The Railroads Fired Everyone Who Knew How to Fix These Locomotives

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]In 1981, more than 550,000 people worked for America's railroads.

[00:00:06]Inside the locomotive shops, skilled mechanics spent entire careers learning how to keep diesel electric engines running across open country. They learned by watching veterans read the color of exhaust smoke the way a doctor reads a pulse. But over the past decade, the largest freight railroads fired nearly half of those mechanics. 45,000 jobs vanished. So, what happens when the people who actually know how to fix the locomotives are gone.

[00:00:34]It was 1963 and a 19-year-old from Memphis named Euing Hunter Harrison walked into a railard and got a job as a Carmen Oiler at the Frisco Railroad. The pay was modest. The work was physical.

[00:00:47]He spent his days lubricating wheel bearings and crawling under freight cars in the southern heat. Nobody at the yard that summer would have guessed that this teenager would eventually reshape the entire North American freight rail industry. Back then, railroading was still a lifetime career. A young man could walk into a locomotive shop at 18, start sweeping floors and fetching wrenches, and spend the next 40 years at the same railroad. The roundhouse was where diesel mechanics learned their trade. Surrounded by the rumble of idling engines and the smell of hot oil, senior workers taught the new hires how to read a locomotive the way a horseman reads an animal. By feel, by instinct, by a thousand small observations accumulated over years of hands-on work.

[00:01:35]The knowledge moved slowly, and it moved only in one direction, from experienced hands to inexperienced ones. across the workbench and across decades. Harrison absorbed all of it, but he drew a very different conclusion from the experience than the men who trained him might have expected. He worked his way up through the ranks the old-fashioned way, learning yard operations, dispatching, and train handling from the ground level. By the time he reached the executive suite, he had something most railroad CEOs did not. He understood what happened on the shop floor because he had worked on the shop floor.

[00:02:15]That operational intuition became his weapon. But Harrison did not use it the way the old-timers expected. Instead of preserving the apprenticeship culture that had trained him, he developed a philosophy called precision scheduled railroading. And it was designed to shrink everything the old system valued.

[00:02:33]Run fewer trains, but run them on a reliable schedule. move freight from point to point instead of routing everything through massive classification yards. Keep locomotives rolling instead of sitting idle. The promise was faster service, lower costs, and happier customers. The reality, at least for the workforce, turned out to be something different. This decision seemed small at the time, just an operating philosophy with a tidy name.

[00:03:00]It was not. Harrison first tested his ideas at Illinois Central in the 1990s.

[00:03:05]He moved to Canadian National where he drove the operating ratio down and made investors very happy. Then he came out of retirement to take over Canadian Pacific in 2012 backed by an activist hedge fund. At Canadian Pacific, he cut employment from 15,000 workers to 12,000 while the operating ratio dropped from around 81% to under 59%.

[00:03:28]Wall Street noticed. However, what excited investors terrified the workers on the ground. The operating ratio became the industry's obsession, a single number that measured how many cents a railroad spent to earn each dollar of revenue. The lower the ratio, the fatter the margin. And the fastest way to push that number down was to cut the single largest line item on the balance sheet, the cost of the workers who actually ran the railroad. In January 2017, Harrison left Canadian Pacific. Two months later, he was installed as chief executive officer of CSX. The massive Eastern Railroad, headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida.

[00:04:09]The activist fund Mantel Ridge had pushed for his appointment and handed him an $84 million package to replicate the costcutting playbook he had run at every railroad before.

[00:04:20]Harrison went to work immediately.

[00:04:21]Locomotives were idled by the hundreds.

[00:04:24]Yards were consolidated across CSX's eastern network, and the headcount dropped fast. But the consequences showed up just as quickly. Within months, customers began reporting severe service disruptions across the freight corridor. Shipments that normally took days were taking weeks. Entire rail lines slowed to a crawl. The Surface Transportation Board, the federal agency overseeing freight rail, took the unusual step of publicly criticizing CSX and demanding regular performance reports. What comes next is the part that even Harrison's supporters could not defend. Federal Railroad Administration data showed that the CSX train accident rate climbed 73% from 2013 to 2017 and the employee injury rate rose 38% over the same period.

[00:05:15]Harrison had been at the helm for only 9 months when he died in December 2017 at the age of 73. His ashes were scattered in a Memphis railyard, the same city where he had started as a teenage oiler more than 50 years earlier. Harrison was gone, but the philosophy he had built was just getting started. His proteges fanned out across the North American rail industry. Keith Creel took the top job at Canadian Pacific, while Jim Vena, another Harrison disciple, eventually rose to lead Union Pacific. Norfolk Southern adopted its own version of the model. The playbook spread from railroad to railroad like a doctrine carried by executives who had trained under Harrison at Canadian National or Canadian Pacific and believed in the formula. One industry analyst described it as a diaspora of talent moving from Montreal to Calgary to Omaha to Jacksonville, carrying the same costcutting gospel everywhere they went.

[00:06:15]And in every case, the pattern repeated.

