I got an interesting post card in today’s mail from UP. The picture side of it was an interesting graphic layout with the headline, “There’s a reason story problems are usually about trains.”
The address side of the card had an employment pitch for people with degrees in engineering or engineering-related disciplines. Based on the form of my address, I suspect that they purchased the PE roster here in California, which happens from time to time, for the mailing. This happens to me about once a year, usually with some public agency with an extended candidate search for a position requiring a registered engineer.
Anway, it was an interesting approach indicating that their usual recruitment methods are not turning up enough candidates of the caliber they are looking for, I guess. Too bad it’s about 35 years too late in my case. The engineering aspects of transportation are the most interesting to me, and in hindsight, I think it would have been a lot of fun in my “prime” to have followed the railroad engineering path, since a lot of very interesting stuff has been going on since 1970 in all three of the major branches of the art.
As for the present, I will be content to observe from the sidelines and appreciate the solutions the working engineers come up with.[:D]
I know someone who knows someone who got one of these. I was wondering why he got one and I did not when I have an engineering degree and I applied for a trainman position with UP about a year ago. I guess that would explain it. I have been thinking about applying for the mechanical associate position. I wonder how much reviewing I need to do.
(1) Intrinsic worth, the marketplace and institutional common sense have finally overcome the auditor’s balance sheet. Took 10 years for the railroads to figure out that the corporate management outside consultants (McKenzie goup, et al …of DumbSizing fame ) of the late 1980’s really screwed-up by going to too far.
(2) There was a huge generation gap (20+ years) in the industry in the 80’s and 90’s with railroad technical expertise and the bulk of these folks are now pulling the pin (retiring) after being run into the ground for years. The railroad boardroom attitude of “use them up and throw them away” has now backfired.
(3) A few consultants got folks from the industry after retirement or downsizing, but those numbers are dwindling fast. There is nobody in the training pipeline (thanks to those blind management consultants) which has dried up and blown away. Most public sector civil engineering/surveying/construction consultants are grossly unqualified to railroad. Colleges (Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan Tech) are starting to teach to fill the void, but the chasm is pretty big. Most college curriculae do not include railroad engineering and many college civil engineering requirements no longer require surveying (IMHO dumb, especially for railroaders)…AREMA encouraged potential candidates to visit their meeting in Louisville a couple weeks back for a “meet and greet” which caused quite a stir.
(4) UP is hardly the only one looking for help (including the CA stopgap issues that started the thread), BNSF will hire 30 college grad/ civil-surveyors over the next 4 years (… Including one working under me who graduates next year.), CSX is out actively beating the bushes plus CN and NS are stirring. People are retiring en-mass and there is no one coming in to replace them which is stretching the rubber band in a boom economy for railroads.
(5) The 4 year college degree ( a tool, not an entitlement) is the hopping-on point for becoming a railroad civil
MC hits the nail (spike) on the head, and it’s not a problem that just the railroads are confronting. The BS degree in engineering is a starting point, as plainly the engineering schools do not have time to teach a lot of the history of the art, whether it be structures, electrons or the like. Some schools have good MS programs that begin to get into the real-world details of some of the things, but there is nothing like getting out under the wings of a “gray beard” for a few years to learn “the ropes.”
While working my last pre-retirement program, I had a supplier person from a company in Cedar Rapids onsite for a couple of years. He was a young software guy who had hired into that particular company because they had a lot of very experienced people there and he thought it would be a great place to learn a lot. What happened, though, was that they “dumbsized” by offering the well-compendated high-experience folks lucrative buyouts, which exposed the fact that the next layer of “talent” mostly wasn’t ready for prime time. The buy-outs who were willing then came back as consultants for a while, costing them even more, which was still better than the cost of the “not-ready-for-prime-time-players” and their mistakes. The young guy ended up staying out here and going to work for another defense contractor, so it worked out for him.
It’s been my impression that railroad engineering, at least in the civil area, is not taught in a lot of places. Illinois seems to be the only school promoting that, probably because they have the longest commitement to the subject.
