Western Railroad Discussion > How is crew availability in your district?

How many people in your crew terminal are marking off for sickness, and how is that affecting your ability to get your own rest and run trains?

One of the byproducts of the Covid disease is an increase in vaccinated people suffering mild symptoms of the disease, sufficient to call out sick for a few days.  That's different than the no-vax folks clogging the Intensive Care Units and taking up ventilator space.

Here in south Florida, it's not unusual now for 10% of employees to be out of work due to sickness. My local Publix market is so short staffed now that they could only unload 1/2 the contents of the overnight grocery delivery. Not unusual, I'm hearing similar reports from Home Depot, Lowes, and some restaurants. Warehouses are seeing call outs, even with $18 hourly wages

People need to protect their fellow employees and not report to work when they are sick or have symptoms. With a highly contagious respiratory disease, or flu as it is commonly called, more people than normal have symptoms.

I am glad to see they are doing the safe and responsible thing and not working while sick, even if it does cause some minor inconveniences.

Of my terminal of roughly 80 t&e employees, 4 engineers are off covid (with one in the hospital on a vent), and 7 conductors are off covid.

Our engineer extralist was trimmed down to 2 turns. Of those 2 turns, one engineer is out with covid (Myself. I'm fine, just have the symptons like a bad cold. Vacc'd).

There are many more people laid off sick, FMLA, rest days, injured, berevement, etc. Of course a couple weeks ago, there were more people out covid than right now. 6 out of 7 conductors on the extralist were out covid.

Right now, there are 2 pools out of my terminal. No engineers available in either one, or any engineers available on the extralist. One pool has 1 conductor available while the other pool has 4 conductors available. Again, no engineers anywhere.

The "big" pool that protects the daily trailer train has a crew (en and co) available for tonight's train...but none of the pools have a full crew available.

I'd say this is about average...at any given time, nobody rested or available. Trains tied down on the main line for days until they get around the crewing them. Situation normal.

Everything is a giant extralist because of this; they'll rob crews out of one pool to run trains for another pool. They do this out of the hotel frequently, use you to run trains from other pools. And if you don't leave the terminal, they put you back in the hotel. This has been happening a lot because at one terminal (away) they have been cutting yard jobs. Now they call road crews out of the hotel to do the work of the yard jobs (like building trains). They then put that crew back in the hotel after building the train, then use the next available crew to drag the train over the road. This has been going on for at least a year now.

The other night in the hotel I got a call from the conductor ahead of us saying we were now first out. They wanted them to come out of the hotel, taxi 190 miles to another away from home terminal, take a train from that pool 180 miles from that terminal to our home terminal. It's a different pool all together....190 miles away. The engineer flat out refused. They took him out of service for insubordination. Will be interesting to see how it plays out...but enough is enough.