The reality of the RR industry is not so glamorous. First of all most of us in train, yard, and engine service work on call 24/7/365. I do get time off at my discretion so long as I don’t exceed 25% unavailablity. The downside is I work at night, probably the vast majority of the time but can not predict accurately what time or even what day I will be working. I miss most weekends, a lot of holidays, and now with a 1 year old son a lot of his milestones.
The work itself is rarely satisfying to be honest, not these days with an industry wide obsession with cost cutting and fuel conservation. Unless I get called for a Z train (super high priority freight like UPS), which we don’t regularly have on my route, there is no getting with the program and hauling ass. Those days are long gone sadly. Now it’s just a suck fest of running right at the bare minimum scheduled horsepower per ton, usually around .6-.9 HPT effective on loaded coal trains, and isolated locomotives, and throttle limit restrictions on everything else. I thought maybe I’ve just gotten a bad attitude, but every now and then dispatch has to move trains (which they would love to actually be able to do too) and get word to have us put everything on line and run; gotta say it’s still fun and rewarding to high ball properly. Just exceedingly rare.
So we putz around at idiotically low speeds, beating the living crap out of the locomotives we can use, just to “save” money on fuel. Instead the carrier pays us overtime, and gets to spend extra $$$ on maintenance for all the locomotives that go down. I have a photo (taken after securing the equipment and suspending service because we were out of time) of a crankshaft on a two stroke V16 EMD 710 series that must have spun a rod bearing and then managed to cut the rod journal up to the point it twisted itself in half. Pretty impressive mechanical carnage. Made for a very long day, and who knows how big of a repair bill. The company doesn’t care, they’re saving money on fuel... the total financial picture is not considered.
When my employer isn’t thinking up stupid shit to try out and make work miserable, they’re trying to cheat money from employees, ignore contracts, and screw customers. They also are trying real hard to screw over some widows of my former track coworkers who got killed after being ordered to work on a switch, but weren’t afforded blocking protection in that block. They were then struck and killed by two of my other coworkers on a train. Can’t delay trains you know, the big wigs in Ft. Worth wouldn’t like that. I sincerely hope they lose that lawsuit, sounds like depositions are going very very badly for the company. Good. I’m pretty pissed about that still. They preach safety unless it means delaying trains, or spending money.... then it’s just cheaper to blame the crew or the deceased in the event of a fatality.