Linda Niemann

Linda Niemann has been a conductor/brakeman/switchman on the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, and AMTRAK railroads for twenty years Ph.D. (University of California-Berkeley), Assistant Professor of English, teaches creative nonfiction and is the author of two books: On the Rails (previously titled Boomer: Railroad Memoirs) and Railroad Voices. These nonfiction works chronicle her twenty-year career as a railroad freight conductor. In addition, she has published feature essays, reviews, interviews, and anthologized stories.

For many years, she has been interested in Mesoamerican culture and has traveled to Central America as a tourist, student, scholar, and teacher. She is currently working on a travel book about Mexico. Currently, she lives in Marietta, Georgia and teaches creative nonfiction at Kennesaw State University.

Review/ Synopsis

An evocative and honest portrayal in words and images of railroad life in America, Railroad Voices is a collaboration by two of the first women to work as railroad brakemen. Linda Niemann hired on the Southern Pacific in 1979 in California, where she continues to work as a conductor for the Union Pacific, and Lina Bertucci hired on the now-defunct Milwaukee Road in 1974. The eighteen-year-old Lina Bertucci used her camera to hold her own in the freightyard, and the resulting fifty-eight photographs in this book present an insider's view of a world few people have access to. This is the true world of work: the face of exhaustion, of hours spent waiting, followed by intense activity, of the outside maze of tracks and house-size boxcars the workers shepherd with their bodies and a two-dollar lantern. We notice what individuals these people are - the clothes they choose to wear, their tattoos, their faces. And they are, of course, looking at Lina, or aware of her presence in their previously all-male sanctuary. Linda Niemann's folkloric memoirs give this environment voice. The railroad for her has become an eighteen-year career and her poetic subject. As the last brakeman hired, Niemann has had to follow the work all over the Southwest, collecting travelers' tales along the way. Her stories carry the images forward in time to the present-day railroad of short crews, no cabooses, and streamlined, downsized operations. Image and text interplay to place the reader inside an exciting, changing, and dangerous world that has for generations been a major part of American culture.

On The Rails is Linda Niemann's story of working on the railroad and, in the process, reconstructing her life. A highly crafted, lyrical memoir, On The Rails is an unorthodox tale of hard drinking and gritty work, sexual adventures with both men and women, and discovering hope and a new life. Like Jack Kerouac, Niemann writes of finding oneself on a journey of physical jeopardy and exhaustion, in isolated places and precarious human connections, in a landscape whose only benevolence is "the darkness of the caboose and the unknown fragrances" of the desert. On The Rails is candid, vivid, engaging, provocative -- and a great read!

More on Niemann

Radio Interview transcript
Real Audio version