I haven’t talked to any rail engineers. What do they say? Is it anything like being a pilot or a truck driver?
Pilots used to be paid as well before the deregulation in the 80’s.
Let’s give an example: Rail engineers are sometimes fired by the railroads for some FRA reason.
The rail engineers have a private unemployment insurance fund that pays them their going rate while they’re out of work. They’re usually re-hired if the reason they were fired was some BS FRA compliance issue (ie, not being drunk on the job. An example of a compliance issue that might get them fired is being on the job in a moving train more than 12 hours in a day). When they get re-hired, they usually get all their back pay from the RR. While they’re “fired,” they can work any other job other than rail engineer. One rail engineer I met worked for UPRR, was “fired” at the time and using his CDL to haul hay off our farm. He told me he was currently “fired,” and when I expressed sympathy, he said “Don’t feel sorry for me, man, I’m going to come out of this quite, quite well.” He would get to keep all the unemployment bennies, get his back pay and he was able to work on the side as well. All because he brought a train that was left stranded outside of town due to another engineer using up all his hours... this guy was qualified to bring the train in, but had reached his weekly hour limit. He thought “Oh, it’s only an hour to bring the train into town, I’ll go out, fetch the other guy and just get it done.”
Well, some really PO’ed black female bureaucrat from the Feds saw this in a log of hours... and brought action against UPRR, and their way of ducking the fine was to fire him.
They have mandatory maximum hours per day and per week. They get paid quite well (like $80K on up, plus bennies and retirement) and there are very few people entering the field. The downside is that they have to deal with lots of bureaucracy (from both the rail companies and the Feds) and sometimes, they have to sit and wait out in the middle of the sagebrush with a broken train. I don’t mean that some mechanical part in the engine is preventing movement, I mean that the rail car couplers have literally broken and the air brakes came on when the brake line pulled apart. Apparently, it happens sometimes on coal trails. The engineer can’t do anything but sit and wait for the maint guys to show up. Sometimes, they’re forced to just sit there in the middle of nowhere for hours...