How many hours is a CSX day?

[freightfan]

I saw a job listing from CSX and they listed the pay as $138 per day. Is this an 8-hour day or 12-hour day? Does overtime kick in after 40 or 48 hours a week?
Thanks in advance.

[Freddy]

Your day is whatever your job assignment is. When I was a signal maintainer and also a trackman on a stationary force my shift was 8 hours with overtime kicking in after 8 hours.
The railroad, and I don't know how it works with you train guys, has it where O.T. is anything over 8. I've only seen overtime with anything over 40 hours in non-union companies.

[lvrr325]

T&E crews operate under hours of service laws, your day could last just a few hours but by law is limited to no more than 12, regardless of where you are or what's going on you then have to stop the train and be re-crewed. Penalties and so forth depend on specific union agreements; there's some variation as there are still crews working under prior railroad agreements.

[Freddy]

As a maintainer I was covered by hours of service laws to where if I worked 12 hours I'd have to be off 10. The way the guys that I worked with did it was our rest started the minute we
walked thru our front door. Reason being, we sometimes had to drive 2 hours back home after being called out on trouble or sometimes all the maintainers would have to be brought together to put in a switch or put back up a crossing flasher or gate mechanism that a vehicle would knock down.

[roadster]

Probably would help if you stated "what" job was listed. Different crafts have different agreements. Train crews are paid by miles. Rates vary regarding assignments, ie: locals, yard jobs, road short pools, long pools. The Hours of Service is not a pay rate item. Like the trucking industry, It's a safety standard under federal law specifying hours able to work and required rest between assignments. On the Railroad, one can perform service up to 12 hours. After Federal Law prohibits employee from performing any type of service. (Emergency's excepted) However, a crew may remain on duty at an out laying point, until they are transported to a final destination terminal and marked off. This is referred to as limbo time, does not count towards rest and is also regulated by the FRA.

[9axle]

It must be trainee pay at the REDI center. No other jobs pay that little here that I know of.

[Gadfly]

Probably would help if you stated "what" job was listed. Different crafts have different agreements. Train crews are paid by miles. Rates vary regarding assignments, ie: locals, yard jobs, road short pools, long pools. The Hours of Service is not a pay rate item. Like the trucking industry, It's a safety standard under federal law specifying hours able to work and required rest between assignments. On the Railroad, one can perform service up to 12 hours. After Federal Law prohibits employee from performing any type of service. (Emergency's excepted) However, a crew may remain on duty at an out laying point, until they are transported to a final destination terminal and marked off. This is referred to as limbo time, does not count towards rest and is also regulated by the FRA.

The old clerk's agreement provided for overtime with certain exceptions. If you worked more than 8 hours on a bulletined assignment on a single day, you got OT.
But when on the Extra Board and "moving from one assignment to another", you got NO OT for working 8 hours on one assignment, then 8 on another, and another and so on. So long as you were being called off the 'board to work various assignments, you would not receive OT for accumulated hours past 40. This meant that you could work 11, 15--even 20 days at straight time so long as you didn't occupy the same assignment for more than "one day only". I did that several times where I was called to protect off the Extra Board "One day only", marked back to the board. Called the next day or night, worked one 8hr assignment, back to the board. Again and again and again. Each time making ONLY 8 hrs pay for each day even if it were 16 days straight! Now the exception was IF I were working an operator's assignment and marked back up to the board "one day only", I could NOT be recalled to service the same day, working 1st trick, then being called to protect an 11 PM assignment. That was under the "Hours of Service" law that existed at the time. And if the call clerk DID slip up and call, you had to inform him that you were "on the law" and couldn't protect an assignment. I *think* it was 12 hours for clerks at the time, tho the years have faded the memory. You were dog-lawed or hog-lawed until 3 AM. But there were no assignments that went to work at that time, so the previous, or the assigned clerk would've been on it anyway. But, if you caught a vacation where the incumbent was off for 5-7 days, you got to observe the rest days of the assignment.