[00:06:17]longer trains with fewer crews. Surplus locomotives parked on sidings across the Great Plains. Maintenance shops shuttered in smaller cities from Butler, Wisconsin to Pine Bluff, Arkansas. And always the mechanical workforce shrank, and the hands-on expertise needed to keep aging diesel fleets running left with it. The numbers tell the story plainly. However, even the people watching the trend unfold did not fully grasp its scale until later. Between roughly 2015 and 2024, mechanical department employees at class one freight railroads were cut by 41%.

[00:06:56]That is not a seasonal fluctuation.

[00:06:59]That is the systematic elimination of nearly half the people responsible for maintaining and inspecting the locomotives and rail cars that carry hazardous chemicals, grain, automobiles, and consumer goods across the continent.

[00:07:13]Union Pacific alone eliminated more than 10,000 positions in under a decade, a 25% reduction. Across all class 1 carriers, the total reached approximately 45,000 jobs lost. The industry that once employed more than half a million Americans was down to roughly 227,000 workers by 2023.

[00:07:35]But here's the detail that everyone missed at the time. Those workers didn't just carry job titles, they carried knowledge. Nor Southern's own vice president of mechanical operations once admitted that locomotive maintenance has a particularly steep learning curve.

[00:07:50]Some aspects of the work, he said, [music] are simply not learned as quickly as leadership would sometimes like them to be. Consider what a locomotive mechanic actually does. A diesel electric locomotive is one of the most complex machines on the road. A single unit can weigh over 400,000 lb and contain a prime mover engine, [music] electrical generators, traction motors, dynamic braking grids, air brake systems, onboard computer diagnostics, and miles of wiring.

[00:08:22]Maintaining one requires understanding mechanical, electrical, and pneumatic systems simultaneously.

[00:08:29]And every locomotive model from the old EMD SD40 series to the newer GE AC44 units has its own quirks, its own weak points, its own ways of telling a mechanic something is wrong before the diagnostic computer catches it. The traditional path into this work wasn't quick. A young worker might start at 18 as a shop laborer in a locomotive roundhouse, sweeping floors and handing tools to senior mechanics. By 24, if they'd paid attention, they might earn the title of skilled mechanic. But the real expertise, the ability to diagnose an intermittent electrical fault in a traction motor by listening to the way it loaded under a hill climb, that took another decade or more. Norfolk Southern established a dedicated training center in Rowanoke, Virginia just to try to accelerate the process with classrooms and laboratory sessions covering everything from electronically controlled pneumatic braking systems to advanced traction motor diagnostics.

[00:09:30]And it was still passed down the same way it had always been, from one pair of hands to the next, inside the grease stained walls of locomotive shops in places like Altuna, Pennsylvania, and Pocutello, Idaho. That kind of knowledge doesn't survive a layoff notice. When the railroads closed those shops and sent those workers home, the mental library of sounds, smells, and vibrations went with them. None of it transferred to a spreadsheet or uploaded to a corporate database. It simply disappeared as quietly as the workers who carried it. So, what did the industry do about it? Not much, at least not until the Federal Railroad Administration stepped in. In 2022, the agency commissioned a formal study on expertise management in the railroad industry focused on the critical knowledge being lost as experienced employees separated. The researchers found that the industry's existing succession programs weren't adequately transferring knowledge to the next generation.

[00:10:31]Significant experience, they concluded, will be lost if knowledge is not effectively transferred and socialized among newer staff. The institutional memory built over decades was evaporating, and nobody had a plan to capture it before it was gone. But this wasn't just an HR problem or a training gap. These aren't just machines that move freight. These are machines that move hazardous chemicals through residential neighborhoods at 50 mph. And that's exactly where this story takes its darkest turn.

[00:11:04]If you are finding this valuable, consider subscribing. We cover stories like this every week, exploring the history and engineering behind the machines that built the modern world. By early 2023, the consequences of a decade of cuts had become impossible to ignore.

[00:11:22]On the evening of February 3rd, a Norfolk Southern freight train designated 32N was hauling 149 cars along the Fort Wayne line in eastern Ohio. 20 of those cars carried hazardous materials, including vinyl chloride, butile acrylate, and benzene residue.

[00:11:41]The train stretched nearly 2 mi long and weighed around 18,000 tons. A security camera at a business in Salem, Ohio, captured something alarming as the train passed. One of the car axles was visibly on fire, throwing sparks into the night.

[00:11:57]The overheating had been building for miles. By the time wayside detectors triggered an alert, and the crew initiated an emergency brake application, it was too late. 38 cars derailed just outside the small town of East Palestine, [music] Ohio. Several burned for more than 2 days. Emergency crews conducted controlled burns of the chemical cars, releasing hydrogen chloride and fosgene into the air over a community of 4,600 people. The investigation that followed pointed to a mechanical failure on a railc car bearing. But regulators and union leaders pointed to something broader. They pointed to a decade of staffing reductions, shortened inspection times, and a corporate culture that prioritized operating ratios over preventive maintenance.

