ABOVE LEFT: Conductor Tom Wood calls in car numbers to the shipping agent at the mill prior to departing the mill property.
ABOVE RIGHT: Milepost 10 on the KNOR marks the entrance to the mill trackage at Gilchrist as the outbound train does its air test to depart for the junction.
RIGHT: Engineer Troy Terry carefully feathers the throttle of the GE to maintain track speed up the grade approaching Oregon Route 58. ROBERT W. SCOTT PHOTOS
Poncil says that the railroad is a mix of 60, 62, 68, 75, and 80-pound rail. “Some of the smallest rail is our 60-pound, lo- cated on a couple of the yard tracks at the mill that we use every day.” The lo- cal ballast is affectionately referred by Poncil as “pummy-dirt” since its a com- bination of volcanic pumice, cinders, and a dry fine dirt. Back to today’s train, the speed is quickly dropping from ten m.p.h. as we start up one of the short but steep grades. Engineer Troy Terry reacts to the wheel slip buzzer by feathering the throttle to maintain forward momentum. “This is where I earn my keep,” smirks Troy. To- day’s ten-car train is heavily laden with six loaded center beam flatcars with 2×6s and 2×8s. Four wood chip cars are loaded to the tops from the mill and are destined to the paper mills in Longview, Wash.
While enroute to the interchange
from the mill, conductor Tom Wood con- firms the outbound railcars have been released to the Union Pacific, checking and rechecking his paperwork. Both men make up two-thirds of the entire operating crew of the Klamath North- ern, with the third person being railroad operations manager Michael Poncil. All three are veterans of railroading and mill work. Troy hired out in 2004 work-
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ing in the mill’s dry kiln. He has worked on the railroad side since 2007, starting as a conductor, then becoming engineer certified in 2008. Tom Wood is the newest member of
the railroading team. He hired when the mill was under Crown Pacific ownership in 1999, where he worked as a certified lumber grader. He worked up to swing shift supervisor on the planer inside the mill before going to the railroad as a con- ductor in 2013. Riding along with Tom and Troy, its easy to get a crash course on the nuances of timber grading and the process included in cutting, prepar- ing, and dry kilning, all of the processes in making raw timber into the different products offered by the mill. Mike Poncil is the veteran of the group.
He started working on the railroad’s sea- sonal section crew in the mid 1970s. In the early days, teenage children of mill and railroad workers were hired as sum-
mer help to maintain the railroad. “They would hand us spike mauls and wrench- es and start from one end of the railroad and work towards the other, tightening joint bars, pounding spikes, checking gauge, and replacing ties as needed.” For several years while in school, Mike progressed from summer section help to becoming the track foreman of summer hires in 1978. After college and working a time in California, he returned to the woods, first as a fire forester, then back into the mill as a planer operator, then working on loading rail cars. In 2005 he moved over to the railroad operations. As with other small railroads, some-
times it requires the help of all people to work any assignment when needed. Mike recalls a time in the early days when the railroad was rebuilding one of its loco- motives at the time, GE 70-tonner No. 205. “During the rebuild, I was elected to be the one that was to crawl inside the
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