January 9, 2003
All aboard: UW staffer is train fanatic
In preschool he was building them out of blocks. By age 8 he had a working model. But now that he’s a grownup, Bob Ledingham gets to “play” with a real train just about every weekend. The senior computer specialist in Biostatistics is an avid volunteer at the Northwest Railway Museum in Snoqualmie.
“I’ve been interested in trains for as along as I can remember,” Ledingham says. “As a kid I built model planes and model cars out of kits and such, but the trains were different because you could actually operate them in a realistic fashion. You could have something that looked like what it was and also operated like it.”
Ledingham had a model train setup throughout his childhood. Then, after a hiatus during his undergraduate years, he built a smaller layout to fit in his Seattle apartment during graduate school at the UW. And it was during his grad school years that he went on to full-size trains.
“One day in 1971 I was driving through Snoqualmie and saw a sign that said ‘railroad museum’ so I drove in and joined up,” Ledingham explains. “But I didn’t become an active volunteer until a year later.”
It happened that Ledingham’s graduate school office was next door to where some volunteers were working on a steam locomotive. The locomotive, which had been used by timber companies, was on display near the forestry building, and the UW wanted to have it moved because it was in the way of a new building. So it was taken over by Washington State Parks, and they in turn offered to loan it to the railway museum. But first, museum volunteers had to get it there. Ledingham joined in the efforts to fix the locomotive enough to steam it off campus under its own power. (The Burke-Gilman Trail was still a railroad track at that time.)
The volunteers succeeded in getting the locomotive to Kenmore, where it was put on a regular freight train and transported to Snoqualmie. The experience was enough to get Ledingham hooked, and he’s been volunteering regularly at the museum ever since. He generally spends one day every weekend in Snoqualmie, but he doesn’t have to worry about his wife feeling neglected. She’s a fellow volunteer; in fact, the couple met at the museum.
“Our 21-year-old son took his first train ride before he was born,” Ledingham says. “He’s a volunteer now too. I guess it’s hereditary.”
Both Ledingham and his wife have qualified to fill all the positions of the train crew — engineer, brakeman, conductor and fireman — which required both classroom and on the job training. And they have to take a written exam on the operating rules every two years to retain their certification.
The museum offers the training to all its volunteers, using experienced volunteers and retired railroad workers as the teachers.
“Operating a train is quite a bit different than operating a car,” Ledingham says. “For one thing, you don’t get any automatic feedback from the controls. With a car, the harder you push on the brake pedal the faster it stops, whereas with a train you apply a certain amount of brakes and you can tell by the air gauge how much you’ve applied. By experience you know that at a certain speed a certain amount of braking power will bring the train down to whatever speed you want to stop it in the right distance. So it takes a lot of practice to get that correct.
“The other major difference is that things take a long time to happen. It’s partly because you’ve got steel wheels on steel rail. The coefficient of friction is .25 whereas a car has a coefficient of 1. You can slow down a car about four times as quickly. Also, with a train that has a lot of cars, you have to operate it as smoothly as possible because of the passengers.”
The museum operates its trains as a demonstration railroad on the 5 miles of track it owns. The train station has been restored and contains railroad artifacts. And at Christmas, a special train includes Santa Claus. When he’s at the museum, Ledingham either works on the train crew or helps with maintenance and restoration. Right now, volunteers are getting ready to build a new conservation and maintenance shop, which will allow them to do their work indoors and thus make it more practical to run steam locomotives along with the current diesel models.
“It’s quite a bit more expensive to run steam but it’s a lot more interesting,” Ledingham says. “It’s more maintenance intensive and the fuel costs are slightly higher. With a steam locomotive, within the boiler there are 150 small tubes that exhaust gases go through and they have to be removed every five years and either inspected and put back in or replaced with new tubes. Every 90 operating days you have to do a fairly thorough inspection. Every operating day you have to get underneath it and do inspections and lubrication.”
Ledingham says his extensive knowledge of trains hasn’t proved too useful at his UW job, where he does database management for cardiac research projects. But his computer knowledge has come in handy at the museum, where he computerized membership lists and designed and analyzed a customer survey. And he likes both places for the same reason.
“It’s the people,” he says. “Just like here at the UW in our office, everyone is there because they want to be. So I really enjoy the camaraderie. And at the museum we’ve got a wide variety of backgrounds. We have a couple doctors, a Ph.D. in chemistry, people who work at Boeing, a number in the computer industry. But we’re all focused toward a common goal of keeping railroad history alive through the museum. It’s a fun place to volunteer.”
