How often does a train engineer get home to his/her family?”
But in the seventies an engineer had a specific section of the route that the train took. My wife’s cousin is a retired engineer, and he used to have part of a cross country route on the Southern Pacific. He would drive the train from Tucson, AZ to El Paso, TX and then come back on another train. The routes of the trains were probably from California to Florida or Louisiana, but each engineer only had to be responsible for about 200 miles of track. The railroad did this so that an engineer wouldn’t have to drive over territory he wasn’t familiar with, and wouldn’t get so tired that he might have a wreck. Also, train engineers had a really good union. It was a nice arrangement for family men.
