Benjamin J. Gordon, 85, railroad engineer

"If heaven has no trains," Benjamin J. Gordon often told his children, "then I'm not going."

When he retired in 1990, Mr. Gordon was chief engineering officer for Conrail, the Consolidated Rail Corp., which the federal government formed in 1976 from Penn Central and five other bankrupt railroads.

On Saturday, Mr. Gordon, 85, died of complications from pneumonia at his home in Radnor.

As a teenager, he had been an Olympic-grade athlete.

In 1948, his daughter Anne Moran said, "he started out with the New York Central Railroad in Cleveland."

He moved to Philadelphia in 1968 to work with Penn Central.

For 26 years, beginning with New York Central, she said, "he had his own private railroad car" to use for duties such as inspecting tracks.

While at Conrail in 1981, he began working with Plasser American Corp. A 2007 piece in the magazine Railway Age, she said, reported that he had worked with Plasser "in 1988 on development of a roadbed boring machine, the first of its kind in North America."

For 10 years after retirement, Mr. Gordon consulted with L. Stanley Crane, a former chairman of Conrail.

Mr. Gordon grew up in Buffalo, graduated in 1941 from Kenmore (N.Y.) High School, and, while a student at Michigan State University, enlisted in the Navy in 1942.

In 1947, he graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology and for a year took courses at Columbia University.

In 1940, he had been named to the U.S. Olympic cycling team, his daughter said, but never competed because World War II intervened. Mr. Gordon cycled only during high school, his daughter said, and would have competed in the Olympic mile on a steeply banked track in velodrome racing, using a bike with one gear and no brakes.

As a teenager, he was a competitive sailor in a 26-foot boat on Lake Erie, she said, and in college he played varsity hockey. Later in life, he was a member of the St. Davids Golf Club.

Besides his daughter, Mr. Gordon is survived by his wife of 60 years, Catherine; sons Joseph, Benjamin, Michael and Peter; daughters Jane Fog and Kathy Mullaney; and 14 grandchildren.

A Funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. today at St. John Neumann Roman Catholic Church, 380 Highland Lane, Bryn Mawr, followed by burial in St. Agnes Cemetery in West Chester.