Is CSX going to sell?

crazy_nip wrote:like the erie lackawanna?

C&O was in talks to buy part of the system and N&W wanted parts too, but labor wouldnt budge

4 and 5 man crews and ignorant unions did them in

Erie Lackawanna, Penn Central, you name them and the same thing holds true in nearly every case. The only exception being the one you pointed out- Conrail.



One final word from me: I find it ironic that people complain constantly about the ICC not allowing railroads to abandon lines which they claim were ruining the railroads and then complain when a company wants to freely get rid of lines that are similarly bleeding the company dry AND MAKE A PROFIT FROM THE SALE OR LEASE- simply shows their true motives for being against basic rules of economics.

efin98 wrote:The only exception being the one you pointed out- Conrail.

hmm... wonder why? Maybe because the government poured BILLIONS of dollars into CONrail before it even remotely became proffitable

and then sold at a tremendous loss when it finally went public in its IPO...

at a tremendous loss to the public taxpayer who funded your welfare railroad

I think "Crazy" and "Efin" need their shots updated. lol!

Imagine the history of Eastern Railroading and the decline of the industrialized Northeast and the US in general identified and layed out in a forum thread. You boys identified the problems and cut to the point like a lazer, It was union railroaders. I never suspected that, but you must be right.

As a railroader I resent your comments about dirty conditions being the cause of railroaders. My railroad has five crew bases that rely on "porta potties" do you have running water and a toilet where you go to work? My last crew base was built in 1880 and had a rotted roof, was infested with rats and hadn't been painted since...well no one really knows. Is your work place like that? I had to face insulting passengers, drunks, addicts, pompous professionals and jack ass students every day, do you?

I don't know Noel, hell I might not even like him if I did meet him but I know one thing I'll stand up with a "rail" any day before I take the side of a casual observer of our world! I will withold comments about your life and work, who knows how accurate I'd be?

Was the Northeast railroad morass in the 60s and 70s a result of bad management? Yes. Was it due to union featherbedding? Yes. Was it due to unfair government regulation? Yes. Was it due to changing market conditions, i.e., the formation of the interstate highway system, a declining manufacturing base, etc? Yes. Bottom line: To choose one reason for the mess of the past is to oversimplify history. You could say it was the Perfect Storm of a cluster....

To the present. The railroad is in existence to make money for its shareholders. Period. You might not like that, but I expect anyone that has stock or a 401(k) hopes that the companies that have their savings act accordingly. Markets change and railroads need to change with their markets in order to be around to make money tomorrow. They expand and spend money only when it promises a return (recent double- and triple tracking, flyovers, new locomotives, new technology). They retrench when economics dictate. CSXT... and all the Class 1s have a hefty burden due to union work rules and wages. If this is not true, why are unions proud of their accomplishments improving pay and working conditions? This inflexibility can be accomodated in high volume through- routes, but oftentimes branch line economics require more flexible labor working conditions and wage scales. No, higher costs can't just be passed on to the shipper. Shippers don't care about someone else's wage issues when it affects THEIR profitability. What is so hard to swallow about this?

In the total scheme of things I think your rationale about union burdens on a company are overstated. There is no fat on the system any more. If there was, the railroads would not be on a hiring blitz. Work rules, please the unions haven't saved a job since, well someone else better answer that one cause I don't know. If you closely examined the railroad work place you would see that the protection offered workers in the general economy are far superior to those offered railroaders. We do not have unemployment coverage, we do not have workmen's compensation, some of us do not have sick days, the hours of service act allows us to be called to work after only a total of eight hours off duty. A two man crew is charged with the same performance standards of that five man crew. Todays railroaders work harder and under more stressful situations than ever before.

The problems the railroads have include access to affordable capital dollars and investor expectations that are increasingly out of line with any distribution or manufacturing industry. Let's not forget jackasses like our esteemed Sec. of the Treasury Snow. The railroad answer to Robber Barons like Jack Welch of GE.

The reality of America is not "free market" it is increasingly an example of draining capital from industries to enrich top management and the oligarchs of the country.

SnoozerZ49 wrote:In the total scheme of things I think your rationale about union burdens on a company are overstated. There is no fat on the system any more. If there was, the railroads would not be on a hiring blitz. Work rules, please the unions haven't saved a job since, well someone else better answer that one cause I don't know. If you closely examined the railroad work place you would see that the protection offered workers in the general economy are far superior to those offered railroaders. We do not have unemployment coverage, we do not have workmen's compensation, some of us do not have sick days, the hours of service act allows us to be called to work after only a total of eight hours off duty. A two man crew is charged with the same performance standards of that five man crew. Todays railroaders work harder and under more stressful situations than ever before.

