APPOINTED — Danielle Eckert, an experienced locomotive electrician and proven union leader, has been appointed director of the IBEW’s Railroad Department, effective May 15.

Before this latest achievement, Eckert served as assistant to International President Kenneth W. Cooper, who named her to replace retiring Railroad Director Al Russo.

“Al’s passion is hard to mirror,” Eckert said. “I hope that I can serve the members just as well as he did.”

A member of Altoona, Pa., Local 2273, Eckert brings a wealth of experience to her new role.

She joined the Army Reserve in 2007 and invested the service’s education stipend toward earning a bachelor’s degree in secondary education from Mount Aloysius College. While Eckert was there, she married her husband, Jason, and the couple had a daughter soon afterward.

Eckert intended to become a teacher. Permanent full-time work proved elusive, so she helped support her family as a substitute and by working at a Sheetz, an Altoona-based convenience store chain with hundreds of locations in the Mid-Atlantic.

“We’re a big, busy shop. … [Danielle] was always up to every task.”

_{– Altoona, Pa., Local 2273 Chair Kevin Beers}

After Eckert was promoted to a job in Sheetz’s corporate office, an Army Reserve friend working at Norfolk Southern Railroad’s nearby Juniata locomotive shop urged her to apply for work there.

“It was a union job, and it was good pay and benefits,” said Eckert, who started working for the railroad in another union. She became a member of the IBEW through Local 2273 in 2014 after passing the interview to become a locomotive electrician, thanks in part to some Army Reserve-gained skills.

“There wasn’t a huge adjustment, making the transition from the corporate world,” Eckert said. “It was similar to the Reserve, working on your feet and doing technical work around mechanical equipment.”

Eckert’s job took her to different parts of the massive Juniata complex, once one of the world’s largest.

“We’re a big, busy shop, and Dani was always driven,” said Local 2273 Chair Kevin Beers, who worked with Eckert on several projects at the facility.

Sometimes Eckert could be part of a team running cable or performing diagnostics; other times, she might be assigned to a locomotive buildup — “tearing it down to the frame and then rebuilding it with modernized electrical components,” she said.

Eckert also got increasingly active with Local 2273. She had been working as the local’s volunteer political registrar when, in 2019, then-Chair Dan Dorsch encouraged her to run for an open executive board seat.

Shortly after winning that election, though, Eckert joined the ranks of hundreds of IBEW and other unions’ members who had been furloughed by Norfolk Southern and other major U.S. freight rail carriers as they pursued a radical cost-cutting strategy known as “precision scheduled railroading.”

Eckert’s furlough fueled her desire to remain in the IBEW and advocate for her fellow members. “I wasn’t entirely happy with the carrier,” she said. “I thought that they were making changes that were more like hedge funds out to destroy workplaces.”

In 2020, Eckert was appointed as an international representative in the Government Affairs Department, and she later finished her contract with the Army Reserve, having reached the rank of staff sergeant. By then, she had also earned a master’s degree in management and leadership from Liberty University.

The following year, Eckert was appointed director of her department, and she remained in that role until her 2024 assignment as Cooper’s assistant.

“She was always up to every task,” Beers said. “She’ll be excellent as Railroad director.”

Please join the officers and staff of the IBEW in wishing Sister Eckert good luck and much success in her new position.