The Secret Life of Quonset

Brian Baer and John Fuller. Photography by James Jones.

Brian Baer, Engineer, and John Fuller, Conductor, Seaview Transportation Company

There’s a brief moment of pure railroading glory as engine number five builds up some speed running the mile or so from its West Davisville base down to the Quonset port area, pulling a string of ten cars full of plastic pellets to the Toray factory.

The Seaview Transportation Company operates more than fourteen miles of track, but a mile and a half is usually as far as this industrial rail hauls cargo — and even that trip is full of constant starts and stops. “We really don’t go that far,” admits Seaview  engineer Brian Baer.

At times, the job of Seaview’s engineers and conductors is less the romance of the rails than a giant game of Tetris. Cars are constantly being coupled and uncoupled, switches being thrown so the trains can either proceed forward or change tracks, and loads of cargo added or dropped from the train according to their destination and order of delivery.

On a passenger train, the conductor is the guy who collects your tickets; with a freight operation like Seaview, the conductor works hand-in-hand with the engineer, who closely follows the conductor’s commands as the pair works to build trainsets for deliveries to Toray, NORAD, BBS Lumber and other customers at Quonset.

“I run the train — it’s my job both with the rail cars and the paperwork,” says Seaview conductor John Fuller. “I tell the engineer where we are going.”

Fuller is constantly jumping on and off the train even on the short trip we take on a chilly morning, manually operating switches, visually inspecting rails and cars, and carefully counting down over the radio (“twenty feet, ten, five — good”) so that cars can be coupled gently but firmly together. Good teamwork ensures not only the safety of the train, but the crew.

“I’m only as good as the guy on the ground,” says Baer, who has been driving trains in Quonset for the past twenty-seven years. “He’s my eyes and ears, so you have to have a lot of trust.”

Baer joined the company after being laid off from Raytheon and later working in a lumberyard, while Fuller followed a more serpentine path, spending decades in the restaurant business and as a wedding photographer before randomly meeting Seaview Transportation Company CEO Eric Moffett at a model railroading show about four years ago. Fuller has a G scale model railroad in his yard, and as a hobbyist he understood the basics about engines and rail cars, but also underwent extensive on-the-job training and licensing.

Unlike his peripatetic conductor, Baer can spend an entire eight-hour shift without even getting off the engine. He has a small heater to stay warm in the winter, while the conductor and track crew have the unenviable task of working outside and clearing snow in the winter — digging out the system of twenty-six switches alone can take hours.

Regardless of the cargo, the goal is to do things in the fewest moves possible, says Fuller. Still, progress is sometimes measured in feet, not miles. “A lot of people, when they find out you work on the rails, think all you do is go for train rides,” says Baer. “There’s a lot more to it than that.”

As I walk the rails alongside a moving freight train, the heavy cars cause the ties, rails and spikes to snap, crackle and pop alarmingly. The giant steel wheels don’t ride flat atop the rails, but frequently drift from side to side as the heavy train lumbers along. It’s all normal, says Fuller, but also why the rails require constant maintenance and the conductor needs to be ever-vigilant for potential problems.

“It’s no fun derailing,” says Baer, who like every engineer has seen a train land on the dirt a few times, usually because of switching problems. After decades at the controls, though, Baer moves the 248,000-pound, 1,200-horsepower diesel engine around the yard with a delicate touch.

“It’s all in the feel,” he says. “Once you get a feel for the brakes on the train, you are golden.”