For the Union Pacific Railroad Workers crowded between shifts into a motel break room here, beetles crunching under work boots, nights and weekends never arrive. And almost everyone has stories about their schedules.

Consider the conductor who departed Houston at 8:40 p.m. on a recent Thursday. So many other trains were trying to use the same rails that his 12 hour shift, the federally allowed maximum, brought him only 80 miles, just a third of the way to Livonia, a bayou town a couple of parishes west of Baton Rouge.

With no choice but to halt, the conductor was stranded more than three hours until a van came to his rescue. It took nearly five hours more to reach the motel here.

Dispatched back to Houston late on Saturday morning, he arrived shortly before midnight. After a few waking hours with his wife, he was back on duty just before noon on Sunday. This time he made it closer to the Livonia rail yard, but not close enough. Stranded again, a van driver dumped him at the motel at 2:15 a.m. Monday.

Even in normal times, to work on the railroad is to enter a world apart. It schedules, culture and grimy, clangorous locals, where a slip or stumble can end a career or a life, make conductors and engineers a hidden brotherhood. It is an existence that outsiders, especially families, often cannot understand.

But for Union Pacific workers, the costs are immediate and personal. Wives and children become strangers. During brief visits home, no plans can be firm. And Federal investigators, in findings that the railroad disputes, list mismanagement and worker fatigue among the prime causes of crashes that killed nine workers last year.

Seeing how the merger went so wrong takes no M.B.A., no fancy title, only recent experience of trying to run a Union Pacific train. Engineers and conductors say they watched the railroad's managers try to squeeze the deal for every possible economy and efficiency. But when a brisk economy kept freight traffic rising, there were far too few supervisors, locomotives or crews.

"There are too few of everybody for what they're trying to do," said an engineer at the Oak Tree Inn, the motel here. "They're trying to put ten pounds of taters into a five pound sack."

For all these rigors, conductors and engineers get two rewards. First is membership in a fraternity of those who can guide mighty chains of steel a mile or two long. "Like my dad says, 'The railroad is not a job; it's a way of life,'" said Cory Gravouia, a conductor and the son of a railroad engineer, as he finished a Sunday shift at the Livonia rail yard.

Second is pay that is about as good as blue-collar gets: usually $55,000 to $90,000 a year, including overtime, but $70,000 to $100,000 last year with all extended shifts.

Last year, workers in the Houston region, which stretches into much of Arkansas and Louisiana, reached their limits. They win their union's backing for a regional walkout, but a court ruled that safety and fatigue were not issues over which they could strike. In the railroad tradition of wearing company caps, they made up caps of their own with the red. white, and blue Union Pacific crest-- and this motto: "Hello Houston. We Have a Problem."

Still, wimps need not apply. From Mr. Davidson, a 6-foot-4 former brakeman, on the down, railroad workers are sized like their trains. When a train breaks in two -- it happens once or twice a day on the system-- the conductor must be ready to lug an 80-pound joint called a knuckle, perhaps a mile or more.

Besides muscle, the work takes attentiveness and skill. Though long hauls across the open West can turn monotonous, engineers and conductors on other routes are busy every minute. Unlike jets, trains have no autopilot.

Over a crackling radio, dispatchers relayed the conditions ahead and granted permission to proceed. Computerized trackside monitors beamed in their own cautions in the monotone of synthesized speech. Mr. Deloach, who lives in Houston, adjusted his speed through curves, grades, bridges, and patches where maintenance, delayed because of congestion, forced him to go as slowly as 10 miles an hour. At his top speed of almost 50 miles an hour, stopping a train with 2 locomotives and 96 cars, weighing a total of more than 6200 tons, would have taken at least a mile.