Burlington Northern Adventures: Railroading in the Days of the Caboose

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.