We LIVED for the summer and the Freight House clerks vacations. They worked 8 AM to 5 PM with an hour for lunch w/ Sat & Sun rest days! SO! If you got called to protect a Freight House job (Bill Clerk, Cashier, Demurrage, etc), that meant you were locked in for the week with "normal" hours. And you would have Sat and Sun rest days. Furthermore, because of the Agreement, a clerk had to observe ALL of the assigned rest days and the hours. SO! They couldn't call you until 5 AM previous for an 8 AM assignment because your hours weren't up. Therefore, if there were a LOT of vacations & you got called for ONE of them, it set up a cycle where you were almost assured of getting another "gravy" job next week! So long as the vacations lasted, you got the "good" assignment. What would bust it up was, an assigned clerk would mark off for one or two days . That put you back on the the Extra Board and available for the next (lousy) Yard Office job. Could be 3 PM or 11 PM. Yuck. Made for crazy hours and crazy pay. We didn't make as much as people THINK we did!

GF

[Desertdweller]

GF,

Your post brought back memories for me of working those extra board clerk assignments. NO OT! If you shifted from your own job to someone else's back to back, it was 16 hours straight time. Sometimes for a week or two at a time.

Les

[Gadfly]

GF,

Your post brought back memories for me of working those extra board clerk assignments. NO OT! If you shifted from your own job to someone else's back to back, it was 16 hours straight time. Sometimes for a week or two at a time.

Les

I think it was, I worked one 19 day stretch withOUT a rest day!:( And no OT! I got on one of those cycles of "one day only" assignments, bouncing from one shift to another, etc! I didn't much like the Operator's job, but I started hoping I'd get called for one so I could get a rest day of SOME sort! (Due to the hog law). Some of them, I worked 1st trick, marked back to the board, then called BACK for 11PM to 7 AM Yard when a clerk took sick & the board was short. One of those times when they furloughed TOO many people and then couldn't find folks to protect everything.

Then there was the time of a declared emergency where all clerks were called in due to a lightning strike. (Remember the days when computers had to be kept very cool, and there was a room full of IBM machines and tape reels?) It knocked everything off, power, computers---ALL. We were running round with flashlights and hanlan lanterns, and building trains with pencils, switch lists, and blank waybills. We were down for 3 days and worked 12 hour shifts. They called in clerks from other Local rosters/districts on the Division. There were clerks in the Yard office tripping over each other, clerks in the Freight house in each other's way, and clerks scurrying all over the yard booking tracks, hunting cars! We got OT for THAT!!! I wuz wore OUT!!!!

[Desertdweller]

GF,

Yes, I remember those days very well.
The yard offices were the only comfortable places to be, because of the A/C for the computing machines. Not only did they need the cool air, but the paper would jam in the humidity.

Where I worked on the Milwaukee Road, our "computer" equipment was at least 25 years old. IBM 25 keypunches, and Canadian Electronics "translators" feeding even older ticker tape punchers and teletypes.

Nevertheless, this stone-age computing equipment was considered too "new-fangled" to be trusted, so car accounting was also done by hand: hand entries into the "car book", typewritten waybills, etc. This had the effect of doubling the clerks' work. Made the union happy.

All train lists were hand-written from physical yard checks. Train crews never kept lists of their trains unless they were on the road, they worked off lists that were made and given to them by the clerks. Yard clerks would spend half their day walking tracks and making lists, then match them up to waybills and punch cards. As the train was doubled up, the punch cards were removed and used to run train lists.

It was a lot of work, but, as you know very well, it was a lot more accurate than what replaced it.

One day, when I was working in the so-called Customer Service Center in Brookings on the DM&E, a conductor called me on the phone. He was about five miles west of Winona MN, and told me "I pulled tracks one, two, and three out of Winona Yard. What's in my train?"
I went kind of ballistic on that one. "What's in your train? How do you know if you have any hazmats if you don't even know what's in your train?"
I guess he thought it was my job to know what was in his train. Not his responsibility.

Les

[Gadfly]

GF,

Yes, I remember those days very well.
The yard offices were the only comfortable places to be, because of the A/C for the computing machines. Not only did they need the cool air, but the paper would jam in the humidity.

Where I worked on the Milwaukee Road, our "computer" equipment was at least 25 years old. IBM 25 keypunches, and Canadian Electronics "translators" feeding even older ticker tape punchers and teletypes.

Nevertheless, this stone-age computing equipment was considered too "new-fangled" to be trusted, so car accounting was also done by hand: hand entries into the "car book", typewritten waybills, etc. This had the effect of doubling the clerks' work. Made the union happy.

