Railroaders' Nostalgia > In my younger days

We old timers have them And once in a while an old
memory comes up.Here is one of mine.
I was working at Tampa Union Station in the sixties.
We had several passenger trains to add/drop cars.
We also had short time to do so.Whenever something
happened that caused a delay a report had to be made.
I had to report to someone in Waycross,Ga.(date is
after merger of 7-1-67.) Finally one day,I got the idea 
to know who this was.I found out it was a clerk!.
As you can tell I am SEABOARD man.We did not
get along with the coast line at all.
ACL headquarters in Jacksonvill was called the "Purple
Palace" and Waycross was acl heaven.I believe
that no one in Jacksonville could go to the bathroom
without checking with "Heaven".

Uncle Joe
Seffner,Fl.

Joe what you said is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. There was never a combined rr as long as ther was ne Seaboard man and one Coact line an employed. I guess all of the prior rights men are retired now. They should be if they aren't.

When I worked for the Chicago & NorthWestern (their name on my paycheck) in the mid 1960s, I was chastised by old heads when calling it that. As far as they were Concerned, They still worked for the "Omaha" The Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha had been absorbed by th he C&NW in 1918.

-LD

When the company you work for constantly tells you your former employer and vis a vie “you” have been doing it wrong for 148 years, all the while your current employer looks like a monkey fornicating a football in most regards then... well...

Posted from iPhone

I can remember a lot of T&P employees sayling that about the MP.

There's usually more than one monkey involved at my company !

Canadian National had that problem too in the West. Most of the main line was former Grand Trunk Pacific, while most of the branch lines were former Canadian Northern.

After nationalization in 1923, Sir Henry Thornton, a US railroad executive hired to run the CNR downgraded and even abandoned large portions of the former railways. However, he negotiated the "Montreal Agreement" with the unions which merged the seniority of the component companies employees in an equitable way. However, there were still resentments and rivalries amongst the GTR,CNor,NTR and Intercolonial employees. which lasted into the 1950's.

In the merger tht created the SCL the train and yard crews had ACL and SAL jobs. A younger Seaboard man could displace an older   Coast Line man off a SAL job. This didn't get to be a problem until the crew dispatchers were moved to Jax. The engineers merged to a common roster.Now here was where problems emerged and hot discussions happened. The SAL had seperate road and yard rosters, the ACL was combined. There was also a difference in how seniority dates were established. The Seaboard had to combine road and yard rosters, then merge with the ACL. It was done by the BLE by-laws and the Railway Labor Act. The result was a lot of bitterness mostly by SAL road men.SALyard men were handed 40 years seniority on the road at once. Some of them that I fired for couldn't run a wheelbarrow. They also had strange train handling techniques. To show how this was done that was strange because of percentages of  work etc. I think at Sanford there was an engineer who was senior to his father. Joe may know the names involved here.

Sam0   

Trainhand Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> In the merger tht created the SCL the train and
> yard crews had ACL and SAL jobs. The SAL had seperate road and yard
> rosters, the ACL was combined. There was also a
> difference in how seniority dates were
> established. The Seaboard had to combine road and
> yard rosters, then merge with the ACL. It was done
> by the BLE by-laws and the Railway Labor Act. The
> result was a lot of bitterness mostly by SAL road
> men.SALyard men were handed 40 years seniority on
> the road at once. . I think at Sanford there was an
> engineer who was senior to his father. Joe may
> know the names involved here.

There was a son that wound up senior to his dad at Hamlet too.  The dad wad was SAL yard and the son was SAL road. As I remember seniority standing was done on  a career mileage basis. When I went firing at Hamlet post merger we still did mileage slips for each tour of duty.  We converted yard hours to miles.  We had to mark off for mileage, but that didn't matter since we got called in anyway due to exhausted extra boards.  I knew a few SAL yard engineers that qualified and made good passenger and time freight engineers.

   I was a Southern Pacific Western Lines UTU Local Chairman when the UP bought the SP in 1997.  UP management told us to work out the seniority roster mergers ourselves in a fashion that they could work with.
   The only man that is satisfied at the vend of the day is the guy who winds up #1  One UP man asserted that since the UP bought the the SP, all SP men should go behind the youngest man on the UP roster!  I advocated a straight dovetail, but I got accused of feathering my own nest, since I would have been pretty high on that roster  Let's say, discussions got pretty heated at times.
   Finally, a seniority roster was adopted that was more or less equitable, although a lot of UP men thought otherwise.

Brian Black
Castle Rock, CO