Cari-ing on a railroad family tradition

As a technical manager on BNSF’s Technology Services team, Cari Elstad understands the progression of railroad technology. That rich knowledge is partly due to her role at the railroad, and it might also be because Elstad comes from a long line of railroaders who have shared stories from working more than a century on the rails.

Elstad’s family’s railroad legacy begins more than 100 years ago. In 1917, her great-grandfather, Arthur Elstad, joined Northern Pacific Railway (NP), a BNSF predecessor, as a steam locomotive machinist. He worked out of Jamestown, North Dakota, for 39 years, retiring in 1956. During that time, he was awarded the “Silver Veteran’s Badge” from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).

Following in his father’s footsteps, Clarence Elstad also went to work for NP in Jamestown in 1937. He was a hostler at the roundhouse where he was responsible for fueling and prepping locomotives for train crews. He shared many stories about working on locomotives in subzero temperatures during his 31 years with the railroad.

Cari’s father, Craig Elstad, kept the legacy going when he joined Burlington Northern Railroad (BN) in 1976. He also began his career in North Dakota where he hired on as a brakeman, then took a conductor job before becoming a locomotive engineer. In the 1980s, he moved his family to Seattle to become a train dispatcher. He was a dispatcher for eight years, before moving to the railroad’s Technical Training Center in Kansas to teach others about safety as a rules instructor.

With the BN-Santa Fe merger in 1995, Craig moved his family to Fort Worth, Texas, the headquarters for BNSF, and joined the Network Operations Center team. In this role, he was responsible for all BNSF dispatcher databases.

Since his retirement in 2011 after 35 years with the railroad, Craig settled in Southern Utah and stays active biking, hiking, golfing and traveling with Cari’s mom, Nancy.

Cari joined BNSF as a Technology Services contractor in Fort Worth immediately following college graduation in 2006. The next summer, she was hired on as an eBusiness management trainee and spent some time working in demurrage, the process of applying fees to rail cars being held waiting to be loaded or unloaded while at origin or destination. She then moved to intermodal hub operations before joining the Technology Services team in her current role.

It wasn’t until Cari became a railroader herself that she learned much more about her grandfather and great-grandfather’s roles on the railroad.

“About six years into my career at BNSF, my father showed me my grandfather’s and great-grandfather's retirement certificates,” she said. “I had no idea where they worked. I couldn’t believe I was a fourth-generation railroader!”

Looking to the future, Cari currently builds technology systems, like remote control crane operations, for our intermodal facilities, and is excited to share them with the next generation of railroaders.