The problems the railroads have include access to affordable capital dollars and investor expectations that are increasingly out of line with any distribution or manufacturing industry. Let's not forget jackasses like our esteemed Sec. of the Treasury Snow. The railroad answer to Robber Barons like Jack Welch of GE.

The reality of America is not "free market" it is increasingly an example of draining capital from industries to enrich top management and the oligarchs of the country.

I totally agree with you but I am glad you said it this time instead of me.
Now you will get the response from the railfans who think they know more
about your job than you do.
There are at least three of them on here and they know who they are.
Noel Weaver

Snoozer - I never stated that there is now fat in the union employee ranks. The railroads are facing a big challenge with attrition... the majority of T&E employees are over 50, which means a lot of vacancies in the coming years. And there's a lot of turnover with younger employees quitting due to lifestyle issues. (Someone accurately stated elsewhere that railoaders are paid for the lifestyle they lead, not the work they do.)

And railroaders have less protection than industry in general? Ever hear of Mendicino Coast or New York Dock? Could you please tell me what other industries have had to guarantee 6 yrs of pay for separation?

And railroaders do have unemployment... it's under RRB oversight rather than state. And workmans comp is something the railroads WANT. The unions and legal community that have fought the keep the current system (FELA) in place.

However, inflexibility continues. Guarantee boards, arbitraries, etc. I'm not saying that they are fair or not... but when a crew gets an extra day's pay because they ran through their home terminal or get taxied to another terminal... do you think the costs of such can just get passed on? It's a harsh fact that they cannot. And those costs are factored into such things as branch line economic viability studies that feed keep, sell, or lease decisions. It has NOTHING to do with executives lining their pockets, John Snow notwithstanding.

Railroaders DO NOT face worse conditions when compared to the past. It's still no walk in the park, but there are no more 16 hr days, and with technology and evolving operating practices, e.g., forbidding getting on moving equipment, it has NEVER been safer. REGARDLESS OF CREW SIZE.

Noel - I don't claim to know what you did in the industry... I'm going to assume your positions never involved economic analysis. If you do have experience with such, please tell me how a railroad should decide the fate of a branch line or redundant bridge route in the face of declining on-line business and profitability. I have plenty of experience with such analyses and I'd be interested to know your viewpoints.

As for the union not being a burden to the railroad, didn't Guilford just fire half the train crews working out of Rigby just a few weeks back for lying about their hours? Seems it had been going on for a long time and alot of people were involved. That's part of the reason that service has been in the $hitter for the last month or two.

Cowford wrote:And railroaders have less protection than industry in general? Ever hear of Mendicino Coast or New York Dock? Could you please tell me what other industries have had to guarantee 6 yrs of pay for separation?

thanks for someone recognizing my reference to the longshoresmans unions and the position they put themselves in...

And railroaders do have unemployment... it's under RRB oversight rather than state. And workmans comp is something the railroads WANT. The unions and legal community that have fought the keep the current system (FELA) in place.

they have it pretty easy in this regards, most workers comp boards are staffed with pro-employer staff vs union staff from the vaious RR unions and at least here in florida you automatically get 25% knocked off your base salary if you go on long term disability

However, inflexibility continues. Guarantee boards, arbitraries, etc. I'm not saying that they are fair or not... but when a crew gets an extra day's pay because they ran through their home terminal or get taxied to another terminal... do you think the costs of such can just get passed on? It's a harsh fact that they cannot. And those costs are factored into such things as branch line economic viability studies that feed keep, sell, or lease decisions. It has NOTHING to do with executives lining their pockets, John Snow notwithstanding.

out here in the real world we have something called FLSA EXEMPT SALARIED employees.

Which basically means your employer can work you more than 40 hours a week (up to NO maximum in most states) and theoretically 7 days a week.

Last year during the hurricanes we had here, I worked in some capacity for 60 days straight and did not get one DIME of overtime or comp time. I got my basic 40 hours and that was it. Nothing more than a pat on the back and a free mean here or there... Id love to hear someone like Noel Weaver bitch and moan if they had to do something like that

Railroaders DO NOT face worse conditions when compared to the past. It's still no walk in the park, but there are no more 16 hr days, and with technology and evolving operating practices, e.g., forbidding getting on moving equipment, it has NEVER been safer. REGARDLESS OF CREW SIZE.

yes, its quite a bit safer now, except RCO. Im not convinced that this is any safer than a 2 man switch crew.

Uh if we didn't have Conrail we'd have no Chicago-Boston direct route. All of the PC would be gone.

AmtrakFan wrote:Uh if we didn't have Conrail we'd have no Chicago-Boston direct route. All of the PC would be gone.

that is an assumption based on very little fact...

if there was no conrail, the railroads would have been liquidated and the existing railroads would have bought the various systems piecemeal, at very much reduced prices and would have had the option to renegotiate labor contracts at favorable rates/concessions

like what happened to the rock island and milwaukee road when they went bankrupt...

