Mark W Hemphill's last paragraph...

Trains Magazine General Discussion
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I guess my point was that RRs aren’t unique in being different so to speak. The military is one example of a group that unless you are a member of it (like police or firemen or RRs) the average Joe (not Koh) may not have an understanding of the whys and how comes…But like the RRs we find ourselves in similiar positions regarding the new folks coming in. But that in it’s self is an issue that old timers have always had…regardless of profession, and is not unique to RRs.

It is a shame that standardized training is not prevelant in RRs. Most is OJT it would seem. But then again, like I said, training someone to fly and making them a combat pilot is two different things and the reality is, OJT is huge. You can put someone in a simulator (plane or train) and teach them to drive…but until they feel it under their butts and hear the real sounds…it ain’t real. That cold feeling in your stomach that something isn’t right can’t be simulated or taught, they gotta go out and do it, so your job becomes harder as you do yours and train them at the same time.

It would seem that the RRs should see it as a cost savings to provide better and standardized training. Accidents from a purely financial perspective are expensive. If you did a cost analysis of a crews that had standardized training vs crews that did not, taking into the cost of any accidents involving the two groups, I would venture to bet that the cost of formal training would be less than clean up. That’s why airlines invest a fair amount of bucks into their training facilities and companies like Flight Safety International stay in business. It’s a simple business decision. Accidents cost money. Lots of money. Is the cost of a wrecked SD70 more or less than the cost of making a six or eight week training syllabus or what about a HAZMAT cleanup?

So CNW tried employee ownership and failed. Why was that? Why not try it again? You won’t get things to change unless management is forced to chang

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Okay, so I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. If I don’t start moving it it’ll probably freeze anyway.

I think there will always be some differing of opinions between the new and the old no matter what line of work you are in but the point I see Ed is making is really about experience more than ability. Kevin, please take note, as this also relates to your posts as well. Ed, and really also Mark H’s article, seem to be reffering to the rise in new hires leading to its natural progression of having train personnel with very little experience. Now Kevin, I haven’t reviewed your safety record but it seems to me that only having 6 collisions is considerably within the limitations [:D]so you are definitely an exception to the rule. I think the real concern comes with personnel that need the experience to stay within the established guidelines.

Okay, let me make an analogy. Everyone probably knew someone from school, be it high school or college or whatever, who cut class a lot or slept through classes. Maybe even it was you ( I had a semester at college like that).
Now, if that same person chose to be a surgeon in your town, would you rather he spent a week studying and then begin practicing because of financial constraints or take his time with his studies until he and his instructors were fully confident that he could perform successfully. Ideally most of us would prefer the latter, especially if we are the ones being operated on. Realistically each person learns at a different pace and some of the candidates might not be ready for decades if this is how it really worked. So there are time restrictions and ready or not at some point they have to be tested to see how much they have learned. But just as Ed and Mark both wrote, the ones who find challenge and enjoyment in their work are the ones who tend to excel. If the railroads want to do a two week course AND THEY CAN DO IT SAFELY, then I think let them do it. But if they are just hiring and passing a bunch of folks ju

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As a in-the-trench worker you have 18 months training but what if that two-week wonder is in the corporate office, straight out of business school, and is more concerned with his stock options than worker safety?

I think that is the primary point of this conversation.

Just my two cents worth and its only worth about 2 cents…

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Not wait a cotton pickin minute…you work for a switching road…shouldn’t be any overnighters…so where are all your socks?[;)]

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Just so we all know

I havn’t (Touch Titanium or “wood” but thats old school) hit anyone, or anything,

Wait, do skunks Count?

WHY should they count, it’s not like it was YOUR PET or anyhting…

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I don’t mean to change the subject or anything…but the last three posts, check the times…

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Only if they work in Uncle Petes corporate offices…

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See thats all I’ve run over, A mangie skunk, that was in bad health anyways

I still couldn’t sleep that night, it was quite morally dipressing.

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Hi all. I have been reading the topics of various forums with great interest. I have gained alot of insight to the railroading world today. Very enlightening.

