Railroad Employee Roundhouse

This page is for various Railroad-related character types, until they have enough examples to split off into pages of their own.

Railroad Brakeman: Notably remembered for having to walk along the top of the cars and stopping the train by manually turning the braking wheels. The brakeman also handled car couplings and track switches. This was a dangerous job in terms of life and limb, eventually made somewhat safer with the invention of air brakes and automatic couplings. The Railroad Brakeman is the train employee most likely to get into a Traintop Battle.

• Girl Genius: Brother Dinsy was the brakeman of the Corbetite train the Wyrm of Limerick. His being killed before he was able to decouple the last two train cars from the rest of the train during an ambush by the Knights of Jove nearly lead to the whole train tipping and stranding the passengers at the mercy of an attacker that intended to kill them to the last man.

Railroad Conductor: Also known as a Guard in British-English speaking countries. The manager of a train and its crew, responsible for all areas other than the engine, which is the responsibility of the engineer. He makes sure all the freight is secure, and the train is cleared to move down the track. He signals the engineer when to start and stop the train. On passenger trains, the conductor also announces the route of the train, gives the "all aboard" and collects the passengers' tickets. (On large trains, the collection may be done by an assistant conductor.) While railroads were in their prime in the United States, the conductor traditionally rode in the last car of a train, the caboose. Modern trains have largely made the caboose obsolete, and the conductor is based near the front of the train. For some unfathomable reason, British railways have retired the title in favour of calling them a "train manager" instead. Some countries have one conductor per passenger car and one senior conductor (called "master of the train" in Russia) in charge of the whole train.

• "Mr. Conductor" from Shining Time Station, though he never seems to do any actual conducting.
• Young Frankenstein. Frederick rides in two trains, one in the U.S. and the other in Transylvania. The conductor is exactly the same guy in both trains, except he's wearing a different uniform. See it on YouTube, starting at 3:45.
• Ernest Borgnine plays a villainous railroad conductor in Emperor of the North.
• The Flying Pussyfoot of Baccano!! has a full complement of three conductors at the start of the trip. The oldest, Tony, mentions that this is his last run before he hangs up his cap. The middle-aged one is The Mole for the Lemures, and the youngest, well, that's even more spoilery.
• In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario talks to the conductor quite a few times en route to Poshley Heights, including outside the train at Riverside Station.
• The conductors of the Corbetite Railway in Girl Genius are an odd combination of The Captain and Good Shepherd; the Corbetites are a quasi-monastic religious order dedicated to neutrality and running the absolute best train system Europa (or anywhere else) has ever seen, and the conductors' duty is to keep the trains running no matter what. At one point, the Wyrm of Limerick is stopped by an avalanche and its conductor and engineer respond to a passenger's flippant remark that it'll just be late by shouting "Blasphemy!" in unison.
• Galaxy Express 999 has the 999's mysterious conductor, who announces stops, performs small services for passengers, and enforces Galaxy Railways regulations. Hardly ever seen out of his blue uniform coat and cap, he has a strong resemblance to a Final Fantasy Black Mage.
• "The Conductor" from The Polar Express is rather stressed by his responsibilities and is concerned his train is going to be late due to all the delays.
• Skimbleshanks in Cats runs the Night Mail train, supervising all of the human crew members and looking after the passengers.

Railroad Engineer: The "driver" of a train. He's responsible for the maintenance of the engine, controls its speed, and requires an intimate knowledge of the route and its peculiarities. Railroad engineers are often portrayed as heroic in fiction, thanks in no small part to many railroad engineers in real life who sacrificed themselves to avoid a massive disaster.

• Perhaps the most famous Real Life engineer is John Luther "Casey" Jones, who was immortalized in song for his death in a crash (but having used his final moments to brake the train, preventing any other fatalities.)
  • And later immortalized in a different song which complained that the train would never have crashed if the railroad had hired union employees instead of that dirty scab Casey Jones. Ironically, the real Casey Jones was a supporter of labor unions; his death was the result of a combination of low visibility, tricky track, confusion about signaling, the train having left Memphis late, and Jones wanting to make a record-breaking run (he'd gone from 85 minutes late to just two minutes short of schedule by the time of the crash).
    • This one is explainable, though it is kind of long. The second song was written by Joe Hill (no, not that one, the one he is named after). Hill's father was killed by a runaway train in Sweden, and he was furious at hearing about how Jones had essentially caused the same kind of incident that killed his father out of pride and misplaced corporate loyalty, and then became a national hero for doing nothing more than common decency demanded and cleaning up his own mess. Since Hill was a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, a hardline anarcho-syndicalist labor union, the harshest slur he could think of was "scab", so that's what he called Jones.
• Mexican engineer Jesús García, the Hero of Nacozari. In 1907 a train full of explosives stationed at Nacozari, Sonora was on fire, so he drove it away from the town, saving it from impending doom. He was vaporized in the blast.
• Two famous drivers in Britain are Benjamin Gimbert, who was severely injured in World War II when a wagonload of depth charges caught fire on a freight train as it approached Soham. He uncoupled the wagon (directly behind the engine) from the rest of the train and drove the engine into a cutting. Amazingly, he survived. The other is John Axon, who, on realising his freight train was running away towards a station, stayed on the footplate, trying to stop his train and sounding the whistle in order to clear the station.
• Green Lantern: Alan Scott takes the hero connotations to the logical extreme, becoming the masked hero the Green Lantern after sabotage kills everyone onboard a train he was engineer on. Later retellings of Alan's origin make him strictly a businessman who was friends with the engineer Jimmy Henton.
• "Steamer" is the engineer of the The Polar Express, he temporarily leaves the driving to "Hero Girl" in order to change the train's blown out headlamp.
• Dick Simnel, inventor of the steam engine and driver of the Super Prototype Iron Girder in Raising Steam.
• The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: Link himself, who starts as an apprentice engineer, and is quite heroic as usual. His mentor Alfonzo also counts.
• In Paper Mario, the train is basically just an engine, and the engineer is the only one aboard aside from the passengers.
  • In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario talks to the engineer of the Excess Express twice: once for his autograph for Bub, and once to find out why the train is so empty on the third day...
• Girl Genius: The Corbetite order naturally puts its Sparks in the engineer's chair, which is part of why their operations are so fantastic. In the incident mentioned above, the Wyrm cleared an avalanche by breathing fire on it from the dragon's head on its engine.
• The General has Buster Keaton's character Johnnie Grey, who loves his engine about as much as his girl. The Confederate Army turns him away when he tries to enlist because he's in a vital profession (without explaining this to him), leaving him in place for a great locomotive chase when Union saboteurs steal his engine.
• Forest of Boland Light Railway has Lobgob, an inventor gnome who drives a Cool Train named the Boland Belle.
• Oh, Doctor Beeching! features Arnold Thomas, the driver of Blossom.

