CHICAGO — Class I railroads appreciate moving large volumes of traffic across long routes. There’s efficiency and carload profitability gains by running fewer trains for longer distances on relatively consistent schedules. When this is successful, customers see their shipments make great strides across chunks of a Class I railroad’s network. But some customers’ locations aren’t conveniently placed parallel to a high-density superhighway of a mainline, and thus must rely on lower density feeder lines, and local service, to connect them with the mainline, similar to a regional puddle jumper providing access to a hub airport.
Customers’ supply chains must consider the travel time from when a railcar is pulled from its siding to when it arrives at a rail yard and is blocked into a long-haul manifest. Depending on local service frequency, railcars may only travel a few miles each day, or may have to travel a greater distance on a feeder line at a slower pace. Many of these locations and intermediate crew change points are in rural communities.
As railroads navigate labor shortages, they desperately need workers in small towns to help ensure local service and intermediate crew change points are staffed to provide reliable, punctual service. Attracting workers to these small communities is challenging, especially when a otherf employment sectors are hiring workers with work-life balances that do not require railroading’s on-call environment.
For instance, BNSF Railway has almost 50 conductor trainee positions available at this writing, many in popular railroad towns, but otherwise likely foreign to a potential job candidate. To entice applicants, railroads are having to up the ante. BNSF is offering a $10,000 sign-on bonus in Aberdeen, S.D., on the old Milwaukee Road. Here, the railroad’s east-west Mobridge and Appleton subdivisions connect with the railroad’s Aberdeen Subdivision for access to southeastern South Dakota. From Aberdeen, the ex-Milwaukee connects to the rest of the BNSF via the Appleton Subdivision east to Appleton, Minn., a distance of 130 miles, and to the west via Terry, Mont., 371 miles away.
Similarly, Union Pacific has more than 30 train crew positions available in places like East St. Louis and Seattle where there’s a pool of potential candidates. But crew vacancies in Helper, Utah, or Grand Junction, Colo., on the old Denver & Rio Grande Western may be more challenging to fill. The former Rio Grande doesn’t host the same volume of traffic as the railroad’s Overland Route to the north, between Cheyenne, Wyo., and Salt Lake City, where railroads may have more crews available. If crews aren’t available, train velocities may decrease on these lower-density secondary lines.
Eastern Class I railroads are feeling the pinch, too. CSX Transportation is looking for a freight conductor at Clifton Forge, Va., on its ex-Chesapeake & Ohio mainline connecting Richmond, Va., with Russell, Ky. The former C&O is primarily a conduit between West Virginia’s coal mines and export coal facilities in coastal Virginia, but a fair bit of manifest traffic travels an average distance of at least 400 miles through the rural Appalachians.
Railroads will have to deploy a creative strategy to attract workers to these rural locations in order to keep freight railcars moving across the entire network. Deciding where to hire and how to utilize existing crews will continue to be critical, as well. A healthy-staffed crew-change point at a busy mainline terminal won’t be useful if railcars are stranded on a rural branch line a couple hundred miles away.
Chase Gunnoe works in marketing & sales for the freight rail industry and is the author of Carload Considerations, a monthly Trains News Wire commentary series. It discusses the freight rail industry, commodities, and economic trends. Its views are the opinion of its author with no particular emphasis on a specific railroad or shipper.
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