(The following article by James Quirk Jr. was posted on the Burlington Hawkeye website on June 17.)
BURLINGTON, Iowa — Former Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway employees who lost their jobs when the railroad eliminated 258 local positions in January 2003 may soon get called back to work at the company’s Galesburg, Ill. location.
The possible operations expansion in Galesburg is what local consultant Randy Danniel, operator of Railroad Data Services, West Burlington, was trying to make happen in Burlington before the city filed a lawsuit against the railroad on March 4.
Steve Forsberg, BNSF spokesman, said Wednesday there’s a possibility the railroad’s Galesburg location, which already employs 900, will start servicing locomotives, meaning more employees would be needed.
Forsberg didn’t know how many former Burlington area employees BNSF would try to furlough back into the fold or when a decision will be made.
Des Moines County Supervisor Ed Blow said Tuesday he heard a rumor that General Electric Co. would be in charge of the maintenance.
“There’s nothing formally in place,” Forsberg said. “I would not be surprised if such an agreement were worked out with GE, simply because we typically have such operations in place at all of our biggest rail yards because they’re the focal points of the majority of our rail track.”
It’s also possible BNSF management itself would oversee locomotive maintenance in Galesburg, he said.
Whatever the case, the work would still be done by BNSF employees, Forsberg said.
“It’s just done in some cases under the supervision of managers from the manufacturer (like GE or General Motors’ Electro Motive Division),” he said.
Galesburg is the second–busiest rail yard in the entire BNSF system, he said.
Forsberg made it clear “there’s nothing currently in place and there’s no contract that’s been negotiated and signed with GE, but clearly we had previously announced a few months ago that we were going to be assigning a lot of new locomotives — we’re acquiring more than 300 this year and we’re running out of capacity to maintain and service the fleet in Kansas City — and Galesburg was the natural choice from an operation standpoint.
“Management is obviously assessing and discussing … the increased number of locomotives that will be serviced out of Galesburg (and) how that work is going to be done,” he said, adding he doesn’t know how many locomotives would be assigned to Galesburg.
“What I do know is we’re adding more than 300 locomotives to our fleet this year,” Forsberg said.
The BNSF management in Galesburg “will, at some point, make a determination if they need more employees to get the work done,” he said. “If they decide they need more, it’s possible some furloughed employees could be called back to work. Who gets called is really determined by the seniority roster within the individual unions … the people in Galesburg and Burlington were part of the same seniority district.”
Danniel said in March that, while under a still–disputed verbal contract with the Southeast Iowa Regional Planning Commission, he was working toward getting BNSF, which was in the process of transferring local positions elsewhere, to sell the West Burlington shops to a non–profit subsidiary of SEIRPC for $1.
The subsidiary, in turn, could have sold the property to either GE or EMD, which could use the shops as repair facilities for BNSF’s new leased locomotives.
Danniel said his plan was derailed when the City Council decided to sue BNSF for breaching a 146–year–old contract that stipulates the railroad could use riverfront property as long as it maintains its principal shops in the city.
Blow said Tuesday that he believes some of the jobs that may get created in Galesburg could have been created in the city if the lawsuit wasn’t filed.
Forsberg said it’s “highly unlikely” Burlington would have been considered for the maintenance work because “the reason you look at a Galesburg is (because) you don’t want to have to disconnect or have to haul locomotives any distance to do this kind of servicing.”
BNSF’s interest in establishing Galesburg and not Burlington as the place for locomotive maintenance was a “business decision,” he said, and had nothing to do with the lawsuit, which is still pending in federal court.
“Would you do business with somebody who had a lawsuit filed against you?” Councilman Mike Campbell, who was against filing a lawsuit against BNSF, said Wednesday. “Sure, it was a business decision.”
Although Forsberg doesn’t believe BNSF would ever have considered Burlington for the locomotive maintenance jobs, Danniel said Wednesday he believes his plan had a chance.
“That’s the thing about economic development,” Danniel said. “You have to believe that to go try and do these things. You have to have that foresight that something good could happen. When you just shut your mind and say we’re going to sue, you no longer have the foresight for the future … I think as this story continues to unfold, you will see that it doesn’t take a smart man to shoot the messenger.”
Forsberg, however, said it wouldn’t be logical to consider a maintenance operation in Burlington instead of Galesburg when there’s heavier train traffic in Galesburg.
All of the train traffic that comes across southern Iowa, as well as the traffic moving between Minneapolis and Kansas City and Chicago and Kansas City, passes through Galesburg, he said.
Forsberg said there’s “a record amount of hiring going on, quite frankly, across the railroad industry.
“Over the next six years, the railroad industry is projected to hire more than 80,000 people,” he said. “A vast majority of that is being driven by demographic turnover in the rail industry employment, where you got a surge of baby boomers who are going to be eligible for retirement at age 60 because of a change in the Railroad Retirement Act by Congress.”
The new act allows railroad employees who have 30 years of service to retire at age 60 with full benefits, he said.