Railroad Fireman: Also known as a stoker, he is responsible for keeping the engine fire going properly and regulating the boiler. With the end of the steam era, this position has shifted to duties similar to the co-pilot of a plane, assisting the engineer and observing what's going on outside the train on the opposite side.

• Green Lantern: Jimmy Henton was the stoker of the train whose sabotage led to the deaths of all onboard save for Alan Scott, whose protection by the Starheart and desire to bring the man responsible to justice turned him into the Green Lantern. Jimmy had just been telling Alan he needed to be more wary of the villain just before the explosion took place. Later retellings would make Jimmy the engineer.
• Stoker Blake, the legendary master of shovel-dueling in Raising Steam. ( Who is actually Lord Vetinari taking a holiday.)
• Girl Genius: Brother Osterman is busy stoking the fire and regulating the boiler on the Corbetite train the Wyrm of Limerick.
• The long bearded "Smokey" is the fireman of the The Polar Express, he and the engineer temporarily leave the engine room to "Hero Girl" in order to change the train's blown out headlamp.
• Oh, Doctor Beeching! gives us Ralph, the fireman/assistant driver for Blossom.

Station Master: Charged with managing train stations. They would manage other station employees like porters and ticket clerks and would be responsible for the safe and efficient running of the station. During the 19th Century they would live in a house near to the station, and would be one of the "big men" in any rural community (along with the mayor, storeowner, publican and doctor). Station masters are increasingly less common with the advent of ticket machines, but "station managers" still exist at large and important stations.

• Inspector Gustave from both the film and book versions of Hugo is a good fictional example.
• As is Cecil Perkin from Oh, Doctor Beeching!.
• Hedley Green is the officious station master from The Train Now Standing..., who keeps things running with an out-of-date 1933 rulebook from the Great Western Railway.

Signalman: A fairly important position, because they regulated the movement of trains so they wouldn't crash into each other. In olden days, they would work in a signalbox alongside the tracks, moving levers to operate points and signals. Today, railway signals are mostly automatic and computer-controlled, but rail traffic controllers are still very important.

• Charles Dickens wrote a short ghost story entitled The Signal-Man which is about the eponymous signalman, his lonely signal box located in an isolated railway cutting, and the supernatural occurrences that happen nearby.
• Oh, Doctor Beeching! has Harry Lambert, the signalman who runs a considerable number of side gigs from his box.

Railroad Laborer: One of the many, many people responsible for building and maintaining the rails of the railroad. The most famous of these is John Henry of man vs. machine contest notoriety. An important subset of these workers were "gandy dancers", groups of men who would realign the rails using metal rods known as "gandys". A substantial number of laborers in The Wild West were from China, and they have their own page at Chinese Laborer. In the United Kingdom, the workers who built the railways were known as "navvies" or navigators. The term comes from the days of canals, which were known as "eternal navigations". The guys who did the maintenance were called "platelayers" after a type of rail used in the very early days of railways.

• There is a very good description of what the builders did in one of the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
• Gordon Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy is about building the Canadian Pacific Railway, the first of the transcontinental railways in Canada.
  We are the navvies who work upon the railway
  Swinging our hammers in the bright blazing sun
  Laying down track and building the bridges
  Bending our backs til the railroad is done.
• The hero and his friends are railroad laborers at the start of Blazing Saddles.
• Various trolls, humans, goblins and at one point gnomes in Raising Steam. The practicalities of building a railroad from scratch are largely glossed over in the novel; the principle seems to be "throw enough labour at the problem and a railway appears", a hundred times faster than comparable construction methods could achieve on Roundworld and with almost none of the unexpected engineering difficulties, financial problems, or gang wars between the labour forces of rival contractors that beset Roundworld railway construction. (Engineering difficulties are at least mentioned on occasion, but because we're mostly seeing them from the perspective of Moist von Lipwig, who is not practically minded, we don't get much detail beyond "Dick thinks they're solvable, and he's been right so far".)
• The Pogues: "Navigator" is a paean to these people.
  Their mark on this land is still seen and still laid.
  A way for a commerce, where vast fortunes were made,
  For supplying an empire where the sun never sets
  which is now deep in darkness, but the railway's there yet.

Western Union Man: While the WU man does not derive his paycheck from and is not employed by the railroad, in rural areas, his office was often located inside the local railroad depot. Notably, The Station Master and the Signalman often shared the WU man's skillset since some railroads continued to use morse code to communicate with minor outlying checkpoint/signal stations even after WWII.

• Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman: Horace was the resident telegraphist and tech geek.

---