(The Atlanta Journal-Constitution posted the following article by Matt Kempner on its website on August 6.)
ATLANTA, Ga. — The baby-faced 22-year-old’s arms shake as he hangs from the ladder, his boots on a rung a mere 4 inches off the ground.
All he has to do is hold on for four minutes. During that time he has to give a few signals with his lantern, like real train conductors do.
It’s just the first day of conductor school in Atlanta, but the pressure is getting to Ray Smith, who grew up in a South Side Chicago housing project. The ladder test is supposed to simulate what he’d do on a train. Fall or wrap an exhausted arm over the rungs, and he’s an automatic washout from the training program.
Breathe easy, he tells himself. “I have no other choices. I have to do this.”
His classmates are watching. The “cubs” — each wearing a fluorescent green CSX cap denoting newbies — are learning how to work on the railroad.
Railroads, those quaint, chugging giants that opened the West, are in the midst of a hiring boom. And that has enticed a swarm of trainees to metro Atlanta, where the two lines that dominate freight rail traffic in the nation’s eastern half operate conductor schools.
Three shifts a day of wannabes roll through a brown metal building beside CSX’s Tilford Yard in northwest Atlanta. It’s here that the Jacksonville-based rail giant trains new conductors for its 23-state operation. Virginia-based Norfolk-Southern operates a similar center in McDonough for its 22-state system.
Each line expects to hire 1,800 conductors this year and similar numbers for each of the next several years, all part of a recent upturn.
It wasn’t so long ago that railroads seemed stuck in their tracks. The heavily unionized industry has shed 139,000 jobs — 37 percent of its work force — since 1985. The cuts were dictated by industry consolidation, office automation, competition from tractor trailers and new technology that eliminated the caboose, helping reduce the size of train crews from five to two people.
“We went 20 years with very little hiring,” said Margaret Downey, the director of training development and administration for CSX Transportation.
Retiree replacement
Now, railroads are on a roll again. Increased international trade has boosted freight. So have soaring fuel prices. Trucks still carry an overwhelming share of freight in the United States, but with less pricing flexibility and lower fuel efficiency, trucking companies have suffered.
That’s not to say that the railroad boom means a dramatically expanded work force. CSX and Norfolk Southern still have fewer employees than they did five years ago. And the national Railroad Retirement Board predicts that over the next decade the number of railroad jobs will shrink by about 8 percent under its most optimistic scenario — a whopping 30 percent under its most pessimistic.
While Norfolk Southern says it is adding staff needed for increased freight traffic, much of railroad hiring in the last four years has been to fill vacancies left by retiring employees. Railroaders rely on a pension system separate from Social Security and can retire with full benefits as early as age 60 after 30 years of service. CSX predicts nearly half its work force will be eligible for retirement within 10 years.
Training overhauled
Faced with that potential shortage, CSX took a closer look at its future. It redid training programs that hadn’t been overhauled since the 1970s. It labored to prove that train work isn’t a career past its prime.
“People have an image of railroads as something that is not growing,” CSX spokeswoman Meg Scheu said. They’ve got it wrong, she said.
“It’s not your grandfather’s railroad.”
Last year, CSX opened its new training center in a retrofitted 40-year-old warehouse, consolidating training that had been scattered over five states. Students learn in classrooms, but they also get computer-based training and lots of time outside on the center’s tracks, climbing onto rail cars and locomotives.
The center also teaches current employees everything from dealing with hazardous materials to conserving fuel. And it’s where conductors learn to be engineers, using a $3 million locomotive simulation system that can test students using trains of every configuration under varying weather and light conditions, throwing in twists such as cars swerving around crossing gates.
Demanding jobs
But most start as a conductor.
The job is considered a steppingstone to management or posts as engineers — the people who actually drive trains. Conductors are stationed on trains and responsible for sending signals, switching tracks, making and breaking trains, and overseeing train movement.
The job comes with high demands. Trains speeding down tracks can stretch for 2 miles and carry 15,000 tons — 300 tractor-trailer loads — of freight, including toxic chemicals.
“You don’t get scratched or bruised with this equipment. You lose limbs. You lose lives,” said Jerry Russaw, a CSX training instructor.
The industry’s want-ad description: Work outside in all seasons. Pick up and carry 80 pounds. Walk a lot on uneven ground. Work odd hours with a varying schedule. Spend many nights away from home. Face exposure to hazards.
By the time the trainees leave the center, they are expected to know hundreds of railroad rules, be able to decipher signals and get hands-on time with train equipment. Graduation leads to another 15 weeks or so of on-the-job training.
“The jobs are very demanding from a work/life perspective,” said CSX’s Downey.
But railroads boast that they offer pay in the top 10 percent of all blue-collar jobs. Conductors typically make between $40,000 and $50,000 their first year. At CSX they’ll probably stay in the job five to seven years before training to become engineers, where pay can top $60,000.
Before they show up for training at CSX, most of the newcomers have shelled out $4,500 and taken five-week conductor training programs offered by third parties. If trainees make it through, they come to CSX for two weeks at the training center.
Trainees optimistic
C.J. Sullivan, 27, of Buffalo, N.Y., never considered a job with the railroads until a friend’s father — an industry retiree — pushed the idea.
Sullivan was operating bulldozers when he and five friends decided to make the jump. He expects to work fewer hours and make $10,000 more his first year with CSX.
“It’s a career with a future,” he said. “Railroads have been around forever.”
He and other trainees predict the industry will only get stronger as fuel prices rise and make trucking less cost-effective.
Nobody in the class mentions the possible impact if railroads succeed in their goal to run trains by computer, reducing some two-person crews to one.
Most of the 18 other people in the class with Sullivan appear to be in their 20s or 30s.
Jennifer Myers, the sole woman in the group, is a 34-year-old bodybuilder who trained mentally disabled workers in Ohio. She said her mother worries about the dangers of railroad work.
Passing the CSX training program starts with acing the first day’s physical tests: picking up and installing a 70-pound metal “knuckle” used to connect cars, squeezing through tight locomotive doorways and climbing train ladders and walkways. But center staffers say the hardest test is the four minutes hanging on a ladder.
High stakes
Smith, the young man from Chicago, failed earlier practice sessions before he got to the CSX facility. “It was mentally beating me,” he said.
He knew the stakes. He worked a series of fast-food jobs in Chicago before he applied to CSX, believing it would be one of his few options for a real career.
Smith grew convinced the ladder test would be his greatest hurdle. He worked out with dumbbells. His young wife timed him as he stood on the rung of a gate back home.
In Atlanta, just two minutes into the crucial test, his arms began to quiver. He was that nervous, he said.
Two minutes later, he stepped off, a conductor in the making.