I was a road foreman in Cheyenne when they chose me. I got the job mostly because no one else wanted it. It was thrust upon me. It wasn’t politically popular to do the steam program at the time when I started--the management didn’t realize its PR value at that point, and managers thought it was a dead-end job. Management didn’t realize how much skill went into coordinating the excursions, and didn’t think that anything the workers did while they were in the Heritage Program applied to the modern railroad.

At first, I was managing the Heritage Program on top of my normal foreman duties. That went on for four or five years before it dawned on the managers in Omaha that it was a full time job and they relieved me of the road foreman’s duties. That took care of that!

The managers’ attitudes towards the program became more friendly by the end of my career, though not as much as it should have. The problem is that you can’t put a number on how much good PR the Heritage Program brings in. Management can’t understand that without the steam engines and their excursions being in the news, the only press the Union Pacific got would be about tying up level crossing or blowing stuff up and evacuating towns. Or collisions, and too much noise from the train horns.

As the program grew, though, and as the managers above me moved up in the the hierarchy, a lot of them became more broad-thinking and viewed the Heritage Program in a different light. They get high enough up to see the benefit coming in PR from counties, states, national, We’ve had congressmen and presidents on the train. As long as we didn’t do anything stupid, they started to support us.--Steve Lee