Remembering Union Pacific’s John Bromley

Ask anyone who covers railroads for a living and they’ll tell you — if they are honest — they couldn’t do it without the support of their contacts in railroad public relations. Of course, such cooperation varies from company to company, and PR directors I’ve known have run the gamut from obfuscation to enlightenment.

One of the stellar guys in the latter category was John Bromley, longtime public affairs director at Union Pacific. I can’t imagine how anyone could have done a better job representing the storied Overland Route than Bromley. He was not only a PR professional, but a true railroad historian, with Armour yellow in his veins.

I was saddened to hear that John died last month at age 81. I hadn’t spoken with him in many years, but back in the 1990s, when I edited Trains, we talked all the time. He was the kind of PR man you could trust, so long as he could trust you. And unlike so many in corporate communications today, he knew railroading cold. If you said “angle cock” or “19 and 31 flimsies” he knew what the hell you were talking about.

John presided over UP’s PR during an especially fertile era when his railroad was expanding during the megamerger era. At Trains, we could not have adequately explained how UP was gobbling up Southern Pacific or Chicago & North Western without the reliable and patient support of a guy like John. Nor could we report effectively on some of the unfortunate things that can happen on the railroad (derailments, operational meltdowns) without the honest answers he was always ready to provide.

I suppose management thought of Bromley’s job priorities as the Wall Street Journal or Railway Age or the Omaha World-Herald. It helped that before coming to UP this Navy veteran spent several years working for newspapers. However, perhaps more than any other corporate rep I knew, he respected the role of enthusiast publications such as Trains and Railfan.

John made that clear in September 1990, when UP was ready to unveil its renovated steam shop. He brought staff from both magazines from Chicago to Cheyenne aboard a pair of business cars on the back of a hot intermodal train. On board were Jim Boyd and Mike Del Vecchio from the competition, and me.

The hospitality was unbelievable. In addition to John and his effervescent wife Pat and perhaps one or two more guests, we had a two-man staff aboard the office car Kenefick, including a chef. The food was terrific (steak and lobster) and there were plenty of drinks to go around. But what was best were the conversations we shared at night in the muffled quiet of the Kenefick’s observation lounge as Nebraska unspooled behind us in the glare of inspection lights. The next day’s tour of Cheyenne — including a steamed-up Challenger 3985 as well as fantrip veteran 844 — had a hard act to follow.

John’s appreciation for Trains became even more clear five years later when he worked with us on one of the magazine’s biggest stunts: surrounding the day-long operation of a freight train with a team of writers and photographers. The idea was to focus the story of the late-1990s railroad revival through the lens of just one day on one train on one railroad. The project would require the unprecedented involvement of management.

When the staff and I first tossed around the idea early in 1995, we considered a number of railroads that could meet our basic criteria, which included daylight operation of a merchandise train over a single division, with the Trains reporter in the cab, another in the dispatcher’s office, and two at the terminating yard, along with several photo teams chasing by highway. We thought about asking Conrail or CSX, but ultimately settled on Union Pacific for one simple reason: We were confident Bromley would not only “get” what we were up to, but maybe even embrace it.

He did. He made a skillful appeal to UP President Dick Davidson and pretty soon we had a green signal. On May 10, 1995, our team of 14 descended on the railroad’s Council Bluffs Subdivision. The results were splashed across the entire November 1995 issue — the magazine’s 55^th anniversary — under the headline “Super Railroad.” Readers loved the issue, but what meant more to me was a good review from John Bromley, who took some professional risk in backing the whole thing.

History became the theme of Bromley’s later professional life. After 25 years in PR at 1416 Dodge Street, the company installed him as director of historic projects, a job that had him spending a lot of time across the Missouri River at the Union Pacific Museum in Council Bluffs. It’s a terrific museum that other railroads would do well to emulate. There, Bromley immersed himself in the company’s extensive archives and assisting outsiders with research.

The museum also became a venue for some of Bromley’s vivid railroad paintings, a hobby he successfully pursued for years. Much of his art ended up on UP corporate Christmas cards, or as prints on the walls of UP offices across the system. John talked about his passion for painting in a segment on Milwaukee public TV’s “Tracks Ahead” series.

One of John’s later associates was Mike Connor, who is active in the UP Historical Society and worked with Bromley in various ways. “John was for sure a Union Pacific guy,” says Connor. “Even the license plate on his truck said UPRRPR! Bromley was a true gentleman and railroader who really knew what he was talking about when he was speaking to the public.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by writer Fred W. Frailey, who covered UP countless times over his career as a Trains feature writer and columnist. “John was on my short list of press people who always went an extra mile to help writers,” Fred recalls. “And I took his word as gospel, because it was the truth. It helped that John was always fun to be around. He took his job seriously but enjoyed peoples’ company. I miss him already.”

To prepare for this tribute, I went back to that November 1995 issue and re-discovered something I wrote that might be worth repeating: “John is in the front rank of railroad PR people. He’s made it his business to know where his company came from, what it does today, and why. He’s at much at ease talking about E. H. Harriman as he is R. K. Davidson. He knows that one Challenger was a passenger train and another is a 4-6-6-4. He knows where Lodge Pole is. His grasp of his job is strong and subtle, and we were pleased to have him in our company on the Council Bluffs Sub.”

Union Pacific has had a lot of good slogans over the years. One strikes me as a good description of John Bromley: “We Deliver.”