(The following article by David Patch was posted on the Toledo Blade website on November 29.)
TOLEDO, Ohio — For those who can handle the hard work and the irregular hours, America’s railroads may have a job for you.
Between this year and the end of the decade, the freight railroads expect to hire more than 80,000 new employees, according to the Association of American Railroads.
The pay: an average of $67,128 a year for conductors. Engineers average $75,162 and top out at about $110,000.
But to get those robust salaries, railroaders put up with wearying schedules, physical work, and unpredictable assignments.
For 35 years, Jack Tighe, an engineer for Norfolk Southern, has been unable to do volunteer work. He can’t get involved in Perrysburg politics. He found coaching his children’s sports teams to be impractical.
“I can’t tell someone, ‘Yes, I’ll be there at 7 o’clock next Tuesday,’ ” he said. In a normal week he makes several round trips between Toledo and Chicago.
For many years after he hired with Penn Central in 1969, Mr. Tighe was the most junior man on the railroad fireman’s roster in Toledo, which meant he got last pick of assignments.
But in recent years, his seniority has risen rapidly, as railroaders ahead of him retired. The retirements, combined with increasing freight traffic, have put the railroad in a hiring mode unseen for decades.
The hiring boom is accentuated by years of austerity and downsizing. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, railroad mergers, automation, mechanization, and elimination of low-volume operations took a heavy toll on employment. Trains that used to run with five-person crews now have two or three people.
The largest rail systems had a combined payroll of about 780,000 in 1960; by 2003 the number was 154,652.
Spokesmen for CSX and Norfolk Southern, the two railroads with the largest operations in Toledo, attributed the current manpower shortages to the rebounding economy.
In recruiting and training, recruiters say they try to present as clear a picture of the job requirements as possible.
“We have company officials at our hiring sessions, and the first 60 to 90 minutes [of those sessions] are a clear and unambiguous description of the jobs and the challenges they will face,” said Rudy Husband, a spokesman for Norfolk Southern, which expects to hire about 2,000 people per year for the next four or five years.
Only after that initial presentation are job applications handed out, he said, and typically one-third to one-half leave without filling them out. Recruiting has tended to be most successful in places like West Virginia, where out-of-work coal miners are accustomed to both shift work and physical labor, and less productive in areas with high-paying job alternatives.
While Norfolk Southern conducts its own employee training, CSX directs job candidates to enroll in railroad training courses offered by vocational schools or colleges in its service area. Those seeking jobs in northwest Ohio or southern Michigan are directed to either Huntington, W.Va., or Cincinnati, depending on where they plan to work. CSX expects to hire 2,300 workers next year, after an estimated 2,150 during 2004.
“We make certain that potential employees understand as fully as possible that railroad working hours can be irregular and they will be expected to work at odd hours and on weekends,” said Gary Sease, a CSX spokesman.
Initial training for railroad workers typically takes six months, though, and engineer training generally doesn’t start until a year after that.
For the majority of railroaders who work the “road,” trips are assigned on a rotating basis, with the order of each person’s call to work determined by the time he or she went off duty at the last assignment’s end. When the railroad is busy, conductors and engineers often are called back after just eight hours, the minimum rest period required by federal law. And while the maximum on-duty time is 12 hours, crews sometimes can end up waiting aboard their locomotives far longer than that if their legal time expires in an out-of-the-way place.
Scheduling can be particularly hard on the “extra board,” a list of mostly junior railroaders who have no regular assignment, but fill in vacancies caused by illness, vacations, or other absences or cover trains not covered by the regular pool jobs.
But even those who have an assigned run may find their start times moved up, or pushed back, by the vagaries of rail operations. Labor contracts typically require railroads to give 90 minutes’ to two hours’ notice for the call to work.
The nature of the work, which involves being outdoors in all sorts of weather year-round and occasionally requires strenuous labor, has caused many recent hires to quit after a short time.
“There’s a number who come out, and go through the [training] program,” Mr. Tighe said. “Then they find out they’re expected to work the weekends. The ones who stay realize it’s a pretty good job.”
The hours have been particularly rough of late because a rebounding economy has increased freight shipments, and rising fuel costs and a driver shortage in the trucking industry have shifted a larger share of that freight to the rails.
Mr. Tighe has stuck with “road” assignments even though he has enough seniority now to claim a job working in the yard or on a local train that starts out at the same time each day.
“The money is exponentially better on the road,” he said. “If you’re working 12 hours a day on a yard job, you get no quality time at home.”
Bo Williamson, who hired with Conrail in 1996, said he was warned he’d be doing a lot of traveling. “They weren’t lying there,” Mr. Williamson said. “I didn’t imagine that I was going to be asked to work this much. They take the money and they shove it in your pocket.”
Mr. Williamson has enough seniority to choose to work a 50-mile district between Toledo and Bellevue where the train crews take a train east and return west to Toledo on the same shift.
It doesn’t pay as well as long-distance runs, but the crews don’t have to wait in a hotel for their trip home the next day, either.
Scheduling time off for special events is possible, if done ahead of time. But a child’s birthday party or school band concert can be hit-or-miss.
“We’ve given up a normal life,” Mr. Williamson said. “We can’t bowl on Wednesday or golf on Thursday. We can’t coach our sons’ Little League teams.”
A recent change that granted full Railroad Retirement benefits at age 60 to retirees with 30 years’ experience has sped up attrition even more, Mr. Husband said.
“We were a graying work force to begin with, and this legislation really accelerated it,” he said.