Among the estimated 1.2 million new railroad jobs ostensibly available with high speed rail development according to a Progressive Railroad article were crossing watchmen, levermen, and draftsmen (not AutoCAD)! Someone else found a position listed for caboose porter! You’d think someone would do at least a cursory edit before someone got their hopes up. I hope the employment estimate wasn’t based on all the jobs listed.
Not all that “progressive” really.
Maybe the Feds are bringing those positions back! One way to help get rid of the unemployment that is way over 10%. Plus heck the way I look at it most of those positions wont take too much to train people.Kinda hard to find enough hacks for the porters ( what the heck is a caboose porter anyway? I know some conductors had cush jobs but sheesh!)
That’s a new one to me too. Perhaps there is something to this thing about creating jobs.
Johnny
What Europhile yuppy wrote that article? Crossing watchmen and levermen. Incredible.
Or is Progressive Railroad a European magazine? I’m not familar with it.
Yea, I think I want to be a leverman, oh wait, you may have to do something there like pull levers., Better to be the crossing watchman, sit in a chair and take train photos.[swg]
I think you mean what clueless government buearucrat wrote and titled the job descriptions used in the article. In the past before on-line applications when almost all intial contact with most railroads was through the state job services, a brakeman/conductor job could be listed under a variety (and sometimes misleading) job title.
A leverman would usually be a tower operator. It could also be someone’s idea of a train dispatcher, train controller, train director, etc.
Jeff
Probably one of the newsnitwits who think railroads have ‘marshalling yards’ and airports park modern jet planes on ‘tarmac.’
Your Federal tax dollars at work! Back in 1982, I had a young lady (just graduating from High School) tell me that she wanted to train as a keypunch operator, since some Federal document indicated that it was a skill in high demand. I almost hated to tell her that the local business school had phased out the program - optical readers were in and keypunch was one with the dodo and the passenger pigeon.
The same geniuses wanted to call Orlando a pocket of poverty - based on statistics taken a few months before Disney started building there! They were about twenty years out of date by the time the Federales blew the call!
Chuck
Most definitely a highschool intern in a congressional or executive office wrote a press release on knowledge gained by reading Freeman Hubbard books! Or Hungerford. Or a few PR hacks of the 50’s!
My company still used keypunch operators into the early eighties. I don’t remember just when Stores personnel began entering their transactions into the system that kept track of all transactions, but, for several years, one of the first activities in the morning was to take the printout of the previous night’s keypunch activity and compare it with the transaction tickets that had been processed. Then, a sheet of corrections was prepared, with the code “KPE” to show the reason for the transaction. Since “KPE” is seldom needed these days, I will translate–Key Punch Error. I think that the puncher simply worked too fast at times. This system was a great improvement on the manual posting of all transactions–P. O. receipts, issues and returns–that was in use when I began working there.
Johnny
Harvey, could you by chance be referring to Progressive Railroading Magazine?
If so, a link to the article, or an idea of which issue, or when it appeared online, would be helpful to provide something concrete to laugh at, or the basis on which to come to our own conclusions.
Never thought about asking for that lol. Yeah I am curious to see that as well.Maybe I can be a crossing watchman.No I prefer running the darn things.
ME! [wow][yeah][4:-)]
I want to apply for that job of Caboose Watchman!
Lookin’ forward to the Goub’ment Featherbed! YEAH!!
[tup][tup]
Blog post by some apparently clueless hyper-enthusiast, getting strongly criticized in the blog by other blog posters, who claim these types of posts are typical of this blogger known as RAILWAYIST.
(No, I hadn’t read it before - but it is not all that hard to find information using google …).
Smile,
Stein
Thanks for the link, Mr. Stein! There is some mighty interesting stuff there.
I wonder whether that “caboose porter” job on a high-speed passenger railroad would work for me, post-retirement. I guess I couldn’t do that, though. Sounds more up my alley than a Wal-Mart greeter, though!
Oh–and I see no need for the magazine itself to be embarrassed here. The only one who should be embarrassed is this “Railwayist”, but he doesn’t seem to get the message.
Skimming through that blog, it seems the first - and repetitive - critic of that post is a Larry Kaufman, who it appears may be the same as the Trains columnist ?
The whole thing is kind of funny, but it wasn’t worth reading all of it. It does illustrate the ‘Achilles heel’ of a lot of the Internet, though: anyone can post anything, without any basis in fact or connection to reality - and it looks just as valid as something that’s well thought-out and carefully composed by someone who knows his stuff, at least until taking the time to read and understand it, and then realizing that it’s BoguS !
A quick review also shows that forum to seem to be more acerbic than this one. One of the posts referenced under Mr. Kaufman’s link was a Bill Simpson resigning from the forum, because of his objection to the twisting of his words by another poster - under a pseudonym, of course.
- Paul North.
Happened to me on there as well. I just sent him back a nice lil message and never has had a problem again.I prefer it here though. Those guys over there are rather hmmmm cant think of a strong enough word to explain my feelings for most of the people there.But they are rather full of themselves.
Not sure if thats our larry there, might be but on here you never know.