Railroaders' Nostalgia > Any Santa Fe Folks Remember.................

a very nice man, engineer on Santa Fe for a little over 40 years?  Ralph Robison.  Retired in 1979 and his last run was on a San Diegan.  Just  super nice man.

I was very fortunate to have fired for Ralph Robinson from April of 1978 to July of 1978.  He was a true gentleman and never worked a Sunday for personal reasons.  I learned alot from Ralph on how to handle a San Diegan and all through my 30 plus years as an engineer, tricks that Ralph taught me, I still remembered.  Gary Nelson

Ralph Robison? You betchya.............Always laid off on Sunday.

While working as an instructor at the Santa Fe's Engineer Training Center in '78 we didn't have classes scheduled for a couple of weeks in Dec. and were instructed to go out and ride trains.  I've shared this before in answering a post so might be repeating myself.  A fellow instructor and I caught the passenger train at Emporia and went to Barstow, then a freight train to LA.  Next caught a San Diegan.  I was watching the engineer closely as hadn't seen "blended braking" being used before.  At Fullerton he turned it over to me to operate on to San Diego.  I was like a little kid with a new toy, a grin from ear to ear.  The other instructor got to run on the return trip.  I don't remember the engineer's name but he fit all the descriptions posted above about Ralph.  I remember he was No. 1 on the seniority roster and was a slender, small to medium sized man and was super, super nice.  He explained one engine with 4 cars was the ideal size train.  If you had 3 cars you wouldn't have enough braking and 5 cars wouldn't let you resume speed fast enough.  The job went to work around 9am and was off around 3pm with an hour or so off for lunch in San Diego.  I tried to get him to trade seniority with me but he wouldn't do it.  From my brief description of the engineer, could this have been "Ralph"?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/27/15 13:55 by KskidinTx.

You did a pretty good job of describing Ralph Robison.