When you think of the Union Pacific Railroad, you might picture massive locomotives or endless stretches of track crossing the plains. But for a recent American Heritage Center oral history project, it’s the people and their stories that take center stage. Through funding from the Union Pacific Foundation, former UP employees shared their railroad experiences, now featured in five themed videos that bring their memorable stories to life.

Pioneering Women of the Rails

The 1970s marked a turning point for Union Pacific as women entered roles previously closed to them. In one of the videos, a roundtable discussion features Teresa Straub, Celeste Malloy, Kris Tomanek, and Danny Roeseler, who were part of the early wave of women to work as brakemen, conductors, and engineers in the switch yards and on locomotives. Their discussion reveals not just the physical and social challenges they faced, but also the strong bonds of friendship that developed among coworkers, creating a supportive network in what was then very much a man’s world.

I think for me, the camaraderie [impacted me most]. I still have really good friends who worked for the railroad, and you trust these people with your life and limb, literally. If they make a move, you could get split in two or hurt really bad. So, that life and limb kind of bonding and knowing the crazy schedule and the crazy lifestyle it was.

– Kris Tomanek

Not every railroader welcomed these changes. As women entered traditionally male-dominated jobs in the 1970s and ‘80s, they sometimes faced direct pushback from their colleagues. Retired UP engineer Debbie Martinez recalls:

I had a man, an older man, and he told me, “You don’t need to be out here. Women should not have this job and be out here. You should be at home with your kid and you should just stay home.” I tried to explain to him why I was out there and he says, “I understand, but I’m old fashioned and that’s my idea.” We ended up being good friends after that, after I explained to him. I never took anything too personal.

A Railroad in Transition

At the Laramie Railroad Depot and Cheyenne Depot Museum, veteran railroaders gathered to share memories of an industry in transformation. Their discussions paint a vivid picture of railroading’s evolution, from the era of roundhouses and cabooses to today’s computer-controlled locomotives and satellite communications. These stories capture how railroad workers adapted to sweeping technological changes while maintaining the skills and dedication that kept the trains running.

The computerization of the railroad – we saw it in its infancy and we saw it the way it is now, where locomotives are run by computers. We just saw a lot of changes, the railroad coming into the 21st century and being pretty modern. Getting rid of the cabooses was a thing that was going to happen. It changed how we ran trains as engineers and how the railroad wanted trains run and it was quite an art to run a train with two guys on the rear end and not hurt them running across Wyoming at 70 miles an hour. And when they got rid of the caboose the conductor came up to the head end with us and made sure we rode the straight and narrow.

– Howard Meeker

Breaking Barriers

The 1970s marked a pivotal shift as more Latino and Latina workers gained access to train service positions at Union Pacific. Through interviews with railroaders like Abe Madrid, who worked his way up from brakeman to engineer, and Roy Sanchez, who worked as a brakeman and switchman, plus family members like Carol Pascal whose relatives worked multiple generations on the railroad, one of the videos documents their groundbreaking achievements while also exploring the challenges and discrimination faced by Hispanic railroad workers across different generations.

Sanchez recalls the barriers he faced trying to get hired in the 1960s and early ‘70s:

They would not let me on. They said no…He said, “I’ll give you a job, yeah, but you’re going to go out there pounding spikes with your other people.” I said, “I don’t want to do that. I want to be a brakeman because you’re hiring brakemen right now.” I said, “Why can’t you hire me?” “I can’t do that.” “Why?”

In his interview, Madrid reflects on how his grandfather’s generation of Hispanic workers were often relegated to the hardest physical labor:

My grandfather as a section man, they almost solely hired minorities because that was hard work. They were working on the tracks back then. They didn’t have a lot of the machinery and a lot of the technology that they have now. They had to do a lot of that work by hand… Just labor. Moving ties and making sure that all the spikes were in place and so on and so forth. I think once a week, they’d walk the track. They’d have to walk so many miles of that track, check them for loose spikes or rail and so on and so forth.

Carol Pascal, whose family’s collective UP service spans nearly 300 years, shared difficult memories about a painful chapter in railroad history:

They would say, “Here, you can use this pass, this railroad pass, to get to Mexico”… John Scott, who I don’t know if that’s his real name, who said, “Here’s the railroad pass. You don’t even have to pay for anything. You can take you and your family.” Later, my Uncle Carlos told me… “I don’t know whether they cared whether we went to Mexico, as long as we left here and left our jobs.”

