(The following article by Todd C. Frankel was posted on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website on April 9.)
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Robert Wagner still wears his hair in a tight military cut, but he recently retired from the Air Force to pursue a new career: railroading.
So Wagner, 38, from Clovis, N.M., paid his way here to the National Academy of Railroad Sciences. It is one of the few schools in the nation dedicated to teaching life on the rails. The academy, part of a community college in this suburb just west of Kansas City, offers courses for conductors, signalmen, welders, even an associate’s degree in railroading.
Wagner wants to be a conductor – the No. 2 person on a locomotive, the one who handles the paperwork and unhooks boxcars. A father of two, he was attracted by a starting salary that can top $60,000 a year.
The job might seem like a relic from a different era, back when railroads were shaping the American West and transforming dusty spots on the Prairie into boomtowns. But railroads such as BNSF and CSX have been hiring at a frenzied pace. The industry estimates it needs to fill 80,000 railway jobs – mostly conductors – in the next few years due to growth in freight hauling and recently relaxed retirement rules.
Yet finding new hires, even for these good-paying, blue-collar jobs, hasn’t been easy. Perhaps the biggest obstacle is people’s perception of the railroad.
“People think of Amtrak. And they hear Amtrak is going out of business,” said Jeffrey Abbott, director of training services at the academy. “They don’t think (of) the railroad as being an industry that’s a viable career.”
To lure workers, railroads have resorted to unfamiliar recruiting tactics. The railroad academy runs ads in movie theaters. It sends out direct-mail fliers. It targets high school counselors and workers at shuttered factories.
The academy hopes to attract workers who never considered railroads or never thought they could get hired on. Wagner was one of them. “I thought you had to have a father or brother working on the railroad to get a job,” he said.
The results are changing the face of railroads. That was on display recently in Classroom 106, where Wagner took notes on the day’s lesson: how to stop a locomotive.
Instructor Mark Williams threw a heavy black lever on an old locomotive control stand sitting in the corner. That’s how you set the emergency brake, he told his 24 students. When that happens, a burst of air escapes from the brake line. “All of you who live in railroad towns have heard that before – the psoooshhh.”
A couple of years ago, most of Williams’ students were in their early 20s. Now he sees more gray hair – students like Steve Burrus, 43, who lives in Amarillo, Texas, and used to work for Phillips Petroleum. And there are more students looking for second careers. Gary Reid, 47, came to the academy after his employer, an Oklahoma plastics plant, closed its doors in November and he lost his machinist’s job.
There are more women and minorities entering an industry still dominated by white men. In Williams’ class, there were five minority students and one woman, a 17-year-old from Olathe, Kan. Williams said his classes usually have two or three women.
Before coming to the academy, Mark Brimall, 29, was studying to be an architect and helping build houses near his home in Chandler, Ariz. But business was dying, and he decided to try railroading. “But a lot of my co-workers thought I was crazy,” Brimall said.
Mike Nunnick, 27, ended up in Williams’ class after leaving the Army in January and returning to find few job prospects near his home in Shawnee, Kan. “There are no jobs to be had, unless you want to make $6 a hour flipping hamburgers,” Nunnick said.
In addition to class instruction, the academy has a training rail yard with three locomotives and 16 boxcars. It is operated by Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad. But students in the six-week conductors class receive no job guarantees and pay tuition, ranging from $4,400 to $5,400. Other railroads hire from the academy’s ranks. BNSF just gets first dibs.
Although the community college offers a two-year railroading degree, not many people stick around to earn it. They take their 16 credit hours and land a job, said Andy Burton, academy director and assistant dean at Johnson County Community College.
Until recently, the nation’s railroads were mired in a hiring lull that began with industry deregulation in 1980, when the largest railroads employed a total of 460,000. That was followed by decades of shrinking payrolls due to new technology and company consolidation. By last year, those seven largest railroads employed 165,000, accounting for about 90 percent of all railroad workers.
Now railroads need to hire, thanks to increased demand for coal and overseas goods. Last year, U.S. railroads moved a record-breaking 28.9 million units of freight. And in 2002, new federal railroad pension rules took effect, lowering the retirement age to 60 from 62 for rail workers with 30 years experience, causing older workers to leave the ranks earlier.
While the pay is good, the life of a conductor can be tough. Conductors are on call 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. To drive the point home, the academy does not recognize most holidays. The first day of class for the current group of conductors was Feb. 20 – Presidents Day.
“But the thing is, no one ever quits. No one ever quits the railroad,” Williams told his students.
The pay is good, he told them, but the money is not so good that you do it for that alone. You’ve got to love it too, he said. Because there’s nothing worse than getting home after a long day of work, pulling two hours of sleep and being called back in.
There are complaints to life on the railroad – the odd hours, working in the harshest weather conditions, Williams said.
“But every time I get a class of 30 people in here who want the job I have – who want to be conductors – I feel pretty pleased about that,” he said.