I wouldnt expect you to know anything about this since you werent even alive when any of this went down...

the C&O and N&W and likely Southern would have ended up with big pieces of the various railroads. Perhaps even the ATSF would have tried to get in on the action, the EL would have been a perfect match for them

the N&W would have likely bought a good hunk of the PRR and C&O would have likely tried to get a big part of the NYC and / or EL

some lines would have been lost, but likely not as much as ended up being lost due to conrail

Amtrak would have ended up with the NEC, like they ended up getting anyway

crazy_nip wrote:at a tremendous loss to the public taxpayer who funded your welfare railroad

get over it

I am going to address this as best I can although I do not claim to be an
expert and I never did claim to know everything.
"Crazy Nip", I put in plenty of 60 and 80 weeks in my extra list days and
with little or no time and one half, even today, most railroaders except on
local freights, traveling switchers and yard jobs do not get time and one
half except for the railroads that pay completely by the hour. Most of the
larger railroads do not want to go to an hourly pay system as then they
would have to pay out huge amounts of time and one half, holiday pay for
all and some other goodies that they can avoid today. I have worked
under both the mileage pay setup and hourly pay setup and have done
reasonably well either way.
As for five man and sometimes even six man crews, I was not in train
service and the firemen have been gone for a long time, what the
railroads saved in taking off the fireman has been spent on their massive
training programs today, are the railroads better off for it, I am not totally
sure but in my opinion, they were better off with the firemen as the
firemen were always in training to become an engineer and once they
were fully qualified, the railroad had a very good back up to depleted
extra lists, just promote fireman so and so for the day and the train(s) got
over the road. I still believe that you get better skills working with one
engineer for months or maybe even a year or two than you do banging
around all over the place, spending time in classrooms and all of that.
In becomming an engineer, "EXPERIENCE IS THE BEST TEACHER" is more
true than ever.
As for the issue of branch lines and un-needed branch lines. I realize that
in 1976 when Conrail was formed to take over for the bankrupt railroads
in the northeast that there was nowhere near the traffic to justify for
example the five plus existing routes between northern New Jersey and
Buffalo, it is called survival of the fittest. The physical plant was reduced
to three lines and later two lines and now one major route and one rather
minor route. The unions understood that and they cooperated with
Conrail to provide for an orderly system of combined seniority rights where by former LVRR, EL, PRR, NYC and NH people were all given a shot
at the remaining work over the remaining lines. Not everybody was happy but all of them had jobs and decent ones at that.
With the branch line situation, it has been a plus and minus situation the
way I see it. Yes, branch lines CAN be a marginal operation but when the
railroad makes a marginal operation into a deficit operation by throwing
away business, refusing new business, taking weeks to deliver a car or
cars that should be delivered in a few days, it is no wonder that a branch
line becomes a loser. I have seen a few cases where the men working a
particular branch or area ruined the operation but the company generally
knew about this and just let it go on rather than putting a stop to it.
What the analysis shows on an office desk does not always work out on
the road either, what works on paper may not work in actual practice.
I have seen cases where cars for a branch line customer roll by the
junction point a couple of times on a main line freight job and they would
not let them stop to drop the cars, the result, a customer on a branch gets
so upset with the extreme late delivery that they say, nuts to the railroad,
we will use trucks.
I have also seen branch lines that had no hope, the Catskill Mountain
Branch of Penn Central and the early months of Conrail is an example of
that, it had about three good stations but the line was much too long and
the good stations were too far from Kingston to really economically serve
the line on a timely basis. The state of New York has a terrible tax
structure so far as railroads are concerned and as a result the New York
Central and later Penn Central were in no mood to sink a lot of money in
to the line. The state finally saw the light and gave them a little tax break
and provided some subsidy money for operation of the line but it was still
a big loser and the breaks came "too little, too late".
As for selling or leasing a line out, I don't have a big problem if CSX, NS
or one of the others sells a line in total when they can't justify the operation of the line and the buyer gets the line in total with all existing
interchanges open etc. I do have a problem when CSX leases out an
existing line with substantial traffic or a substantial traffic base such as the
coal lines in West Virginia and retains just enough to prevent a competetive interchange arrangement and forces the operator to be a
captive CSX customer. The operator can only offer service as good as
CSX provides and that might not be good enough. I still believe the
leasing arrangements in most cases are a leverage to get out from their
union agreements and benefit no one.
I am not saying that the unions are perfect but we have given up a
substantial portion of our mileage pay, a lot of our arbitraries and special
allowances, a substantial number of crew members on through and local
freight trains and a host of other things that we were formerly paid for.

