the black cylinder cars next to the bright white piles of calcium carbonate, mined just outside of Tonasket. The mineral is used in dozens of products, including high-grade white stationery paper, antacids, toothpaste and paint. "This is the second-biggest customer on the railroad, behind Weyerhaeuser," Lovelady says. He slips on his leather gloves and hops off the train to detach the empty car as Stanley gets a wave from a man in the railyard. A few minutes later, Lovelady is back on board. Just north of Ellisforde, Stanley slows the train to 10 mpg for several miles, but not for an animal or car. The original track -- called 68-pound rail because that's how much a yard of it weighs -- is still part of the system, he explains, and they have to slow down to keep from stressing this old steel. "It's right up here," Stanley says. "It's stamped on the side of the rail -- 1892. So we've got 110-year-old rail still running," he says. Stanley is familiar with the track because they used to spend at least one or two days a week working on the track. That was back before business picked up. The last stop before Oroville is at Weyerhaeuser. "These are all chips out of Canadian mills. They must have a hundred carload of chips just sitting here," Lovelady says. The mounds of tan chips look like dozens of miniature pyramids in the making. They'll stop again on their way back to pick up several cars loaded with wood chips, bound for Longview and Weyerhaeuser's pulp mill. It's 8:20 a.m. when they reach Zosel Lumber in Oroville to drop a few empty cars and pick up their first load for the southbound journey. The smell of freshly milled pine fills the air. Shadows are still several feet long, and the sun hits the sides of the railcars and the roofs of mill buildings, revealing the necessity of the sunglasses propped on both of the railmen's baseball cap visors. The last stop is at the Oroville yard, with its maze of side tracks for loading and unloading. Here, they'll switch to the southbound Engine 1002, hooked directly behind the north-facing locomotive. The railroad ends here. It used to continue north, to Canada, but those tracks were removed perhaps 20 years ago, Stanley says. Outside, Lovelady is offering estimates by radio on how far to back up before the railcar knuckles bump and grab onto each other. He counts down by the number of railcars: "Five, four, three," then, "20 feet, 10, five." Stanley says he can't move the train backward too fast. "If you went any faster than four miles per hour, you'd know it," he says, grinning as if he's done it before. The cars couple without a ripple in the engine cab. Lovelady reads off the numbers of the cars they pick up, and what's in them, and Stanley writes it down. About half of what they do and say is for safety reasons, Stanley says. If they get in a wreck and are knocked out, someone can look at the log to make sure there are no hazardous materials aboard, he explains. Propane is the only hazardous material they ever carry, he says. They continue to pick up loaded railcars on their way south, looking at the clipboard at each stop and writing down railcar numbers and their contents. In between stops, they take bites of their lunches and make contact with the afternoon crew. They're back in Omak by noon, but they still have to fill the train with diesel before handing it off to the next crew, which will take the loaded train to Wenatchee, the final destination of this short-line railroad. It takes 5,000 gallons of diesel a week to operate this train, Stanley says. Workman, their boss, meets them when they stop at Colville Indian Power and Veneer, one of two mills owned by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation that ships veneer and plywood on this rail line. "Last year we were on target to do 9,000-plus (carloads), but this mill burned," Workman says. Still, they hauled more than 8,500 carloads of goods in 2006, the best year yet since RailAmerica bought the line from Burlington Northern more than 10 years ago. The company is based in Boca Raton, Fla., and has 42 short-line and regional railroads across the United States and Canada, including Puget Sound and Pacific Railroad in Elma. Workman says he could have stayed on with Burlington Northern, but he wanted to stay in Okanogan County, where his roots are deep. He was the track maintenance supervisor then, and after a year, he knew he'd made the right decision. "They had proven to me they were interested in the long-term viability of the rail line," he explains. And despite the high cost of replacing track -- certainly needed on some stretches of the line -- Workman expects this short-line to be around for a long time. Looking up at a photo of his young granddaughter on a bookshelf in his office, he muses, "You're looking at our next general manager." K.C. Mehaffey: 422-3850; 997-2512 mehaffey@wenworld.com
