I am going to address this as best I can although I do not claim to be an
expert and I never did claim to know everything.
"Crazy Nip", I put in plenty of 60 and 80 weeks in my extra list days and
with little or no time and one half, even today, most railroaders except on
local freights, traveling switchers and yard jobs do not get time and one
half except for the railroads that pay completely by the hour. Most of the
larger railroads do not want to go to an hourly pay system as then they
would have to pay out huge amounts of time and one half, holiday pay for
all and some other goodies that they can avoid today. I have worked
under both the mileage pay setup and hourly pay setup and have done
reasonably well either way.
As for five man and sometimes even six man crews, I was not in train
service and the firemen have been gone for a long time, what the
railroads saved in taking off the fireman has been spent on their massive
training programs today, are the railroads better off for it, I am not totally
sure but in my opinion, they were better off with the firemen as the
firemen were always in training to become an engineer and once they
were fully qualified, the railroad had a very good back up to depleted
extra lists, just promote fireman so and so for the day and the train(s) got
over the road. I still believe that you get better skills working with one
engineer for months or maybe even a year or two than you do banging
around all over the place, spending time in classrooms and all of that.
In becomming an engineer, "EXPERIENCE IS THE BEST TEACHER" is more
true than ever.
As for the issue of branch lines and un-needed branch lines. I realize that
in 1976 when Conrail was formed to take over for the bankrupt railroads
in the northeast that there was nowhere near the traffic to justify for
example the five plus existing routes between northern New Jersey and
Buffalo, it is called survival of the fittest. The physical plant was reduced
to three lines and later two lines and now one major route and one rather
minor route. The unions understood that and they cooperated with
Conrail to provide for an orderly system of combined seniority rights where by former LVRR, EL, PRR, NYC and NH people were all given a shot
at the remaining work over the remaining lines. Not everybody was happy but all of them had jobs and decent ones at that.
With the branch line situation, it has been a plus and minus situation the
way I see it. Yes, branch lines CAN be a marginal operation but when the
railroad makes a marginal operation into a deficit operation by throwing
away business, refusing new business, taking weeks to deliver a car or
cars that should be delivered in a few days, it is no wonder that a branch
line becomes a loser. I have seen a few cases where the men working a
particular branch or area ruined the operation but the company generally
knew about this and just let it go on rather than putting a stop to it.
What the analysis shows on an office desk does not always work out on
the road either, what works on paper may not work in actual practice.
I have seen cases where cars for a branch line customer roll by the
junction point a couple of times on a main line freight job and they would
not let them stop to drop the cars, the result, a customer on a branch gets
so upset with the extreme late delivery that they say, nuts to the railroad,
we will use trucks.
I have also seen branch lines that had no hope, the Catskill Mountain
Branch of Penn Central and the early months of Conrail is an example of
that, it had about three good stations but the line was much too long and
the good stations were too far from Kingston to really economically serve
the line on a timely basis. The state of New York has a terrible tax
structure so far as railroads are concerned and as a result the New York
Central and later Penn Central were in no mood to sink a lot of money in
to the line. The state finally saw the light and gave them a little tax break
and provided some subsidy money for operation of the line but it was still
a big loser and the breaks came "too little, too late".
As for selling or leasing a line out, I don't have a big problem if CSX, NS
or one of the others sells a line in total when they can't justify the operation of the line and the buyer gets the line in total with all existing
interchanges open etc. I do have a problem when CSX leases out an
existing line with substantial traffic or a substantial traffic base such as the
coal lines in West Virginia and retains just enough to prevent a competetive interchange arrangement and forces the operator to be a
captive CSX customer. The operator can only offer service as good as
CSX provides and that might not be good enough. I still believe the
leasing arrangements in most cases are a leverage to get out from their
union agreements and benefit no one.
I am not saying that the unions are perfect but we have given up a
substantial portion of our mileage pay, a lot of our arbitraries and special
allowances, a substantial number of crew members on through and local
freight trains and a host of other things that we were formerly paid for.
I am going to close this one here and start another entry in case for some
reason it does not enter, I will not have done all of this typing for nothing.
Noel Weaver