She Was My Train Partner for 20 Years The Merger Took Her Away

We shared sunrises through train windows. Now she’s on a route I’ll never ride

Every morning for the last 20 years, my day started with the same sound: the low, steady hum of the freight engine, the hiss of air brakes, and the voice of Denise on the radio saying, “Ready when you are, partner.”

We weren’t related by blood. We didn’t grow up together. But in the world of trains, when you share a cab for that many miles, you become family.

She liked her coffee black. I liked mine with two sugars and powdered creamer, the kind that clumps on cold mornings. She brought a peanut butter sandwich every shift. I always forgot lunch. So she started packing two.

We rode the Illinois stretch from Joliet to East St. Louis almost every week. No matter the weather. No matter the news. It was our route our rhythm. We knew where the deer liked to cross in early spring, where the fog clung longest in the valleys, and which switching yard workers gave the best waves.

So when the Union Pacific Norfolk Southern merger was announced, I didn’t think much of it. It was above our pay grade, after all. Big rail making bigger moves. The suits talked about “optimization” and “realignment” and “network efficiency.” It sounded like another headline to scroll past.

Until it wasn’t.

Within weeks, word came down that our route was being reassigned. Not eliminated just shifted. She got sent to Ohio. I got rerouted to a Southern corridor I’d never even driven. No warning. No goodbyes. Just new orders.

Our final ride together was on a Wednesday. We didn’t know it would be the last.

I still remember the sky that morning pale orange, with streaks of gold just barely cutting through the fog. We joked about how much coffee it would take to stay warm and how the brakes sounded “grumpier than usual.” Somewhere around mile marker 142, she said, “You think we’ll ever retire on the same day?”

I shrugged. “I think we’ll beat this metal to death before they ever let us go.”

We laughed.

A week later, she was gone.

Not gone-gone just somewhere else. Some other track. Some other crew. A new set of coffee breaks and voices on the radio.

I didn’t know what to say when I got the new assignment. I texted her: “Looks like they split us up.”

She sent back one emoji: a train. That was it.

We haven’t spoken much since.

It’s strange how something so big like a $100 billion railroad merger can come down to something so small: an empty second sandwich. A cold cup of coffee. A missing voice on the radio.

I try not to be bitter. I know this is how the world works. Decisions made in boardrooms ripple down to switching yards and split old crews apart.

But I miss her. Not in some dramatic, romantic way. Just in the kind of way you miss a constant something or someone that made the grind feel less like work and more like life.

We don’t talk about it much in the rail world. Not out loud, anyway. We’re tough. Quiet. Practical. We haul tons of freight through storms and heat and stress. But no one tells you how heavy absence can feel.

These days, I run a different route. New signals. New faces. Same sky, though. I still watch the sun rise from the window of my cab, and sometimes I find myself saying, “Ready when you are, partner,” before realizing no one’s there to answer.

Maybe she says it, too, from wherever she’s running now.

Maybe that’s just how it is with the railroad: people come and go, but the tracks remember.

And so do we.