All train lists were hand-written from physical yard checks. Train crews never kept lists of their trains unless they were on the road, they worked off lists that were made and given to them by the clerks. Yard clerks would spend half their day walking tracks and making lists, then match them up to waybills and punch cards. As the train was doubled up, the punch cards were removed and used to run train lists.

It was a lot of work, but, as you know very well, it was a lot more accurate than what replaced it.

One day, when I was working in the so-called Customer Service Center in Brookings on the DM&E, a conductor called me on the phone. He was about five miles west of Winona MN, and told me "I pulled tracks one, two, and three out of Winona Yard. What's in my train?"
I went kind of ballistic on that one. "What's in your train? How do you know if you have any hazmats if you don't even know what's in your train?"
I guess he thought it was my job to know what was in his train. Not his responsibility.

Les

We would do, basically, the same thing. Most of the mainline trains were already in the computer when they arrived as they had been inputted from the previous location. Locals were a bit different. When one of these "shifters" or locals came in, we would go out to the requisite end of the yard and wait for it to arrive. We used a tape recorder to vocally record each car as it passed thru the switching lead. That is, if you didn't get an engineer SOB that didn't like clerks! We had a couple that, upon spotting the yard clerk waiting, would throttle UP thru the lead and go so quickly you couldn't talk fast enough to keep up with the cars! EWWWWW! How that did p** us off! There was no need for such shenanigans, but a few of the engineers thought it was very funny. It meant that you'd now have to wait for the train to be doubled into the yard tracks, find out from the YM where the cars were being staged, then walk 2 miles UP to book the cars by hand (switchlist), then 2 miles back to your car to go to the office. If you were lucky you *might* catch a switch engine going your way and catch up on it to ride back to your car. Otherwise it could take 2 hours JUST to get the train crossed over and lined in while you twiddled your thumbs. Nothing you could do in that event but wait, sweat in the heat, shiver in the cold, get wet in the rain! What could've been done in 2 1/2 hours now took 6 because it would sometimes take all morning to book all the cars in, build the train in the computer, line up the bills, and then get the Porter to take the bills to the cab and engine of the train that was to take 'em. It was a challenge to get everything done before the scheduled train arrived for pickup.

I wised up pretty quick to this sh** and found a way to outfox the engineers! At one end of Charlotte (NC) Yard, there was a large mulberry bush. I hid my car in case he might recognize it as belonging to one of the clerks, then I got down in that bush where he couldn't see me. When the engineer didn't see a clerk out there, he'd ease in slowly at around 20 or so, a speed at which I could easily use the tape machine, while peeping out at him! They never caught on! And I got my trains built in plenty of time!!! "I'll teach you, durn you!!!!", I smirked!

[Desertdweller]

If one of those trains had derailed while backing through a switch in excess of 20mph, it could have lead to an interesting investigation. Especially when the speed tapes were read.

Les

[Gadfly]

They always came off the main line going ahead into the yard. It was then when they had cleared the main switches that they backed back into the yard tracks, finding out from the YM which tracks the cars would be spotted. This is why it was so important to book the cars with a tape recorder. We could then go back to the yard office and copy them onto a switch list. If the engineer was being a SOB, you'd just have to wait, find out which tracks they were going to shove into, then trudge thru the yard to get to 'em. Sometimes you'd have to crawl thru cuts of cars to get to the tracks where the local staged. This was quite a little production what with those old "lunchbox" style radios, lantern (if at night), tape recorder and blank switch lists. First you'd make sure the cut you were going to cross thru wasn't "live" (hooked to an engine), then look for a tank or hopper with a platform, or a box car with a brake platform to cross. Never, never cross UNDER a car under any circumstances. Try not to cross or walk on a coupler; they'd get you for that.

Down in the yards, it sometimes got really "close" in there with adjacent tracks. If one cut started to move, we were taught to just sit down on the ground and wait. It was very easy to get disoriented and possibly fall into a train, especially if BOTH adjacent tracks were moving. Worse if one cut was moving one way, the other one going the other way. And watch out for cars moving at any time! They could sneak up on you & and many is the time, I was bookin' yard tracks and here comes a tank car right past me and I didn't even know it until it was beside me! "Expect movement on any track at any time, any direction", went the Rule. And for good reason!

Anyway, those engineers that flew past me on the yard lead, could get away with it because it paralleled the yard by quite a distance. It allowed them to get up, or maintain, speed for a spell. Not likely to derail. But, yes, they would catch hell for ANY derailment anyway.


