Kaye Baillie

Railroad Engineer Olive Dennis Kaye Baillie

When Olive Dennis was young, girls were expected to be sewing, cooking, and cleaning. But Olive was busy imagining, designing, and building everything from a wooden dollhouse to a model streetcar with working parts. When she grew up, Olive continued to defy expectations, earning a civil engineering degree and becoming the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's first female engineer. Her genius for inventing improvements based on her keen observations of passengers' needs and problems led her to the assignment of a lifetime: designing a luxury train that would change rail travel forever.