Career Overview: What I Do As an Instructing Engineer
Freight trains remain loyal followers of transport and industry, transporting goods across the continent on a daily basis. You can easily imagine driving a train to be relaxing and simple – push, hit the brakes and lean back as the countryside passes, but it takes a little more work to manage that many tons.
To learn more about what it’s like to be a train conductor and engineer, we spoke to Troy Heather, who has been traveling on rails for eleven years now transporting mixed loads with BNSF . He prefers it to office work, but this also has its problems.
Tell us a little about yourself and your experience.
My name is Troy, in 2004 I was hired as a railway conductor and in 2005 I was promoted to engineer. I work for one of the largest railways in the country and operate trains on a 135-mile stretch of the Midwest.
What prompted you to choose your career path?
My father was, without a doubt, the main reason I got hired on the railroad. He worked as an engineer for 38 years and left his job several years ago. I spent many years at a dead end job, never felt like I was going anywhere, and one day he called me and said the railroad was hiring, so I thought, why not give it a try? I applied for one of ten conductor positions, I am sure that I will not be hired, in the end, there were several hundred other applicants, but I stayed my way and got one of the positions.
What kind of education and experience did you need?
Having started training as a conductor, which lasts about four months, you find yourself in a completely different world. The railway is like no other job, you feel the history behind it and it has its own language and culture to match it.
Do you need any licenses or certificates?
After you complete your Conductor Training, you can choose to remain Conductor or offer an Engineering class when they appear. Betting on a course means that a group of guys prepares paperwork trying to get into an engineer course. They are ranked in order of seniority, so the guy with the most seniority gets into the case. Seniority is everything on the railroad; when you get hired as a conductor (or machinist, machinist, any job on the railroad), you get a date, and if a guy hired you for one day, he’ll get the job before you. Guys who have worked for over 30 years on the railways get the best job, salary, or schedule, simply because they have the best length of service. When guys retire, there are fewer guys in front of you, and you are more likely to keep a good job.
The only caveat is that by betting on an engineering course, you will either pass it or lose your job. If you fail, you won’t be able to become a conductor again, at least not on the railroad that I work on. This adds significant stress. I was very lucky that I got into class very early, passed the exam and got the status of an engineer. To complete my engineer training, I took a mechanical test, a General Code of Practice test, a pneumatic braking and train handling test, and several simulator runs, each requiring a score of 90 or higher. You also have 16 weeks of OJT, or on-the-job training, as you go out and study your unit.
So, along with your training as a conductor and your training as an engineer (which lasts between five and six months), you will have a little less than a year of general training. You have exited your engineering training with a federal train operating license.
What do you actually spend most of your time on?
The most important thing we do every day is the safe operation of the train. You are very familiar with the area you are running and the rest of the time you spend trying to safely move your train from point A to point B. My range is 135 miles, but it often takes more than 12 hours to get there. from terminal to terminal. This leads to waiting times for trains on the opposite side. Our opening hours limit us to 12 train hours; after that we are “dead” and can no longer operate the train. You spend a lot of time just sitting in the cockpit, so it’s best to hope you get along with the guy you’re working with, otherwise it’s going to be a long quiet ride. For most of your shift, you and the guide are in an area not much larger than a small bathroom, so you work hard to have a positive relationship with them because the work is brutally unforgiving and one small mistake can have disastrous results. for yourself, colleagues or the public.
A locomotive usually has over 4,400 horsepower, and you have two or three (or more). What you are carrying changes every day: the coal train today, ethanol for the next, mixed cargo, whatever, we carry it. The rear power distribution is radio coupled to the head-end locomotives and corresponds to the throttle or braking position, or it can operate “separately,” with I control the head and rear motors separately. The biggest challenge is controlling the strength or weakness on the train. Each joint between cars has a few inches of play times 120+ cars and can be 25 feet or more. If you allow the head to move backward, you will pull the train in half, since the joints that connect the carriages are inherently the weakest point because they are the easiest to replace. Allowing the rear end to hit you can be a pretty strong jolt as you get hit by 15,000 tons of the train – and no one likes to spill coffee all over the surface – so you try to avoid that. It’s a delicate balance that takes years to be successful. At the same time, you constantly think about ten miles ahead, about planned stops, places where you need to slow down, about other traffic – sometimes you have to juggle.