I am the wife of a road freight conductor of less than 2 years. It is the best job he has ever had. He worked 5 years retail management and did 4 years in the Military. He has tried hard to learn all he can and do the safest, most effective job he can.
For the old heads-------You cant just start working for the railroads anymore----the times have changed. We paid large money for him to take a course that covered HazMat/Signals/Regulations and FRA Laws. We did not get reimbursed the $4250.00 course fee, nor did he get paid for the 5 weeks that it took for him to take the class. (There was no time left in the day for him to work another job. There was also NO guarantee of a job when he finished-just an interview) He worked for 4 months at substantially less than he was making as a retail manager and was gone for days at a time training. He is now a road conductor and is gone all the time and still doesnt make full pay.
We figure that going to work for the railroad cost us about 30k (cash out of pocket in course fees and lost wages) .

What did that money get? A competant conductor that is committed to his job and company. He may not know all the old ways, but he is knowledgable about what he needs to do and how to do it safely.
Are all new heads like that? Probably not. You are always going to work with jerks and fools but in this job they dont survive long do they? Some of the old heads give the new heads a hard time figuring they have not paid their dues. We paid.

RAILROADING IS STILL A GOOD, HONEST, RESPECTABLE, EXCELLENT PAYING JOB.
I am proud to be a trainman’s wife.
Thanks…now kick the soapbox out from under me.
RRWife

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Welcome to the forums, I’m not such a lucky man as your husband is, My Girlfriend has never really approved of me working on Trains.

I can vouch for that, all the jerk and fool new heads were let go within a week. I’m still standing after two yearsm and I LIKE being a new head, although some old heads don’t like me one bit, but thats fine… I never said I cared.

How old is your husband, if you don’t mind me asking…?

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Dan,
I live in a house full of women, a 4 year old, one 10, and a 16 year old, plus my wife.
How often do you think I get a crack at the washing machine?

RRwife,
Gald both you and your husband take pride in his job, and his commitment to it.
Thats exactally what I was trying to get to, some of us want to do this, no matter what we have to put up with in the process.
But it shouldnt cost you to go to work railroading, the carriers should be activly recruiting guys like your husband, and investing in their training.

But railroads play their personel cost real clost to the vest, and this time around, they goofed.
No one looked at the trends close enough to realize they were going to run out of crews.
And now, they have trains, lots of them, and no one to run them.

The Feds only require you to pass a written test, so a two week cram course works, sorta of.

What it boils down to is railroads are flat out of people.

Checked the dispatcher site this morning, we have 15 grain trains waiting to get into Houston right now, spaced 6 hours apart, and more on the way.

And UP and BNSF dont have crews for half of them.
Right now, all the are looking for is warm bodies.

Dan was correct, it is cost effective to train us correctly at the get go.

I had two weeks book training, two weeks practice in a hands on enviroment, then was assigned to a mentor for 3 months, before I was marked up as a helper, at 75% pay.
At the end of my 3 months, I got my foreman rights, at 80%, next year 85%, you get the point.

But the three months with the mentor was what paid off most.

I learned more from him in that 3 months that I have learned in the past 7 years.

Because he showed me first how to do things, then allowed me to do it under supervision, then alone.
So he built up not only my skill, but my confidence.

He invested time in me, a

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[#ditto]
Ed, just let me know, and I’ll see if I can FedEx you some. Like I said, they ain’t washed.

One point in all of the talking about training that has been aluded to but not said straight out, is that the “full crew” of 5 or 6 men trained railroaders far better than any course of books can. Ed, what do think the results would have been for you if your mentoring had been several years in length? There were two reasons for firemen, one official (fire the locomotive and keep the boiler hot) and the other one unofficial (teach and train new locomotive engineers). Same for brakemen and switchmen. I was taught to switch by a snake that went on the road and that man could study a list, put it into his grip, shake the cars out by memory without an error, and do so in about half the time of anyone else because of his economy of moves. You simply can not learn that from a book or from a week or a month of OJC.

