Railroad’s public obligations neglected, former worker says

LIVINGSTON, Mont. – As a boy, all Warren McGee wanted to do was photograph the steam locomotives chugging through his hometown of Livingston and eventually follow in his father’s path of working for the railroad.

Times were tough when he graduated from high school in 1933. The railroad wasn’t hiring. He washed dishes and worked odd jobs, including as a laborer in nearby Yellowstone National Park. Three years later he got his break.

McGee spent the next 40 years working as a conductor, all the while taking thousands of black-and-white photographs of locomotives across the Northwest, eventually amassing a collection of 48,000 images, many of which are now housed in the Montana Historical Society. One of his prized photos captures the first time he was conductor on the train operated by his father. “You think he took orders from me?” McGee said, laughing.

In the photo, McGee stands in his dapper uniform below the cab of his father’s massive steam locomotive. He’s holding a pocket watch. McGee’s father, wearing a puffy engineer’s cap, looks comfortable in his seat. His arm rests on the open window, and his proud smile is clear.

McGee has been retired for 30 years and is nearly blind, but his memories and photographs comprise a workingman’s history of the railroad. Although he’s 90 years old, McGee moves at a speed of someone half his age. On a recent afternoon, he appeared to have no trouble mowing the lawn of his tidy downtown Livingston home, even if his failing eyesight meant he mowed most of his tulips, too.

As much as McGee loves trains, he speaks about his former employer like a jilted bride talking about her groom. BNSF is operated as a business and needs to earn a profit, McGee said, but he thinks the company also has some special obligations, which were written into the company’s 1864 charter and signed into law by Abraham Lincoln. McGee keeps a copy at his Livingston home.

In exchange for building a railroad between Lake Superior and the Puget Sound, the company was granted 47 million acres. The country needed the railroad as much as the railroad needed free land. After a series of mergers in the latter half of the 20th century, the railroad abandoned service to many remote parts of Montana and the Great Plains. The changes have hurt farmers and rural communities, McGee said. “They don’t serve the public like they’re supposed to.”

McGee also thinks the company has failed to protect its workers and the environment. He was a leader in Livingston’s fight to push the railroad for a complete cleanup of the town’s polluted aquifer.

McGee has seen three generations of managers and executives pass through the railroad. It’s a complicated company governed under national laws that are not easy to understand, he said. If McGee can pass on one piece of wisdom about the railroad – or any other company for that matter – it would be to caution citizens against putting too much trust in a corporation.

“Tomorrow’s managers will never keep the promises of yesterday’s managers,” McGee said.