What’s your average uptime?
Our schedules are available 24/7. They call me two hours [in advance] to show up for work, then I take a train to another city, rest at the hotel for 12 hours and wait for the train home. Usually I will be at home 12-24 hours, then the average trip will last 36-46 hours. If I start six days in a row, I get two days off, seven days, and then three days off. But even this is an accident, this is what happens when the government tries to regulate our vacation. Things like off-roading (taking the bus instead of the train) don’t count as the start of the day, they reset my starting count and I have to try to hone my start again. On the positive side, we can pretty much fire when we need to; there is a formula for determining the number of days you sail in any given month, but to keep it simple, you get five working days and two days off per month on our train. I don’t have to look for someone to cover my shift, I just mark the day and get 24 hours of rest.
Many railroad workers will talk about scheduling, or rather the lack of predictability, as negative, and I definitely see it as a double-edged sword. I can sit down at my computer and have a general idea of when I should log out, but sometimes that can change for over 12 hours. Forget about being home on vacation or making an appointment for more than a week because you just don’t know if you will be home. But if you get used to the schedule, you can make it work for you. My wife and children, whom I would not have coped with without their support, understand that Christmas can happen a few days earlier or later, and that I cannot handle everything. But we live more spontaneously and can make the trip somewhere in the middle of the week because we can. It is very important that your spouse understands that the schedule is very demanding. I was lucky to marry a woman who knew what she was getting herself into; her father worked for a long time on the “site” (repairing a caterpillar). A strong marriage is very important, and divorce rates can be high.
How much money can you expect at your job?
The salary depends on how much margin you have and how much you work, or what job you work in, but it can range from $ 75,000 to $ 100,000. I take my allotted vacation a month to better spend time with my family, so I’m in the middle of those numbers. People always comment on how well a job pays, but forget about the 200+ hours a month we have to work to get it (the government has limited us to 276 hours a month, which a lot of people get), or the fact that I ‘ “I sit in a hotel 135 miles from home for a decent amount of time.
What misconceptions do people often have about your job?
A common misconception people have about my work is that we seek to make people uncomfortable. Nobody likes to get stuck waiting for a train to clear a crossing, and most of all we hate doing it. But it happens. I run down the footage counter, enter the length of my train into the computer, and it counts down to the point where I remove something. Sometimes they fail, causing me not to fit where I thought. On average, a typical coal train can be 6,800 to 7,800 feet in length and 16,000 to 21,000 tons. Sometimes the dispatcher does not tell us if we are going to stop somewhere, and as a result, we block transitions. It sucks for us because what we can’t control causes us to bear the brunt of the public reaction. They threw me bottles in the taxi, I saw so many middle fingers that I lost count. Usually people perceive trains as a nuisance: they are loud, and six minutes or so waiting for them to cross the crossing is the end of the world. But there are people in taxis doing their job, trying to get home to see their loved ones, and they don’t like it as much as you do.
What’s the worst part of a job and how do you deal with it?
There is another negative associated with this. People often become so impatient that they run out of the gate and get hit. This is by far the worst part of the job. You feel helpless. Imagine that you are driving at 60 miles an hour and you can see someone in front of you from half a mile away, and there is nothing you can do to stop. You are about to hit them and all you can do is sit and watch. I have experienced this three times in my short career, and each of them I will never forget. It is amazing that someone trying to save a few minutes would endanger not only their lives, but their passengers as well.
What is the most enjoyable part of the job?
The most enjoyable part of the job is the pride and sense of tradition that comes from being an engineer. It’s a long, legendary career that not everyone gets to experience. Each day presents new challenges, from train composition to weather and hundreds of different variables that make my job of safely moving a train from two locations into a challenge. I can see parts of the countryside that others can’t see from the highway, and many times we just roll around, somewhat isolated, doing work that I really enjoy. I was fortunate enough to train with my dad and the time I spent with him teaching me his skills I will never forget. It made me appreciate the sacrifices he made for us as children, and I enjoy passing on the skills he taught me to others. Now this is a family of railway workers, my brother is also an engineer, we have a lot in common, and this is what will always connect us.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sit at the table again.