I do not pretend to be able to switch as well as this man did, but when I was working as a trainman age 48+, I could switch out a train and get it over the road faster (elapsed time) and get all of the work done and do it at half the speed of the young bucks. When I worked with this man while being an Agent, knowing how he did his work, I could have the train list made up and entered into the computer before he even came to work. That is how accurate and consistant he was. I miss that man.

You simply can’t do that sort of training with a two man crew. Really hard even with a 3 man crew.
[soapbox]

(Maybe we n

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And as a added bonus, the fireman often stayed in the same district as he "learned’ on, so he had several years experience in the very place he ended up working.

RRwife,
if your husband and you havent realized it yet, there quite a few offical, and unoffical reasons/rules in use at a railroad.

Do conductors ever sneak a try at running the train?
You bet they do!
Why?
Because they want to learn how its done, and why things work the way they do.
Quite a few want to be engineers, I know I pestered my engineer to let me try when I worked on a “road” job.

It aint anywhere near as easy as it looks.

And the good engineers make it look real easy, real easy.

Do the railroad know this unoffical tryouts go on?

Sure, they turn a blind eye to it, unless something goes wrong, because, like Eric said, thats where the real training goes on, and when they have a engineers class, they expect the conductors to have some time under their belt.

It weeds out the really bad or indifferent ones ahead of time, because a engineers who lets a conductor give it a try will not allow him to run it again if he dosnt pay attention, or beats the train up.

Now, offically, this never happens, for liability reasons, but unoffically, it goes on all the time.

One thing I have noticed is crews dont seem to stay together like they did when I first signed on.
Even here at a small terminal road, where you would think most crews would stay pretty much the same, because of seniority, it dosnt happen nearly as often as it did.

I am lucky, my number one helper and I have worked the same jobs together for several years, he can predict what I am going to do, and I can count on him being where he needs to be, without looking to check if he is.

The number two helper seems to change every few months, but I have noticed the same small group of guys back again and again.

I wou

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Thanks for the input.
Kevin, If I remember correctly you are under 20-right? You are right that my husband is lucky to have me…but I am also lucky to have someone like him
My husband is 33, I am somewhat older…(?)…I just want you to know that he was a trainee for the 1st year and worked in the yard too.
Kevin…You are young…I am not knocking that by a long shot. That you are young but still have a clear goal in mind is rare. When you have worked 30 years you will still be young enough to enjoy retirement. Travel, fish, camp. sleep ,drink beer… whatever.
Remind your GF that guys like you are NOT a dime a dozen You will probably replace her a dozen times before you find the right one (at least you should) and you will find one that appreciates a man (not a boy) that takes care of business. Nuf said.

Ed…Why are you having to fight for the washer?.. All those females and no laundress?

My husband does work for a Class 1 . …You are correct in saying that alot of people are unhappy with how things are within some of the the railroads, but it is worse and more cut throat in the ‘civilian world’. The RR life is pretty sheltered in some aspects. And what company is going to have 100% satisfaction anyway. Let the complainers go out to civilian job hunt. It would be a real eye opener with little or no benefits.

Kevin…by the way…what nickname did the old heads give you?

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Yeah! You wait until Mookie goes home to talk!

[V]

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[soapbox] Mookie pulls out her soapbox, turns it over and sits in it!

I had to contain myself while I read all the postings. Years ago - my ex-brother-in-law hired out on BN - took two student trips and was a fireman. But he had several years training with the engineers before he became an engineer. Gee - that is so simple, wonder why the railroads ever let that go!

Mookie

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As far as setting up a major railroad along the lines of Jet Blue or Southwest Airlines, there are several factors to consider. Most of these carriers are mostly non-union, many are underfinanced. Jet Blue and Southwest have been successful, but keep in mind that Vanguard, Midway, National and many others failed.
Airlines also don’t have to supply their own right-of-way so they can pick and choose their routes. Southwest has pulled out of several cities that weren’t profitable or affected their on-time performance (Denver). A railroad doesn’t have this option.

