08-17-2011, 10:59 AM
Brakie Wrote:Here's the catch-22..Overtime.Locals to some railroads are a necessary evil that cuts into their grand scheme of unit and intermodal trains railroading and of course the bottom line should a local crew hit the "good money" 5 days a week 52 weeks a year.Switches needs to be maintain -more added cost.
What to do? cried the bean counters.
Ah,we'll add another locomotive or a caboose for reverse moves to those blasted locals and save hundreds of man hours by eliminating the runaround moves and we can eliminate one more job ( brakeman/conductor's helper) and remove unneeded track in the process!
Excellent! declared the upper management.Let's get it done!
Then the Feds added more federal safety mandates and that help push runarounds from favor.
The other result was that the class one railroads divested themselves of local branch lines, which were then sold off to smaller operators if the traffic warranted. These smaller non-union operators and in some cases union operations just specialized in serving local industries and acted as feeders to the class one's.