Thanks Charlie. That means I got about another week of waiting I guess. I got my pre-offer about 3 weeks ago for the Conductor job in Sioux City. I am looking forward to starting a new career.
Hate to bust in on a thread I know little about, but are we talking about Job offers straight off the Street " so to speak". I'm going to NARS at the end of June. Is there any differances in the hiring and or training of the two different appoaches ?
================================= I was hired "off the street". I like to joke that I was the "token" in my class. ie, I was the "older American". When I hired out there were a lot of older guys being hired. I was sent to N.A.R.S. for training(it is still manned primarily by BNSF people). Nowadays new hires "off the street" are trained on site at the locations they will be working at. Whether you "pay to play" at N.A.R.S. or get hired "off the street", you are still not "hired" until you pass that Conductors Qualifying Exam and the 60 day "derail". As I have said before, that qualifying exam is no cakewalk. Just a word of advice, if you "just squeak by" passing your Conductors Exam, you probably should consider strongly any ideas you may have about going for engineer training. The course is much more rigorous and when you sign up for engineer training you sign a waiver that if you dont pass the course(2 trys) you lose your job. PERIOD! You cant go back to your conductor or brakemans job. You are out on the street again. That is a union/company agreement! Think carefully! CT
Thanks for the info. I didn't expect that the tests would be any easier or the training would be. It's great to have so many people that have gone though the process so recently so that there's no delusions of what's to come. What's the class sizes like. Thanks in advance and hope I'm not too nuch of a pain for all the questions.
=================================no pain a'tall! BTW a clarification, when I used "you" in a previous post, I meant anyone who is interested in attending NARS or getting a railroad job. The size of our class when we first started was 21, there were supposed to be two more people than that,but they were "no-shows". On of the guys was already a switchman but had been hired under an old agreement(he was on the ATSF side of the RR)He was just in class to prep for and take the conductors exam. He was with us for a couple of weeks only. Another guy dropped out of class. He had been a dispatcher and apparently decided to take a "flowback" offer to dispatching even though that meant going to Ft.Worth. Dunno for sure what the deal wuz, all I know is he was there one day and the next morning he never showed up and his roomate said that his stuff was gone from the apartment. Another couple of guys didn't make the test on the first try so they didn't bid seniority with us. We wound up with 17 in class. My roomate, Tommy B., bid #17 in seniority position! A fact I never let him forget! LOL CT
That's right...you were all from the same area. I never thought about that. I imagine that doesn't happen any more until you actually hit your work area. How did you go about bidding senoirity. I've heard everything from drawing numbers to using SSN for Senoirity. Hopefully they don't go by age from youngest to oldest or I'll probably be in real trouble (38)
================================= Actually my class was from all over. There was one group of us(6) from Chicago, another group about the same size from Lincoln and the rest from here & there, The way we picked seniority is that we drew from a hat for "pick" positions and then drew in turn order from the hat for seniority position. sorta like a sports draft! Not to worry about age! They dont normally do it that way. I would have been on the tail end if they did. I was 52 when I started training! Had a few guys in their 40's some in their 30s. My roomate(Tommy) was 19. We were the class joke. We were the "father & son" going to school together.LOL CT
