Patricia Lollis finished two years of college with the goal of becoming a nurse. During a random conversation with her neighbor, a locomotive engineer for the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe, she was advised to apply for a job with the railroad. He encouraged her because he had heard they were going to hire a woman and believed she could handle the work. She applied with 200 other women, and was selected for the one position. Four weeks after her twenty first birthday in 1974, she climbed the steps of a locomotive and walked into a new world of sights and sounds that had previously been denied to women. Fascinated and determined, one year later in 1975 she was promoted to engineer, and became the first woman promoted to engineer on the Santa Fe Valley Division and a proud union member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, Division 839.