Robert P. ‘Bob’ Fetter, a career railroader whose lifelong love affair with trains led to marketing positions at C&O/B&O and Norfolk Southern, died Jan. 22 of cancer at Broadmead, a retirement community in Cockeysville. The former Roland Park resident was 91.
“Bob was smart, well-educated, hardworking and a devout Quaker,” said E. Ray Lichty, a retired CSX executive and longtime friend. “And while he was an office guy for the Baltimore & Ohio and later the Norfolk Southern, he was also a knowledgeable operating guy.”
Robert Pollard Fetter was the son of Frank Fetter, an economics professor at Princeton University, and Elizabeth Fetter, a musician.
Due to his father’s career in academia, Mr. Fetter was raised in Princeton, England, Washington and Illinois, where he graduated from high school.
His infatuation with trains and railroading began in his childhood watching Pennsylvania Railroad passenger and freight trains chugging through Princeton on what is now Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.
“Around the age of 9, rather than being drawn to comic books, he became fascinated with train schedules and committed considerable time to collecting, reading and memorizing them,” wrote his son, Allen Hutchinson Fetter, of Takoma Park, in a biographical profile of his father.
“And he spent much of his youth traveling by train and trolley and took lots of pictures as a teenager. He became interested in the logistics of both freight and passenger transport,” he wrote.
When he was in high school, Mr. Fetter worked summers as a trackman in the Chicago North Western Transportation Company yards in Chicago, and as a baggageman on the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad.
During his college years at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, from 1949 to 1953, he worked on the Algoma Central Railway in Ontario, Canada, as a trackman laying rails for a new line, and later traveled to Alaska where he also worked on railroads.
“His transportation and travel during his young adult life involved on the order of 55,000 miles of hitchhiking through the lower 48 states and Alaska, and at least one clandestine overnight ride on top of a coal hopper car,” his son wrote.
From 1953 to to 1955, he served as an Army postal clerk at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana and was discharged from Fort Tacoma in Washington State.
After earning a master’s degree in 1957 from the Harvard Business School, he began his railroad career in Baltimore with the old Baltimore & Ohio Railroad where he was assigned to work on the line’s first computer, the Honeywell Datamatic 1000.
Mr. Fetter then held positions in industrial engineering, marketing and corporate planning. In 1972, he left what was then C&O/B&O when he was hired as director of market research at the Southern Railway’s headquarters in Washington.
An avid cyclist, he rode his bike from his Roland Park home to Penn Station where he caught a commuter train to Washington then hopped aboard a bike he had stashed for a ride to his office, and then reversed the entire procedure in the evening, his son said in a telephone interview.
After the Southern merged in 1982 with the Norfolk & Western Railway, Mr. Fetter moved to the company’s headquarters in Roanoke, Virginia, where he worked in market research until retiring in 1987.
“He wanted to reduce the stress and at the time of his retirement was a senior marketing analyst,” his son said.
“Bob was an academic and an intellectual type which isn’t often what you find in railroading,” said William “Bill” Schaefer, who worked with Mr. Fetter both at the Southern and Norfolk Southern, with a laugh.
As important as Mr. Fetter’s railroad career was to him, it was only seconded by his Quaker faith and involvement in various volunteer efforts.
He worked with numerous Quaker committees including the Hi-Qs at Stony Run Friends Meeting, where he led hiking trips on the Appalachian Trail.
A resident of Broadmead since 2007, he maintained an interest in genealogy and family vacations often included, his son said, exploring abandoned rail lines, visiting railroad yards and railroad museums.
In 1960, he married Elizabeth Ann “Suzie” Hutcheson, who taught biology at Roland Park Country School and after earning a master’s degree in special education from Loyola University of Maryland, taught special needs children. She died in 2019.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. March 2 at the Gunpowder Friends Meeting at 14934 Priceville Road in Sparks.
In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Elizabeth Fetter, of Fairfield, Pennsylvania; a brother, Thomas Whitson Fetter, of Bedford Center, Vermont; a sister, Ellen Fetter Gille, of Boulder, Colorado; four grandchildren; and his companion, Jean Wilson, of Broadmead.