Well looks like some of the class ones are going to start hireing another round of new Conductors. I happened across this vid for NS. I think it paint a fairly true picture of what a conductor does and what the job is like. I figured you all might be interested. http://www.nscorp.com/nscorphtml/video/Conductor_prehire.wmv Adam
Pretty cool Adam, I like the music and how they make it all snazzy. It's pretty crazy what you guys have to do. If I wasn't a RRC (mailman), then I'd probably be doing that. Thanks for posting the vid. =) -Mike
Yes I feel the dark side calling sometimes. Mostly when my hogger is giving me the weather report of the cab over the radio.:tb-mad: Adam
My grandfather loved AND hated being a conductor. He served several decades with Union Pacific, and has been retired now about 30 years. He has loads of stories, which I have to tease out of him using leading questions, and has impaired hearing, but then again he's in his mid-90's, so who knows how much of the hearing loss is age-related.
Brian,the conductor in the video,was a bit half-spoken in his description. It's true that operating department railroading is NOT a 9A - 5P job, it is more correctly described as a 9A - 5P then 1A - 9A then 5P - 1A and so on and so on. Does that sound familiar to any of you rails out there??? LOL
It turns out that my engineers promotion actually amounted to a pay cut for me. The commuter trainmans job I was on paid a lot more than most of the engineer's jobs available to a bottom seniority engineer like me. That was another criterion in my decision to retire early. I didn't wanna work all those bottom feeder jobs since I wasn't intending to work long enough and go thru all the crappy jobs until I reached the decent paying ones. I was on the Passenger Engineers extra board when I retired,but that only lasted a few weeks while all the high seniority guys were on summer vacations. It was a "force assignment". CT
Here are the things I was told my by old rail grandfather. He could have had straight shifts at one point but it meant yard service and he said he didn't want to have to wear rain suits all the time and walk around in all kinds of weather at some yard somewhere. He also liked being out on the mainline. He said he was never interested in being an engineer because you couldn't leave the cab and because, especially into the diesel era, he didn't want to be sitting around all that fuel oil smell all the time, and besides that he'd already advanced as a conductor. He is a fairly meticulous person to this day, and I think that trait served him well as a conductor. He's always got a very clear thought process and a very particular way he likes to do things. He can also be a bit unbending, and he's always been that way. When you're dealing with safety regulations and the like I don't think you can afford to be anything but unbending lest you have a head-on wreck with another train or someone gets killed or injured.
