(Sorta) Working on the Real Railroad

There is currently a lively discussion going on the Pennsylvania Reading Seashore Lines Historical Society about railfans not doing well working on a real railroad. Most railroad jobs certainly didn't have much glory and excitement, but rather a lot of hard work under difficult conditions.

I think I probably had the best job of "sorta" working for the railroad. In the early 1990s I was a computer consultant for General Electric Consulting and got my dream assignment at Conrail for 6 months. I got to work at the old Food Fair building near Drexel University. (Where you could look out and down the window from around the 15th floor and watch someone breaking into your car in the parking lot below.) We were working on a system that enabled the people who handled freight orders to identify the incoming call telephone number and put the customer's order history on the screen so the agents could intelligently talk to the customers about their needs. Unfortunately Conrail had 2 disappointing financial quarters in a row which meant they immediately got rid of all the programming consultants to save money.

They got a significant portion of their in-house programming staff from short educational programming schools like Computer Learning Center. Although most were very good programmers they knew little of railroading or transportation. I remember explaining to several of them what a caboose was ("those odd looking blue cars"). We did have a few former brakemen who were retrained as programmers after they were partially incapacitated after railroad related injuries.

The highlight was when one of their in-house people snuck me into the "blue room" where the track diagrams showed the track and all the trains on them. They didn't have a big screen, just a series of computer monitors where you could see the trains moving from one monitor to the next.

The other fun event was seeing requests come in on the printer with agents asking for help ("has anyone seen...") finding lost railroad cars that had escaped their tracking.

I still despise the CSX president who stabbed Conrail in the back during their merger. Philly was to be the combined operations HQ if it had gone as planned.