Team Member Spotlight: Ami Yonts

Watco’s short line railroad teams are some of our most publicly visible team members. They serve our customers and

Ami Yonts Signal Desk Assistant pass through our communities daily, but there’s a group of unsung heroes behind the scenes who help make sure our team can operate safely. Ami Yonts is one of them.

Yonts is a Signal Desk Assistant with Watco’s dispatch team. They’re based in the Kansas & Oklahoma Railroad’s (KO) Wichita, Kansas, depot. From this central hub, Yonts and her group coordinate traffic on 34 of the 43 short lines in the Watco network.

“I communicate with the train crews and the maintenance of way. If we need bulletins from the Class I’s, we call and get the bulletins for them and then send them on. I talk to whoever I need to talk to, to make sure that our guys have what they need to do their job in a safe manner,” Yonts said.

Most Watco short lines are brought into and dispatched from the Wichita dispatch center when they become part of Watco, but one did not. The Ann Arbor Railroad (AA) was first brought on in 2013 but dispatched from Toledo, Ohio, until September 2019. Our dispatchers also regularly work with specific railroads, so they’re familiar with their territories. Yonts’ main railroads are the AA, the Grand Elk, and the Kanawha River. On weekends, she also works the West Desk where she assists the Eastern Idaho, Mission Mountain, and South Kansas & Oklahoma railroads.

“The time zones are the biggest difference,” Yonts said. “You have to keep those straight, especially since you can go from Eastern time to Pacific quickly. It takes attention to detail, knowing the mileposts and what subs they’re on.

Yonts joined the Watco team just over a year ago, in April 2019. She’d been a receptionist at an optometrist’s office and was seeking something more career-oriented. A good friend of hers working on the KO let her know about an open position in dispatch, and the rest is history.

“There were times in my past when people asked, ‘What do you do for a living?’ I’d duck my head a little bit – not that I’m ashamed, but I have never been more proud to answer the question, ‘What do you do for a living?’ I’m a railroad dispatcher for Watco Companies. I am part of the supply chain for the country,” Yonts said. “I know I’m helping our country out in maybe even just the smallest way. I feel like I’m productive in my life finally; I feel like I’m doing something. I love the company I work for. I’ll tell you what: Dispatch. I love the family of Dispatch that I work for.”

Aside from feeling like she’s helping keep the economy moving, she also finds value in helping her team members. It takes more than six months of training before a Watco dispatcher is allowed to handle railroads solo. During her training, and in the time since, she’s built relationships with the team members on her railroads, and she says that’s one of the most rewarding aspects of the job.

“It takes a lot of training and time before you get comfortable, but never so comfortable that you miss something. If you rush through something, you’re going to miss it. You always have to pay attention and not miss anything, because that’s a life out there. You build relationships with these people … and you’ve got to remember that these are human lives that have children; they’re brothers, they’re sisters, uncles, aunts. They have families to go home to,” Yonts said.

She added, “But to me, they’re all the same; they’re all team members, and I’m keeping them safe.”