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coco the clown was one of them, there are many more, the ones that are uttered behind my back are the worst ones, but still,

I rememebr there was one old head who was hell bent on making my life a living hell, I was teamed up with him the first ngiht, It was sunday, And we were about to do the 12 o’clock milk run, I had just gotten out of Church, from 12 o’clock on That entire 60 minutes he never had anythign nice to say, he would alwasy adress my in manners like, Hey toddler, or hey brat, and would tell me i’d never get anywhere and you know the usual routine… I never responded believeing in the Honest Abe approach. Well we got off the Train, he got in his car, I got in mine, he had a heart attack and colided with a cement barriere on his way to lunch.

Sure i still went to his funeral, I disliked his behavior, I didn’t Dislike him, Deep down i could see he was insecure about his job, and he was ultimately worried that i’d do a better job then him, so all his goals were was to make me feel bad so I would ultimately do a terrible job. Well, I probobly owe that guy the biggest thanks of my life.

Believe it or not, he taught me what the Railraod was about, and I know Ed has said this before in a reply to a girl called Lisa, he told her that the Railroad was about Cheap shots and one up man-ship (Rememebr that ED?) , how you always have to be better then the people around you. Well I met a guy, or they paired me up wiht Robert, an Engineer whose about 23. I like working with him, we call each other names for the fun of it, we rush if theres a Hockey Game on, and our Train has never been more then 30 secondes late.

That really isn’t much of a problem, except for exceptions, people aren’t that possesive over their job enough to make new people feel terrible. Threr aren’t that many new heads around, and my suggestion that we hire the hooters girls for conductors… well… that one is still in the works.,

If I may, a quick storry, You know Ed was

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Regarding the “Employee Owned” CNW.

I was working there when the option to “buy in” to the company was offered. The middle & upper management people were the ones that did most of the purchasing. The ‘workers’ (those that pull pins, fix track, drive trains) had such low confidence in the company, that very few union people would decide to risk what they had saved to buy the fupped-duck railroad.

Ahh, but the managers knew what was going on, and chose not to disseminate that information to those ‘beneath’ them. Many managers mortgaged their houses, took out loans, and did what they could to buy all the stock they could.

Surprise, surprise! Soon after the initial offering, the stock split 60-to-1!!! About a year later, it split again, this time 4-to-1.

Just think how much money all those managers made.
Just think what a morale-booster that was to the rank-and-file.
Just think what it did for productivity.

It wasn’t that the managers made lots of money, it was that they chose to not share their information with the “employees”. Most of us felt very betrayed, and it fostered an attitude of downright "F***-em-whenever-you-get-a-chance attitude.

I was too young (20) to care, plus I had no money to invest anyway. And I really liked working for the CNW, after all, they actually hired me!!. I was still in the so-happy-to-be-doing-what-I-always-wanted-to-do mode that I found the bad attitude of my fellow rails a bit depressing. Now, 30 years later, I understand their feelings.

Anyway, to get to the point, the idea that the CNW was “Employee-Owned” was rather a bit misleading. Granted, it was employees that owned it, but it was a very select group of employees, and those employees (and their business decisions) were mostly the reason the railroad was in the shape it was in anyway. In another post someone had thought that the employees could buy their railroad, and fire the CEO or other managers if they fe

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Yes they are non union…but in that vain…has that been a bad thing? I don’t want to start a Union vs no union argument, becasue I’m pretty neutral on the subject, but in the airlines case, the union were a contributing problem (pilots, mechanics, attendents)when it came to the demise of some of the airlines. Airlines don’t supply their own ROW but, can’t just turn routes on and off without approval. And in some cases are required to maintain less profitble routes to smaller markets. They have infrastructure issues also, though rails are not one of them.

I have to admit I was not knowledgable of the CNW issues. But after since being on these forums, the common thread seems to be how messed up and unresponsive management is…Okay, that’s a common complaint in just about every business…So either you live with it, you change careers or you try to change it. You and 2500 of your closesest freinds each buy x amount of stack and go to the share holder meetings and vote your block of shares. Sounds idealistic…but if you don’t like the government, vote it out. Corporations live and die by the control of shares. Sound ludricroius…stranger things have happened. Block A of shares thinks we should reduce the dividend and reinvest more capital into maintenance and training…if you get it on the agenda, it has to be voted