GF

[Desertdweller]

GF,

I never used a tape recorder at work. I would walk between two tracks of cars, writing down car numbers on both tracks as I went. You learn early to use a pencil, not a pen. Pens freeze, ink runs. One day, I was walking between tracks on the Milwaukee Road in Madison, WI when a sliding door on a 50' MP boxcar fell off! The cut wasn't even moving! Fortunately, I was on the opposite side of the car when it happened. I'm sure I would not have been missed for at least two hours.

We had an interesting situation at Camp 20, the Milwaukee Road yard office in LaCrosse, WI. Eastbound trains would pick-up, or set-out cars at a little unmanned yard at River Junction, MN. River Junction is where the Milwaukee-St. Paul main connects with the main that goes south down the west bank of the Mississippi River.

The next reporting station west (north) of LaCrosse was Winona, MN. We would get a train list of eastbound trains out of Winona. Then, as the train passed the LaCrosse yard, day or night, rain, snow, or shine, the yard clerk had to write a list of the passing train as it went by. He would then compare this handwritten list to the train list sent from Winona.

River Junction was the only place cars would be picked up or set out between Winona and LaCrosse. So, any cars not present in the train that were on the Winona list would have been set out at River Junction. And any extra cars not on the list had to have been picked up there.

No cars were billed to River Junction. Cars left there were either bound south on the river, or were destined to be taken west on the Southern Minnesota Division. Or, were set out bad order or to reduce tonnage.

So we not only had to correct and update train lists on eastbounds (next reporting station Portage), but had to keep a running inventory of what was at River Junction. We could call the train by radio and ask if any pickups or setouts had been made, but that was about the extent of information we got from the train crews.

Les

[Gadfly]

On Southern, they'd let us use a recorder. It saved a lot of time, cutting hours of tedious copying lists (w/a #2 pencil) and putting them into the computer. Once you "built" your train and "flipped" it in the computer (depending on direction) then copies of the bills were "pigeon-holed" for the oncoming conductor to pick up OR given to the operator who then put them with their Clearance Card (for moves originating in that yard). He would then give them to the Porter, if needed, to take them to the head end and the cab with the crew truck. Ditto on the pencil. You learned very quick not to use a pen--especially in the rain! No fun having to trudge Waaaaaay back down to the back of the yard to re-copy that one car whose number got smudged. The Trainmasters were always in a hurry in Charlotte, and they'd really fuss and threaten you when the next train was due and you weren't ready with the bills. I even got fussed at on the Operator's job--the Yard Clerk hadn't even got the bills TO me yet! But *I* got fussed out anyway.

I did ALL those jobs at one time or another: Yard, outlying agency, demurrage, cashier, desk clerk (yard), inspections, operator, ticket agent, baggage handler/porter. You name it!

I "got into it" with a Chief Dispatcher one afternoon. 2nd trick was the worst Operator's billet. It was where all the "Hot shot" and pig trains came in as we were on the Main line between New York and New Orleans. Many of these hot shots were destined for Birmingham, Al. I had 3 Divisions that came into Charlotte Terminal at the time. The Main Line, Columbia (SC) Division, and the old Carolina Division (Asheville, NC). I was busy OS-ing and copying orders for the piggybacks, but the Asheville side was buzzing furiously. I could only talk to one Dispatcher's line at a time: "Red" (the Chief on that Division) should have known that. I finshed up on the Southern Main line and flipped over to Asheville. This cat had ONE local train that originated in Charlotte. This fellow jumped up and down on me & and just fairly ate me OUT! "WHEN I BUZZ YOU MR OPERATOR, I EXPECT YOU TO ANSWER ME, BUB!!!!!!!!" And I flew hot! "IF YOU KNEW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, YOU'D KNOW THAT I'VE GOT 3 DIVISIONS COMING IN HERE AND I CAN'T TALK TO BUT ONE AT A TIME! I'VE GOT HOT SHOT TRAINS IN HERE, AND YOU'VE GOT ONE LOUSY LOCAL TRAIN--AND HE DON'T EVEN GO TO WORK FOR ANOTHER 2 HOURS YET!!!!!!"

And it was ON! My Terminal agent heard me yelling at Red, and he took the headset away. Next thing you know, HE'S yelling TOO!!! And I could hear Red screaming over the line! I sat back and listened. Took 'em a little to settle down.

What a life!