MC, I am glad to hear that you have an engineering intern (formal or otherwise) getting some muddy hands work under his or her belt while doing the classroom work. Speaking as one who worked for a few years as a technician before going back and getting my EE, having that practical exposure makes the course work a lot more meaningful and (I think) a lot ea
That I’m aware of : USC and Purdue which want to train operating logistics people, not track people.
(I used Michigan Tech, Illinois and Kentucky because that’s all you see at AREMA these days and Michigan Tech has the only AREMA student chapter in the country. Saw presentations by other research programs in other schools like Nebraska, but they were part of the CE/Highway set or other disciplines…DU-Law School here has a Transportation School [not engineering])
Rgr. Yeah, I think that’s about it too. I know none of the Ivies have a program that is specific to RR Eng. It still surprises me, given that there is still quite a demand for the specialty.
Getting tough to find people who know anything about track…
[quote user=“ChuckCobleigh”]
MC hits the nail (spike) on the head, and it’s not a problem that just the railroads are confronting. The BS degree in engineering is a starting point, as plainly the engineering schools do not have time to teach a lot of the history of the art, whether it be structures, electrons or the like. Some schools have good MS programs that begin to get into the real-world details of some of the things, but there is nothing like getting out under the wings of a “gray beard” for a few years to learn “the ropes.”
While working my last pre-retirement program, I had a supplier person from a company in Cedar Rapids onsite for a couple of years. He was a young software guy who had hired into that particular company because they had a lot of very experienced people there and he thought it would be a great place to learn a lot. What happened, though, was that they “dumbsized” by offering the well-compendated high-experience folks lucrative buyouts, which exposed the fact that the next layer of “talent” mostly wasn’t ready for prime time. The buy-outs who were willing then came back as consultants for a while, costing them even more, which was still better than the cost of the “not-ready-for-prime-time-players” and their mistakes. The young guy ended up staying out here and going to work for another defense contractor, so it worked out for him.
It’s been my impression that railroad engineering, at least in the civil area, is not taught in a lot of places. Illinois seems to be the only school promoting that, probably because they have the longest commitement to the subject.
MC, I am glad to hear that you have an engineering intern (formal or otherwise) getting some muddy hands work under his or her belt while doing the classroom work. Speaking as one who worked for a few years as a technician before going back and getting my EE, having that practical exposure makes the course work a lot more meaningful and (I think) a lot easier to
Of course, when the university admin does the cutting in both ways, the ABET accreditation is jeopardized.
Having spent more time in university environments than I should have, I came to the conclustion that there is a lot of academic “welfare” going on in many ways which impedes real education. For instance, I still think a goodly number of the “general” education requirements are there to prop up weak departments who can barely attract enough majors to justify their existence. Another instance is the UC system, where engineering professors go out and get a research grant for say a half million bucks, and by the time the president, the chancellor and the dean of the school get through with it, he has about fifty cents to work with. That kind of “overhead” practice would send you to prison in the defense contractor world.
My bachelor’s alma mater had a prez a few years ago that thought engineering was just “trade school” and tried to screw things over with them. Fortunately, he got sent on his way and his replacement is relatively neutral to moderately encouraging of the engineering school. When I was doing my EE there, the president of the university was a chemical engineer and the engineering school did all right.
I actively looked for a school with an RR engineering degree many years ago and could not find a program that would work for my situation. I eventually became an electrical engineer - but most of my work is now in industrial and manufacturing engineering. Further, I do not recall a single example from my dynamics and structures classes that involved railroad issues. The typical BSE of today has no concept of the dynamic forces involved in RR structures and rolling stock.
What’s even scarier is that many engineering schools don’t really require understanding analog circuitry for an EE degree. As clock speeds get higher and supply voltages get lower, the digital crowd is now finding out that analog and RF do matter. I was fortunate in being able to take a couple of power systems classes (and labs), electrical machinery, thermodynamics (prof wanted to know what an EE was doing in an ME class - especially after getting the highest score on the final) along with the intro to materials science. Most of my civil engineering education came from reading AC Kalmbach’s Track and Layout (learned about cuts, fills, laying out curves, etc).
I would imagine that courses of interest for railroad engineering would be surveying, soil mechanics (and related geology), structural engineering, materials, enviromental engineering and at least basic knowledge of electrical circuitry.