Well guys, this has been an interesting read and I mean all 269 pages of it! The saga played out like one of those intriguing novels with suspense right up until the final chapter!
Just because, I checked out the conductor jobs for CSX and of course I saw the ones offered for the former PAR. The first thing that caught my eye was the pay. The pay for PAR is only up to 47K per year after all is said and done whereas on CSX it's 67K per annum.
That's quite a difference because the pay for working for PAR is what it was 14 years ago when I was looking to work for CSX. Now, I was wondering if this is because CSX is still honoring the old contract until everything is integrated into CSX or is there always going to be that big disparity in pay? Seeing that, makes think no wonder no one wants the job given the costs of everything these days.
Reading through the posts, yikes there were a lot of them, I noticed Lawrence came up quite often as it may play a bigger role than what it does today. Another new guy, whose username begins with Eli-something, asked about upgrading the yard. If any of you haven't seen it recently, it's pretty bad. I mean the rails are buried completely in the ground. The yard was never this bad in the past, but it was bad and got worse over the years. Like much of Guilford and later PAR, there were and probably still are plenty of standing derailments as the car weight squishes into the ground and rolls the track.
The video on the Worcester main was interesting. Those reeds next to the track aren't a good sign because they live in wetlands. Looking at the video closely, and we can see standing water between the rails at that location. When CSX upgrades those tracks, they'll really have to raise up the roadbed and put down a substantial amount of ballast, otherwise, that line is only a smidge above the old Watertown branch in this regard out to Wonder Bread.
Anyway, it's been quite some time since I last logged in here. Many years ago, I used to live about 4 miles from Lawrence over in Andover and used to ride my bike down to the yard to watch the switching. I got to know the crew there, who used to drive the old SW9 that lived there, as well as the old railroad police.
They were a great crew and one day they brought me around for a cook's tour of the yard. This was way before the strike. During this time, I was even offered a job and told to apply at Billerica. For some reason, I didn't do that, and life went on. Today, I'm too old and disabled to apply for the job, but it was fun looking at the job pages anyway.