Need to know how to run a train engine? We've got you covered!

Joe Witten, UP Conductor, at work

Union Station's archive has a lot of obscure stuff because that's what museums and libraries do: Preserve knowledge, big and small.

Here at Union Station we're a bit specialized. For example you could, by using our library's resources, run a train,

That is an enormously complex undertaking, but  if you spent enough time wandering our shelves you could learn how to do it. We've had donated, over the years, a myriad of shop manuals, instruction manuals, records and diaries from the folks who did that work.

For example, this morning I randomly picked up a little pamphlet called "EMD and GE Engine Starting Instructions."

Those are specific types of diesel-electric engines used by the Union Pacific railroad. Cranking one of those suckers up is a lot more complex than sitting down, putting on your seat belt, turning on the radio and twisting the key on your car.

It has 30 pages of detailed checks, adjustments and procedures before you get to the last page that says "push the start button in." You have to check the crank case pressure, adjust the engine overspeed, open the cylinder test valves and crank the engine over one turn, set up the electrical stuff (whole raft of circuit breakers) and on and on and on.

Then push the button.

Every aspect of running the train was monitored as well. Conductors kept detailed logs of every run on every train, including what the train was hauling, the condition of every car, any and all problems. WE have a number of conductors' log books in our collection, and the detail is amazing. Here's a train that left Pocatello on 10-19-1948 at 11:45 p.m. carrying spuds, coal, boxes, oil, stones, asphalt, wine, liquor and more spuds. Also listed is which railroad owned each car, each car's ultimate destination and how much each car weighed.

These aren't dry numbers, these are life. These are the industry of the nation, its economic core, detailed.

Lee Witten, the chief archivist here in the library, had good reason for taking one of those log books and telling its story in pictures. It was his dad's log book.

Joe Witten was a conductor for the UP from 1943 until he died in 1974. Before that he was a brakeman.

Joe was a conductor back when they still used cabooses on trains, so Lee saw  his dad's log book as a snapshot of the end of an era, a look at how trains ran and how those little cabooses worked. He took the last 6 months of his dad's logs and set out to find pictures of the cabooses his dad worked in.

His dad worked the run between Ogden and Green River, Wyoming. Lee located pictures of as many of the engines to the trains as well as the cabooses. In his investigations, he even found one of the cabooses his dad worked in, #25280. His dad rode it into Ogden, but they found it parked in a playground in Lynndyl, Utah, in west central Utah.

He put all his work into a book for his family and donated a copy to Union Station's Utah State Railroad Museum so it can be preserved for posterity along with the conductor's log.

It's an illustration of the lives, the work, the dedication, that goes into every little bit of life in the railroads, which is just one small part of the entire economy of this huge country.

And it all comes down to a guy doing his job.

Lee in a caboose his dad worked in

The Kathleen Paco Cadman Portrait of the World: Wow.

Poco Cadman and her friend Kaymenn

In the 10 minutes of in-depth research I do for these things, I found this really fun blog post about the featured photographer at Union Station this month: Kathleen Paco Cadman.

Check it out (click) because it says a lot more than I have time or space to.

Great stuff. Briefly, Paco is a nursing instructor who's done more than 100 countries, traveling, teaching nursing to indigenous health workers, having one heck of a life.

And now she's settled here in Ogden?

Yeah, she gets that a lot.

"Burnout is a real issue" in her profession, she said, and teaching nursing at Weber State University, tenure track, gives her a bit of stability. Heck, she's buying a house.

Doesn't hurt that her parents live here.

She did a cross-country bicycle trip with her dad earlier this year, from Vancouver to Tijuana that got written up in the Standard-Examiner (click) a few months back.  Now she's settling into her job as an assistant professor at Weber State.

A few of scores of her pictures from around the world

Her travels as an instructor and adventurer took her to more than 100 countries around the world, and everywhere she went, of course she took pictures. Most of them are portraits of the folks she's lived with or worked with, but some are chance encounters here and there, everywhere from China to Madagascar.

This month her work is on exhibit in the Myra Powell Gallery at Ogden's Union Station this month. She collaborated with Nurture the Creative Mind, a station tenant that works with local children, to display her work.

Paco said she really didn't do a lot for the exhibit except hand NCM director Amir Jackson a flash drive with all her images on it. She said he selected more than 100 images from the several thousand she gave him, decided on the display method, made the prints and put up the show.

A modern day slave 

Amir did a lovely job of mounting the images on old metal shelves, which contrast well with the black and white prints he made of Paco's images. The faces look out at you with interest, curiosity, sorrow, pain and friendliness.

They're a huge contrast, Paco said. She pointed to one, an old woman holding her hands up. "She's a modern day slave. She's never known the concept of being paid for your work." The woman lives in Uthamapalayam, India, a country I bet you thought was too advanced to still have slavery.

 And just over on the next frame, she said, is a picture of a fabulously wealthy Chinese actress.

Bob Cadman, cycling buddy, father

Is she done traveling?  Doubtful. She's got to put some work into her job at WSU to get tenure, but I heard her saying something about a possible Peace Corps gig somewhere. We'll see.

So come look at her pictures.

The show is up through Dec. 2. Myra Powell Gallery is on Union Station's second floor, just down from the station library where I work. Admission is free, and if you come down on Tuesday or Thursday morning be sure to stop in at the library and say hello.