Burlington Northern Adventures: Railroading in the Days of the Caboose

Brotherton recounts his experiences as brakeman, conductor, and trainmaster on Burlington Northern Railroad.Burlington Northern Adventures relates the personal experiences of the author William J. Brotherton, who went “railroading” as a brakeman, conductor, and trainmaster for the Burlington Northern Railroad system from 1979 to 1982. Through his many interesting short stories, Brotherton illustrates what it was like to work for a major railroad company before branch lines, vintage diesel locomotives, and cabooses were phased out. His accounts show what has changed within the railroad industry since then—and what has not.Brotherton, who grew up around trains in Georgia, takes the reader along on his personal encounters with a railroader’s life in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Minnesota, and Colorado. Now a lawyer, nothing in the courtroom compares to hanging on a boxcar in thirty-five-below weather working a local in North Dakota. He truly believed he would put in his thirty years with the railroad once he received his promotion to trainmaster with the Colorado & Southern Railway, a part of the Burlington Northern Railroad system—but he soon found that being a trainmaster was a special kind of hell. Read more