[00:12:43]The Transportation Trades Department revealed that mechanical workers had been cut 41% across class 1 railroads since 2015 and urged the Federal Railroad Administration to conduct surprise inspections on railroad equipment. Transportation Secretary Pete Budd said publicly that common sense would tell you the wholesale stripping away of workers from the railroad sector correlated with stagnating and in some cases worsening safety results. Norfolk Southern's cleanup costs alone exceeded $1 billion within a year of the derailment. The railroad agreed to a $600 million classaction settlement without admitting wrongdoing and somehow the layoffs continued.

[00:13:25]In early 2024, BNSF Railway, the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary and largest freight railroad in the United States, cu 362 mechanical department workers. This came after a fourth quarter profit exceeding $1.3 billion.

[00:13:44]The company said it was reallocating resources to where growth was happening.

[00:13:48]Union representatives called that explanation absurd, noting the railroad had previously mandated 6-day work weeks for mechanics to clear a maintenance backlog before turning around and eliminating those same positions. But BNSF was not done. In May 2026, the railroad cut again. Workers at the Havlock and Hobson Yard locations in Lincoln, Nebraska received permanent furloss. The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Wayi employees reported the loss of carmen, electricians, pipe fitters, laborers, and maintenance machinists. A union chairman with 15 years of railroad experience said the pattern was clear.

[00:14:28]Precision railroading, he explained, is really just a way to see how many jobs you can cut while still getting the job done. Shareholder returns, he said, had taken priority over railroading itself.

[00:14:41]Meanwhile, the railroads that had fired their experienced mechanics began quietly hiring outside contractors to handle locomotive maintenance. This is the part where the irony gets hard to ignore. BNSF contracted out some work to non-UN companies, claiming weather related backlogs. The same railroads that had spent a decade eliminating the skilled mechanics who knew how to fix their locomotives were now paying outside firms, often at premium rates, to do the work those employees used to do. The contractors did not carry 30 years of institutional memory about a specific locomotive fleet. They did not know which engines had chronic traction motor issues or which units needed a turbocharger watched closely after a rebuild.

[00:15:24]So, who was going to push back? The answer, surprisingly, came from a federal agency most Americans have never heard of. Surface Transportation Board Chairman Martin Oberman pushed back against the trend. He proposed new service standards that would for the first time force railroads to maintain sufficient workforce and locomotives to meet their obligations to customers. One of the principal goals of the rule, he said, was to incentivize carriers to retain resources, specifically their workforce and locomotives. The railroads, through the Association of American Railroads, countered that their safety record had improved overall, pointing to a 27% decline in the train accident rate since 2000. They cited investments in technology, sensors, cameras, and predictive analytics as replacements for some of the manual inspection work that human mechanics used to perform. And that argument has a kernel of truth. Technology has changed locomotive maintenance in meaningful ways. Wayside heat detectors mounted along the track can flag an overheating wheel bearing as a freight train rolls past at speed. Onboard computers inside the locomotive cab can monitor engine performance and alert the crew to anomalies. Drone inspections of bridge structures and automated track geometry cars have reduced the need for some of the manual labor that railroads once relied on entirely.

[00:16:53]But technology does not replace judgment. A sensor mounted beside the rails in rural Nebraska can detect that a bearing is running hot. It cannot tell you why a particular GE-9 locomotive consistently develops electrical faults after running through humid conditions along the Gulf Coast corridor. It cannot know that the unit assigned to lead a coal train up the Appalachian Grades has a history of traction motor failures that the onboard diagnostic system has not yet flagged. That kind of knowledge lives in the minds of workers who spent years running their hands over the same machines inside the same diesel shop.

[00:17:32]And when those workers are gone, the knowledge goes with them. A 2022 expertise management study by the Federal Railroad Administration put it plainly. As the workforce ages and retires from the rail industry, significant experience will be lost if it is not effectively transferred. The researchers developed a framework for capturing and preserving critical expertise. Whether the railroads will actually adopt it remains an open question. But even if they do, is it already too late? The study's findings arrived in an industry that had spent a decade proving it valued quarterly earnings reports over the workforce that kept the fleet moving. And that brings us to the question that nobody in the boardroom wants to answer. Today, locomotives still move roughly 40% of American freight by ton miles. Every consumer product sitting on a store shelf, every bushel of grain waiting at a Gulf Coast export terminal, every tanker of chlorine rolling through a small Ohio town at night depends on those machines running safely and reliably. The veterans who used to ensure that reliability are largely gone. Some retired with their railroad pensions intact. Many were furoughed and never called back. A few found work at shortline railroads or private maintenance contractors.

[00:18:57]Most carried their expertise into other industries entirely or into nothing at all. The real question is not whether precision scheduled railroading was right or wrong. It is whether an industry can survive when it treats the workers who understand its most critical machines as a line item to be eliminated. Harrison's ashes sit in a Memphis railard. The roundhouse shops where he once oiled wheel bearings as a 19-year-old have been consolidated or closed. And somewhere along the main line, a locomotive sits on a siding with a problem that a veteran mechanic would have spotted in minutes. The diagnostic screen inside the cab says nothing is wrong. The engine tells a different story, but there is nobody left who speaks that language.