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Saturday, August 24, 2002

By Torsten Ove, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Train engineer Melanie Austin called them the "Good Old Boys Network."

They were her male co-workers at Conrail and Norfolk Southern, including her former lover and fellow engineer, Dennis Wagner, with whom she said she had a "twisted, volatile relationship."

After it ended in August 1998, the sexual harassment she said she had endured for years from railroad men escalated.

The rough railroaders wrote sexual graffiti about her on the walls of locomotives, called her "psycho bitch" on the train radio and once, she said, even hung a pair of her underwear on a stick and waved them from a train.

After lodging various complaints with management, Austin ultimately filed a federal lawsuit against the railroads, and this week a jury awarded her $450,000 after a three-day trial before U.S. District Judge Robert Cindrich.

"It was a nice verdict considering that what the railroad offered [as a settlement] was laughable," said Austin's lawyer, Zan Ivan Hodzic. "It was really miniscule, less than $10,000."

Reached at her home in Brownsville yesterday, Austin, 38, directed questions to Norfolk Southern, for whom she still works out of the rail yard in Waynesburg.

"I don't have anything to say," she said.

Attorney Thomas May, who represented the railroads at the trial, refused comment and also referred questions to Norfolk Southern.

"We take our Equal Employment Opportunity responsibilities seriously," said Frank Brown, a Norfolk Southern spokesman at company headquarters in Norfolk, Va. "We are disappointed in the verdict and we are currently evaluating what our next steps will be."

He said the railroad hasn't decided if it will appeal the decision.

The jury awarded Austin $100,000 in compensatory damages from Conrail, where she previously worked, and another $100,000 in compensatory damages from Norfolk Southern. In addition, the jury awarded her $250,000 in punitive damages from Norfolk Southern.

Austin's original 1999 lawsuit contained many complaints of harassment dating to the early 1990s, when she worked as a clerk for a small railroad later acquired by Conrail. But the jury didn't hear about those, nor did it hear about the underwear episode.

Before the trial, Cindrich ruled that testimony would focus only on incidents that occurred from 1998 on, when Austin was a Conrail engineer working out of the Shire Oaks yard in Washington, Pa. A year later, Norfolk Southern acquired part of Conrail and became her employer.

Testimony and court documents showed that male engineers wrote sexually offensive graffiti, some of it using Austin's name, in the toilet rooms of locomotives or on railroad property in Conway and Shire Oaks.

Hodzic said the harassment began in September 1998, after Austin and Wagner broke up, and continued until March 2000. Hodzic said he wasn't "pointing fingers" at Wagner, but court records indicate Austin blamed him as an instigator.

After she complained, Hodzic said, the railroad not only refused to take any action to correct the situation but retaliated by filing its own sexual harassment claim against her.

In the summer of 1999, Norfolk Southern suspended her for 30 days after a complaint that she called someone a "pervert" on the train radio. That suspension was later overturned, however, when the man who heard the word said he couldn't be sure it was directed at him.

In addition to Austin's claims of harassment, her suit also said the railroads were negligent in training their employees about sexual harassment.

"They knew it was going on," said Hodzic. "They were aware of it but took no effective steps to end it. In March of 1999, after the harassment had been going on for five months, the vice president of the entire railroad issued a memo to all managers talking about a disturbing increase of offensive graffiti."

Some of that increase, Hodzic said, was graffiti targeting Austin.

Torsten Ove can be reached at tove@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2620.