I am going to close this one here and start another entry in case for some
reason it does not enter, I will not have done all of this typing for nothing.
Noel Weaver

The six year pay conditions of the New York Dock case only apply when a
decision is made by authority to apply them and in most cases, apply only
to an extremely small number of people.
As for workmans comp vs FELA, the railroaders whom I knew and worked
with did not want to get hurt on the job, they just wanted to do their job
and collect a week's pay each week for that. The nature of railroad
work is in itself, dangerous. Often conditions in which injury clams are
made are conditions that have been reported more than once by a
number of different individuals or in some cases union people. I will admit
that in my later years, the company was better about correcting these
reported conditions but not too many years back, we would report things
until we were blue in the face and little or nothing got done. I do not
think changing over from FELA to workman's comp would be fair to most
of the men and women working for the railroads today as they would have
no recourse if they were badly injured and it resulted in permanent
injury and they could never return to work again. In spite of comments
here, railroading is not a particularly safe job even with the changes that
have taken place. Trains continue to suffer derailments, loads sometimes
shift resulting in major accidents, vandalism continues to run wild in the
big cities and sometimes even not in the big cities and a host of other
safety problems creep up.
One more point, the railroads (at least CSX and some of the others too) are
always crying about their return on investment and operating ratio but
they continue to pay executives six and seven figure salaries and benefit
packages that are way out of proportion to what these people actually
accomplish. A salary of millions, stock options, generous retirement
package and very lucrative contracts benefit nobody except the executive
who gets a contract like that. The railroad then turns around when the
unions ask for air conditioning on all the engines, decent toilets, better
cabs, pay increases etc and throw this back.
Now air conditioning on a locomotive might raise some eyes here so I
will explain why it should be required on all engines, large and small, old
and new. We usually have only one or two people on an engine while
running today and only one qualified engineer for the most part and it is
important to keep the cab temperature at a level that will maintain an
alert and safe crew, extreme heat does not do that. In addition, trains
often pass through areas that for one reason or another dictate that cab
windows be kept closed. Rocks, bottles and other missels can come from
any direction at any time and the thrower often has good aim and a good
arm to match. Sometimes passing through cities, an open fire hydrant
can be directed toward an open cab window too. We are not free of
hazzards in the open country either, mosquitos, black flies and other
insects can also ruin a trip or make being stopped at a signal or in a yard
a purely miserable experience. The noise level in some cabs can also be
unbearable and in some cases can result in hearing loss if it continues
long enough or often enough, air conditioning helps on that too.
It has been said that railroads are "for profit" companies that exist to pay their stockholders dividends on their investment. This could well be true but these huge and lucrative contracts to this small percentage of executives is like stealing from the investor/stockholder.
A lot of the low level management people with the railroad are not that well compensated for the hours that they put it either.
I agree that the railroads are suffering from a shortage of qualified crews
and I think it will get worse down the road. A lot of young people today
will not work under the present day conditions no matter how much they
can earn, some prospective hires can't pass the aptitude, mental, physical
or drug tests either.
The railroads are not in favor of this but in my opinion, the hours of
service law needs to be changed to allow for more time off between tours
of duty, eight hours off equals about four hours of actual sleep and that is
not enough when you have to go back out on the road for another twelve
hours. Sometimes I would pray for a red signal hold for a few minutes, a
twenty minute "power nap" would get another couple of hours out of my
very tired body at times.
I hope I did not stir up more totally negative comments here but I felt that
I had to add a little bit more to the employees' side of the story here.
Thanks for reading this.
Noel Weaver

Sammy, I agree with you! This topic has taken a rather drastic turn from the direction that you were hoping for, and for that, I am sorry.

Your question is very difficult to answer, which I feel is one reason that the responses to your question have taken such a turn. CSX is still going through an analytical process of the overall status of its railroad lines, especially in terms of which lines to place more reliance on, and which ones to put up for sale / abandonment. Thus, it's take a chance. Future job security is a very important issue with each employee. But, in most jobs, there is no guarantee of long-term future employment (especially in today's railroad industry). If the railroad is where you want to work, then go for it with all that you've got!

Now, for a little bit of housecleaning!

Noel Weaver:

I have always respected your comments, regardless of whether or not that I agreed with them. But, when you think that you have somehow been given the right to say that I am anti-railroad employee in my feelings, friends, etc., then you have definitely crossed over the invisible line into the world of plain stupidity!
To prove how wrong you are, some of my oldest and closest friends are either currently active or retired railroad employees! We have spent a lot of time together, really like each other, socialize a lot, and often go train-watching during the weekends together!

The fact that you would reach a totally unfounded conclusion about my railroad friends has really opened my eyes about your "true colors", and they are not very pretty! You have lost a great deal of my respect!

ACLfan