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Residing in a city known for gambling, Bonnie Leake rolled the dice with her railroad career 31 years ago by becoming one of Union Pacific Railroad’s first female locomotive engineers. It paid off. After retiring last month — capping off one of the longest woman engineer tenures in the Class I’s history and a nearly 40-year UP career — Leake can reap well-earned railroad retirement benefits and adopt a less-hectic lifestyle. She also can look back and reminisce how a bold career move helped open the door for other women to be engineers.

But Leake, 60, doesn’t consider herself a gambler or a pioneer. She didn’t believe she was taking a chance in 1966 when she left her job as a telephone operator at the Las Vegas Hacienda Hotel to join UP as an on-call railroad clerk.

“I earned $350 a month at the hotel, and working five-and-a-half days a week at the railroad, I could earn $480 a month,” says Leake. “Even though you’re on call at the railroad, I thought it was better to work six months out of the year for good money instead of the whole year for poor money.”

She also doesn’t consider it risky that she applied to become a fireman eight years later and eventually became an engineer in 1974.

To Leake — a single mother who raised a daughter also named Bonnie — if you have the right attitude and are ambitious, you can do any job well and make a good wage. As a veteran engineer with a salary primarily based on miles traveled rather than hours worked, Leake eventually earned between $50,000 and $100,000 annually.

“You can make a man’s wage in a man’s world,” says Leake. “There’s no glass ceiling at a railroad.”

Self-supportive. But there was resistance at UP to a woman becoming an engineer. During Leake’s first decade on the job, she mostly ate meals alone in restaurants. Many male conductors and brakemen in her crews wouldn’t socialize with her.

“There’s always a few guys who think you can’t do the job because you’re a woman, and if you do the job well, it’s because you were lucky,” she says. “But I didn’t need a pal or to be a chum on the job, I just wanted to do the job and get paid.”

The job required Leake to operate trains from Las Vegas to Milford, Utah, and to California’s Mojave Desert. She often made 30 10- to 12-hour trips per month.

Leake didn’t let anyone or anything stand in her way to bring her trains in on time and safely, says Steve Slaght, senior manager of UP’s Las Vegas terminal operations and Leake’s supervisor.

“She never looked at herself as a role model, even though others view her that way,” he says. “She thought of herself as an engineer ... and respected the equipment and power she controlled. I’ll miss her leadership. When she was out on the road, I [knew] the job would be done right.”

An engineer’s lifestyle — always on call, rarely spending two nights a week at home — led many engineers, men and women, to quit after a few years, says Leake. But she embraced the time away.

“It was like being on vacation, not being home on days off, and getting to do and see things at different times of the day,” Leake says. “I saw wild horses, elk and deer from the cab.”

Railroader to rancher. Now, after 30-plus years, Leake no longer wants the grueling lifestyle. It’s time to stay home in Las Vegas and appreciate what she has, which includes rental property to manage and a “dude” ranch full of animals to care for, Leake says.

“I’m retiring because I’m being paid to stay home — let the young people work to pay for their homes and cars,” she says. “I figured out if I live another 30 years and don’t get married, I’ll receive $1 million from my pension.”

The million bucks is apropos: Leake enjoyed the challenge of being responsible for millions of dollars worth of freight on each run. She hopes young male and female engineers similarly take pride in their work.

“I see young people today who have no initiative, have to be told what to do and whine about being away from home,” says Leake. “The advice I would give is, ‘Be flexible — work when the railroad needs you and not just when you feel like working.’”