ATLANTA — Steeped in his father’s serial gripes about the hardships of working on the railroad, Robert McRee had no intention of following in his footsteps, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
“I fought it for a long time,” said McRee, 30. After high school, he went into the Navy instead. Then he got a degree in psychology and tried a number of occupations near his home in Chattanooga, including working in a juvenile mental health facility and installing large cranes in factories.
But now McRee is training for a job at Norfolk Southern, the same railroad from which his father, 59, plans to retire in a few months.
At Norfolk Southern’s national training center in McDonough, about 30 miles south of Atlanta, the younger McRee is learning how to repair and install the signal systems the railroad uses along its 21,500 miles of tracks.
He’s part of a rising stream of 1,100 new hires — almost 40 percent more than last year — expected to flow through the center this year.
After years of job-cutting and consolidation, hiring at the nation’s biggest railroads has jumped, partly because they expect the reviving economy to boost cargo shipments.
The biggest reason, however, is the need to replace retirees after President Bush signed a law late last year that liberalized the federal rail pension system. The new law dropped the retirement age for railroad workers with at least 30 years’ service from 62 to 60.
Through April, more than 6,000 railroad workers have applied for pensions nationwide, compared with 6,165 for all of last year, said Jim Metlicka, a spokesman for the Railroad Retirement Board.
Training classes will be bigger for years to come because “we are a graying industry,” said Tom White, spokesman for the Association of American Railroads. Over half of railroad workers are 45 or older, compared with one-third of all U.S. workers, he said.
McRee expects to start at $16.91 an hour after he finishes the eight-week course, and eventually make about $19 an hour. It’s more than he made in previous jobs, with better benefits.
McRee said his parents at first discouraged him from working for Norfolk Southern, where his father repairs damaged railcars in Chattanooga. They wanted him to go to college.
“It was only in the last couple of years, I realized, he loves his job,” said McRee of his father. “He actually gets excited when they bring in a crashed train.”
‘Great opportunity’
Like McRee, many of the 82 trainees now at Norfolk Southern’s center are aiming for positions that became available because of retirements.
“We’re training in crafts we haven’t trained in years,” said William Faulhaber, manager of the 18-acre complex. It includes five brown brick and metal buildings backed up to several tracks. Two 135-ton locomotives and 17 freight cars are parked on them.
Students come from several states, drawn by jobs that in many cases don’t require college degrees. Train engineers earn around $60,000 a year on average, according to Norfolk Southern.
Debbie Nowak, 44, said she expects to make about $14 an hour after she completes an eight-week course to become a railcar inspector and repairman at a Norfolk Southern rail yard near Chicago. She expects to eventually make about $19 an hour.
“That’s more money than I’ve made in my life,” said Nowak, who previously worked at a Chicago-area photo lab. After more than 10 years there, processing black-and-white photos at $10.33 an hour, she quit last fall but couldn’t find another job.
She moved in with her brother in Indiana after losing her apartment.
Then in March, she heard that Norfolk Southern was holding job interviews at a Chicago hotel. She had plenty of company when she showed up early for the all-day session of tests and interviews.
“It was like 300 people showed up,” she said, for 10 trainee positions. “I looked around, and I saw maybe 10 women total. It was kind of intimidating, but I’ve worked in that kind of situation before.”
The supervisor of Norfolk Southern’s railcar body shop and two other men interviewed her. The job requires learning how to weld repairs on the railcars, she was told. Her only welding experience was 20 years earlier in a college sculpture class.
Still, she hoped she had a chance because “they want the people who really want to be there, and a lot of people just left.”
She got a call a few days later. Of 10 people in her class at McDonough, which began last week, six are from the Chicago session. She’s the only woman.
Intense training
Brook Hartzog, 31, quit his job as a high school physics, chemistry and biology teacher in Macon almost five years ago to go to work for Norfolk Southern as a conductor, a crew member who rides on a train but does not control it.
“I bring home in two weeks about what I brought home in a month teaching, and with two kids and a wife, that makes this side of the fence a lot greener,” said Hartzog.
Last week he was back at Norfolk Southern’s training center, striving for a certificate to become an engineer, who handles the controls.
It was his third day.
“I need all the help I can get,” said Hartzog, sitting behind the controls of Engine No. 6693, a $4 million locomotive simulator.
Over a loudspeaker, an instructor on another floor watched Hartzog via a video camera, and talked him through the correct sequence of throttle and brake settings to get his virtual 22-car train rolling.
Another engineer trainee, Derrick Justice, a 20-year-old conductor from Belfry, Ky., sat in a corner of the train cab, observing.
The deep throb of a 3,800 horsepower diesel filled the dark two-story room, coming through loudspeakers mounted under the simulator. The cab began to rock and a rear-projection screen in front showed the train’s progress along the hilly, curving track.
Hartzog entered an uphill stretch. The train slowed from 26 mph to 24 mph.
“Looking good, Brook. Just keep working your throttle,” the instructor told Hartzog.
At each railroad crossing, he switched on clanging bells and blew the whistle, two long blasts, a short, and then another long one, to warn motorists.
At the top of a hill, the instructor told him to back off the throttle and begin applying the dynamic brakes, which use the locomotive’s big electric motors mounted on each wheel to slow the train on downhill stretches.
“Now what you feel is the cars behind us bumping us,” said senior instructor Ken Gercken, who was inside the cab watching Hartzog.
Engineers use two other sets of air brakes as well, he explained, to stop the train. A key task is controlling slack in the train, to keep the cars from banging into each other too hard.
“That’s why the training is long and intensive,” said Gercken. “One engine, you can’t hurt much, but we run three and four and five and six.”
These days, long-distance trains can be up to three miles long, with more than 200 rail cars. Apply too much throttle, and the engineer “can rip one in half at any time,” said Gercken. Apply too much brake, and the cars can jump off the tracks.
Using the simulators, “we can save ourselves a lot of money and headaches,” he said.
More tests ahead
After four weeks at the training center, the 14 engineer trainees will spend the next six months to two years under another engineer’s supervision.
To become qualified to operate in their own territory under the company’s rules and federal regulations, they must pass more written and proficiency tests. Like riverboat pilots, they also will be expected to learn every mile of their territory, typically 300 to 1,000 miles of track, said Gercken.
But first, Hartzog has to stop his simulator train, which has reached the end of its 9-mile “run” south from the training center to Luella.
“You’re ready to stop. Left hand on the automatic. Right hand on the independent,” the instructor said over the loudspeaker, referring to the other two sets of brakes.
The train slowly rolls to a stop.
“Ok, drop your throttle.”
Back outside on a humid, sunny day a little before noon, Hartzog, silent during his run, blew off a little steam.
It’s easy to make a train go, but it’s hard to learn how to stop, he said.
“It’s not like stopping a car. Each train’s a different monster,” he said. “As a conductor, you just take for granted what the engineer’s doing. You don’t know the amount of thought that’s going on in their head.”