Question about Conductor School

From some of the other posts i have read after completing conductor school you are sent to Atlanta, Ga. I was just wondering why and how long does it last?

I also here a lot of people talk about getting furloughed for long periods of time. I was wondering if this is true for people who work short routes such as transporting coal from point a to point b.

Any replies are appreciated.

First off, the reason you are shipped to Atlanta for a week is mainly to get you some hands-on interaction with real equipment before going to your regular assigned location. MOst of the schools have hands-on, but with only stationary equipment. We went to Cleveland for a week and it was mainly to get used to moving equipment (which was in a seperate part of the yard, dedicated to traning excercises ie: making hitches, cupling live air hoses, kicking cars, giving engineer hand signals while riding side of cars).

As to your second question, yes there are lay-offs sometimes, but it really varies from location to location. If you want to hire out don't worry about things like that, you will just end up lower on the seniority roster when you finally hire-out......and the longer you wait, the bigger the risk of being effected by furloughs (if they even occur) because you'll have less seniority.

thinkingaboutit wrote:From some of the other posts i have read after completing conductor school you are sent to Atlanta, Ga. I was just wondering why and how long does it last?

You go to Atlanta for two weeks.
I really enjoyed it down there. The instructors are all good guys and we had a lot of fun. Only thing I was critical of was the class size. We had 21 in our class, so when we did go outside to move cars around, a person would do a move and then stand around for two hours or longer waiting for everyone to take their turn. You do learn a lot watching but it's the actual doing it that you really learn from.

But all in all, it was fun.
______________________________

Moderator's Note: This topic is already being discussed in great detail in the "Questions about CSX conductor school" topic. Please continue related discussion in already active topics rather than create new ones, for better discussion continuity. Thanks!