By Julie Sneider, Senior Associate Editor
Nancy Brice was one of four railroaders to be recognized May 11 for 50 years of service to Union Pacific Railroad. She was the only woman on the stage during the ceremony held at UP headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, a common scene during her career as one of few female railroaders in the room or rail yard.
Brice started working for UP predecessor railroad Southern Pacific in San Francisco in 1969, a couple of years after completing business school courses that trained her to be a secretary. She worked for the construction industry before applying for a better-paying railroad job at the suggestion of a friend. After two years as a secretary, Brice moved to Southern Pacific’s Taylor Yard in Glendale, California, to become a guaranteed extra board clerk, where she would learn new skills. Her first job involved processing arriving and departing trains, using a keypunched IBM card to represent every car moving in or out of the yard.
As she described in a recent column on UP’s Inside Track, Brice worked several jobs in her early years with the railroad, including as a weighmaster generating scale tickets for rail-car billing; a car distributor taking orders for certain types of rail cars to be placed on a customer’s dock for loading; and a claims inspector of damaged freight.
Women were not welcome
On her first day at Taylor Yard, she was “taken aback” when she walked into a large office and saw “a sea of men.” The year was 1972, a time when female railroaders were few and far between. She was not well-received by her male co-workers.
“I was working with older men who had been with the railroad for a number of years. They had their own way of doing things and used rough language,” Brice said in an interview with RailPrime. “I hadn’t been exposed to that kind of language before.”
It wasn’t unusual for male coworkers to say: “You belong at home behind a vacuum cleaner” or “This is not a field for a woman to be working in.”
“I thought: ‘Hey, I can work anywhere I want to.’” — Nancy Brice Union Pacific RailroadBut Brice liked the “fast pace” of working on the railroad, plus the pay was better than anything she would find elsewhere. She didn’t want to quit.
“I thought: ‘Hey, I can work anywhere I want to,’” she said. “The railroad wasn’t like a regular secretarial job where you’re typing, taking shorthand, filing and answering phones. You were exposed to the inner workings of the railroad, how freight was processed through the yard to get to the customer. Each job in the yard was different, so I was learning something new every three or four weeks.”
In 1974, she moved on to try her hand at the “piggyback ramp,” also known as the intermodal yard, in the Los Angeles area. There, Brice met a number of female coworkers. Plus, there was no “good old boys club” — it was a welcoming environment.
A major merger brings a new opportunity
Brice remained at the intermodal yard for most of her career, except for a 12-year stint moving across the UP network as a district field analyst (DFA) after the UP-Southern Pacific merger in 1996. Brice trekked to UP’s headquarters in Omaha to receive extensive training on Net Control, TCS and Oasis, an intermodal software program. Then she visited all the intermodal ramps on the merged network to teach software programs to various departments, including locomotive and car, crew dispatching and maintenance of way.
The 12-year tour was a challenge, as many former workers were resistant to learning a new way of doing things.
“Some of the people we taught had more than 30 years of seniority and it was a huge transition for them to make between two major computer systems,” she said.
By 2008, the training was completed, the DFA jobs were abolished and Brice returned to her intermodal roots. Today, she’s an automatic gate systems trailer flat-car clerk for premium operations at UP’s Los Angeles Transportation Center. She marvels at how much the intermodal side of the business has changed during her career.
“I’ve seen so many advances in how trailers are loaded onto flatcars over the years. In the beginning, this was done through a roll-on, roll-off process where trailers were literally driven onto the rail car and locked in place ready for movement,” Brice wrote in her Inside Track column. “Then along came piggy-packer lift equipment, and soon after, the arrival of Gantry (straddle) cranes.”
Union Pacific earlier this month recognized four employees for their 50 years of service. Shown, from left: Francisco Daniel, Nancy Brice, Johnathan Deckard and Greg Wahl. Union Pacific RailroadTrucking companies now use automatic gates and process their units via computer with no intervention by railroaders unless there are waybilling or pick-up number issues, she added.
Also, there are more women working in rail, both in transportation and in the crafts. One thing that hasn’t changed: Railroading is a 24/7 business, one that makes family-work-life balance a challenge.
“You have to be prepared to work at all hours,” Brice said. “It’s hard work, you do have long hours and you do miss family obligations.”
In Brice’s case, it helped that her husband Gerald was also a rail worker. They both planned to retire after 30 years in the business, then travel across the country in an RV. Sadly, her husband died before they reached that goal. Brice decided then to keep on working.
“It’s something I’ve enjoyed doing,” she said. “It’s very interesting work.”
Brice and three other UP railroaders — Francisco “Pancho” Daniel, Johnathan “Tuttie” Deckard and Greg Wahl — were recognized at the ceremony honoring their 50 years of service. Daniel is a locomotive engineer in the northern California service unit; Deckard is lead rail-car technician in Palestine, Texas; and Wahl is a locomotive engineer in the Los Angeles service unit.
A video of the ceremony can be viewed here.
