It says a lot that a guy gets out of bed at 3:30 a.m. to get ready for work, to be sure he’d arrive well ahead of his 5:30 a.m. start time. It says even more that he’s done it for over 40 years.

His supervisor at the Coffeyville (Kansas) Repair & Maintenance Terminal painted an even clearer picture of his reliability, saying he couldn’t think of a time his team member had ever missed a day or called in late.
The early riser with excellent attendance is David Bidleman. Bidleman retired last month from the shop after four decades there. It’s understandable that a priority on the first day of his post-career life was to grab some extra shut-eye. “I woke up about 7 and thought, ‘Nope, I’m going to go back to sleep,’” he said. “So I went back to sleep.”

Bidleman began his Watco career at the Coffeyville facility in 1985, when Watco was only two years old. This location works on cars coming from Union Pacific, primarily aluminum rotary gondolas. Union Pacific interchanges in Coffeyville with the South Kansas & Oklahoma Railroad, which picks up the bad-order cars and takes them about a half mile south to the shop.

As a railcar repairman, Bidleman worked both as a metal fabricator and someone who removed, repaired, and reinstalled steel roller bearings on wheelsets. Starting off, “I worked Wednesday through Friday in the fab shop and Saturday and Sunday in the bearing shop,” he said.

He became known for his fabrication skills. He’s good at measuring and cutting metal, bending it, fitting it into place, and welding it. He created things like braking system brackets to hold air lines and the support plates and gussets that provide a car’s structural reinforcement. Sometimes he’d tackle what he called “the trickiest” challenge: rebuilding a severely damaged hopper car. That included tasks such as forming four new steel slope sheets that funnel grain to the outlet gates beneath the car and recreating the discharge assembly itself. This hopper car repair sometimes involved an overhead crane to maneuver the large pieces into place.

He also became known as a storyteller, according to Railcar Coordinator Raymond Gray, who worked 33 years with Bidleman. “He’s always got a good story,” Gray said. “He likes to tell them about the old days. He tells stories about Dick Webb from when he first hired on.”

Since Bidleman was there in Watco’s infancy, he often encountered company founder Dick Webb at the Coffeyville shop. “Dick was always there,” Bidleman recalls. “He was the main guy; he was there most all the time. When we were making side posts for the steel coal cars, sometimes we’d work on the weekend, and Dick would be there the whole time. He was hands-on with us a lot. He kept us going.”

Maybe another thing that kept Bidleman going were imagining the things he’d do once he retired. “I’m going to do a lot of hunting and fishing,” he said. There was also a mention of camping. And something about his wife’s honey-do list …