(The Fort Worth Star-Telegram published the following story by Dan Piller on its website on October 9.)
FORT WORTH, Texas — Union Pacific Railroad officials said Tuesday they plan to hire train-crew workers in the Fort Worth area as part of a companywide expansion of the work force that will add up to 3,000 new workers by the end of 2004.
“We don’t have exact figures, but Fort Worth is one of the places where we will add crews,” UP spokesman Mark Davis said from company headquarters in Omaha, Neb. Union Pacific already employs about 3,000 workers in the Fort Worth area, mostly at its Centennial Yard west of downtown, as well as train crews based in Tarrant County.
Union Pacific Chairman Dick Davidson said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News that the railroad plans to hire about 1,000 new train crew workers this year and a total of between 2,000 and 3,000 by the end of next year.
The railroad, with about 46,000 employees, serves the western half of the United States from Chicago and Texas to the West Coast. Union Pacific became Texas’ largest carrier through mergers with Missouri Pacific in 1982 and Southern Pacific in 1997.
In 1997, UP’s $5 billion merger with Southern Pacific Railway went awry when extensive congestion within its system resulted in charges and extra costs of $455 million for the year. Much of the problem centered in Texas.
Since upgrading its track and trains, expanding its work force and reorganizing its rail operations into three regions in 1998, UP has posted earnings of $783 million in 1999, $842 million in 2000, $966 million in 2001 and $783 million in 2002. For the first six months of 2003, Union Pacific earned $717 million, versus $526 million in the first half of 2002.
Union Pacific is a major hauler of coal and other energy and natural resource products from Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, as well as grain from the Midwest and lumber from the Pacific Northwest. The railroad is also a major hauler of automobiles for General Motors, including the plant at Arlington.
UP’s Centennial Yard south of Vickery Boulevard in Fort Worth is a major classification yard, where rail traffic is sorted by destination and routed to and from Texas and the West Coast.
Davidson told Bloomberg that Union Pacific has a “graying workforce” and is losing workers through attrition.
The workers to be hired, Davis said, would be switchmen and brakemen who would be assigned to train crews. They later could be eligible for training to become locomotive engineers.
Davis said most of the workers would be new hires, but added that occasionally workers in other areas switch to over-the-road crew work.