Women Answer the Wartime Call

The videos reach back to World War II through the memories of children whose mothers and aunts answered the nation’s call to keep the trains running. Sally Meeker tells of her mother Myrtle Peterson Forney’s work at the isolated station at Sherman, Wyoming.

Following two months of classes, the instructor called for three student volunteers to go to Cheyenne, Wyoming, for assignment to Sherman Station, just south of Ames Monument, the highest point of the Union Pacific Railroad… On a blustery day, one of the days at Sherman when the chain stood straight out blowing in the wind, we arrived at the Sherman depot where we were to live and work….We had an outdoor privy, coal stoves for heat and cooking, bathing in an old wash tub, and carrying water from an outside pump across the tracks. As our truck arrived with furniture and supplies to furnish our new home, we actually considered not unloading it but returning at least to Cheyenne…. Thanks to an understanding dispatcher and the support of those caring section men and their families, we were encouraged to stay.

– Sally Meeker, reading from Myrtle Peterson Forney’s autobiography

Stories of Carol Pascal’s aunts Lupe Serrano Arias and Rosemary Arias Weible reveal the challenges women faced in the Cheyenne yards.

My Aunt Rosemary, when she worked during the war, she prepared some of the meals for the passenger cars….there were a lot of troop trains and so they made little packages of food for the troops, too…. My Uncle Ruben told me that she would write little notes like, “Good luck” and “We love you” on the packages. So she got to work inside….at some point they replaced her with an Anglo lady and she went to work outside…..She said she couldn’t wait for the war to be over because the winters were really hard on her.

– Carol Pascal

Ricky Durrant shared memories of his mother Mabel Turner Durrant’s experiences working at various points along the UP line during wartime. Initially working at an ammunition plant in Arkansas, she seized an opportunity when the railroads offered telegraph operator training in Denver. She then worked her way across Wyoming and Utah as an operator, moving from Rawlins to Wamsutter, Bitter Creek, Carter, Altamont, then Evanston, Wasatch, and Morgan, Utah.

Mom was a telegraph operator and a phone operator. She started working in Rawlins… Then she went west to Wamsutter, Bitter Creek — she skipped Green River — Carter, Altamont, then Evanston, Wasatch, and then Morgan, Utah…Nobody wanted to work Wasatch, so [her job] was safe.

– Ricky Durrant

Human Stories Between the Rails

One of the videos focuses on the unexpected moments and humor that lightened long days on the railroad. These stories remind us that behind every train that crossed Wyoming’s vast plains was a community of workers who shared not just the work, but their lives. The camaraderie they developed helped sustain them through challenges and created bonds that lasted well beyond their railroad careers.

Bernie broke through the snow drift and stopped the locomotive and panicked on the radio, called me up and he said, “I’ve lost the snowplow.” He said, “It broke loose!” There went the snowplow on its own, heading for the river. I drove as fast as I could to Saratoga and went over by the lumber yard. As it rolled by, I managed to get on it and set the handbrake about 20 yards before it went in the river. And of course, they came down and got it – we pinky swore that we wouldn’t tell anybody.

– Ken Klouda

We were digging out a car out of a train that had a missile on it, and you could tell by the markings and we picked it up and we were going to hand it off to a BN crew and we were doing everything very carefully and very slowly and not having any problems and when we hooked up to the BN crew and my foreman pulled the pin on the locomotive and we backed up, I hollered on the radio, “Bombs away!” I was just kidding, thinking we don’t have it no more, you know. Next thing you know, there’s three guys in a military jeep and they wanna talk to me and then one of our managers shows up and they go, “Why would you say something like that?” and I says, “Come on, lighten up. This job’s hard enough as it is.” I was always clowning around on the radio, that’s kinda what I did.

– Celeste Malloy

Preserving Railroad Heritage

Through the interviews and these documentaries, the AHC has captured an important piece of Union Pacific history. These aren’t just stories about trains and tracks – they’re about the people who kept one of America’s great railroads running through decades of change. Their experiences, now preserved in our archives, help us understand that the true legacy of Union Pacific lies in its people.

You can watch all five videos on the American Heritage Center’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEWxqGJdXNwc1GQlv_xnCdQ.

You may also be interested in the AHC’s virtual exhibit “The Art of the Railroad” and “Hell on Wheels: Union Pacific Towns in Wyoming.” The first explores the cultural impact of railroads like those featured in these oral histories, while the second examines the rough boom towns that sprang up during the original construction of the line these workers maintained and operated.

Post contributed by the “Life Between the Rails” project team Tana Libolt and Leslie Waggener.