Amtrak looking for more employees to keep up with ridership rise
(The following story by Blackwell Thomas appeared on The Southern website on September 12.)
CARBONDALE, Ill. - Amtrak is making a hiring push to meet the needs of its growing ridership a company spokesman said Tuesday.
Marc Magliari said the company is looking for more conductors and onboard service people. The addition of two new daily routes - the Saluki and Illini - between Carbondale and Chicago has helped fuel ridership growth and the resulting need for additional staff, said Magliari.
“Certainly, when you add trains you frequently have to add staff,” he said. “We’ll be hiring a class of conductors this fall of between 30 to 50 new conductors in Chicago alone.”
A shame though that although Amtrak’s ridership is increasing (inspite of delays on Class 1 freight lines) that congressional leaders will continue to play political “hot potato” with it. Until some solid commttments are made on Amtrak’s routes outside of the NEC and California, employees will continue to face an uncertain future.
I’m not much of an expert on Amtrak hiring pratices,but from what I have heard from a few Amtrk operating employees, generally the company promotes from within for new open positions for condrs & engrs. A former BNSF condr I know went to Amtrak as a car attendent back in the late 90’s, put his time in @ Chicago making the cross country runs, then became a condr and now works @ Albuquerque on 3&4 and prefers this work over BNSF although the pay isn’t as good.
While the pay might be something of an issue, passenger service can offer something close to a regular schedule for both T&E and on board service personal. Had a chat today with the assistant conductor working the east end (Washington, DC/Pittsburgh) of the Capitol Limited. He marked up about 6 months ago. He may not have a regular assignment yet, but I don’t think it takes a lot of whiskers. So long as there are AC’s-it’s an issue Amtrak would like to put on the table-conductors will be promoted from the AC ranks.
I think Amtrak will hire qualified and experienced engineers from the outside. I’m not sure of the route from inside to engineer. Obviously there has to be some bookwork type study to pass tests and field training. I’d guess the program would be similar to the freight railroads getting their engineers from the conductor ranks.
You can go to the Amtrak website and see all their job openings. From time to time I look just for the heck of it. Most of the time there are openings for AC’s and on-board service jobs.