Round House staffing

A roundhouse/shop is only part of a much bigger picture. Railroads employed a host of people, more than the U. S. Army at one point. The huge PRR  complex at Altoona employed about 5,000 people in that one place alone.

 

After World War II, rising wages as well as declining freight and passenger traffic made the vast work force required by steam locomotives less and less affordable. Diesels were much cheaper to run and service, and that is why they replaced steam locomotives so quickly.

 

Today, restoring a steam locomotive can cost $1,000,000 and more. The UP intends to restore Big Boy 4014 (thank God). But others like 765 have to be privately funded.

After World War II, rising wages as well as declining freight and passenger traffic made the vast work force required by steam locomotives less and less affordable. Diesels were much cheaper to run and service, and that is why they replaced steam locomotives so quickly.

 

That is certainly true.  Although even in the steam era railroads and locomotive builders were designing locomotives to reduce manpower costs on the road and in the shop.  Super power steam locomotives could pull larger trains faster, needed less maintenance and had higher availibility than older locomotives so their ton miles per month per locomotive was a big advance over older steam.

 

As an example, the NP developed the 2-8-8-4 Yellowstone to haul 4000 ton freight trains over their Yellowstone Division.  Standard practice before the arrival of the big articulateds was to double head 2-8-2s.  The Yellowstones eliminated the need for a second engine crew to move a 4000 ton train.  They also eliminated the need for some of the boiler makers and machinists at the engine terminals. 

 

The manpower at a roundhouse could have been anywhere from dozens to hundreds.  As Reading Fan points out major shop complexes sometimes employed thousands.  Most of those jobs have been eliminated by better technology.  Today's American railroads move more ton miles than ever with less than 25% of the people needed in the mid 20th century.  Thanks to that increase in efficiency we have railroads that are highly competitive in the global transportation market.

 

 

Let us not compare apples to oranges.  Trap cars, LCL service, public tracks, icing, watering and feeding livestock, and Storage-In-Transit are a few of the services no longer in vogue on American railroads.  Consolidation of Fallen Flags has eliminated many rail yards.  Diesel Electric locomotives require less maintenance and en route facilities. Highway trucks have become the choice of many shippers, slaughter houses are no longer near the center of major cities.  New industrial parks do not offer rail service to every warehouse. Passenger and express services are no longer offered by freight railroads.

I don't know the percentage, but today's unit trains are doing what railroads do best - long haul of large tonnage.

John

 

Rattler21/John is correct, apple/orange wise, but........      WW II railroads employed upwards of 2,000,000 people. Today's railroads employ something like 200,000, and are moving more tonnage then at the WW II peak!  Progress is quiet, inexorable, and downright amazing!

Let us not compare apples to oranges. 

 

Railroads worried a lot about apples and oranges.  It turned out their customers wanted bananas! 

 

Many railroad executives in the era of roundhouses thought they were in the railroad business.  They were not.  They were in the transportation business.  When other modes of transportation provided shippers with better transportation the customers went there there was a better combination of cost and quality of service.

 

Railroads needed to get costs under control.  Roundhouses represent large expenses (wages, upkeep, property taxes) and the roundhouse employees don't move freight.  Yards are expensive to operate and maintain and sorting cars there slows transportation times.  Many of the goods that once traveled by box car now move in containers.  Railroads move the containers efficiently on the long haul and the trucks that handle the containers on both ends of the shipment perform the sorting function once performed in yards.  Fewer yard locomotives means less need for maintenance facilities like roundhouses.

 

The customers seem to like "them bananas."  The railroad shareholders do to.

Part of the problem with restoring steam locomotives today, as compared with the roundhouse days, is that there is no steam locomotive supply industry to support the effort.  You cannot pick up the phone and order the parts needed.  Everything has to made from scratch.  Same thing is true for tools. Some of the materials, like lead and asbestos, are no longer available.  Most everything can be made or substituted, but it takes time and money. 

That and the fact that the knowledge base is greatly diminished from the days off steam.

 

The AoS roundhouse is a typical medium-sized steam-era roundhouse, but the shop is small compared to steam-era shops. A large steam backshop could employ 1000+ machinists, boilermakers, pipefitters, carpenters, electricians, etc. This is what your tour guide was referring to. 

 

Work like turning drivers was done in the backshop, not the roundhouse. Most roundhouses were limited to 'running repairs' like renewing rod bearings, fixing leaking flues, boiler washes / monthly inspections, etc.

 

You'd actually be surprised. Most tools for working on a steam locomotive really aren't that specialized--often just bigger versions of the tools you might have in your garage. And lots of parts are, in fact, still available, such as plumbing or gauges or valves or lubricators. Sure, some things are specialized, and do cost a considerable amount to reproduce, such as the internals of an injector, but virtually every part of a steam locomotive, if it cannot be bought outright, can be made.

Piggy-backing on Ted Hikel's comment, recall the "Professional Iconoclast" column in the '70's in Trains Magazine? The grumpy commentor (John G. Neiling) noted that railroads should become the "wholesaler" of transportation and trucks should be the "retailer". He said way freights should be abolished. Further, he published a United States railroad map of a highly efficient, non-redundant and profitable system. And, by gosh, it pretty much looks like today's industry map! He also said to railroad labor: "The party's over!".   An unsung genius whose prognostications were just about 100% accurate!

So AoS is mid size, the shop though is smaller than it would have been say in 1940, and a guess is there might have been between say 300-1000 people employed there in 1940.

 

Discussion about how railroads have changed aside (and interesting), and not knowing exactly what the AoS work force is like today, we might assume that we might see one perhaps two locomotives restored to operation at year... perhaps in a good year.

 

There are what, eight or nine locomotives in the collection, it appears two are pretty much operational (1293 and 33).  So there is a good 10 years or more of work there.

 

Bob

 

Currently there are only 4 or 5 people actually employed at Jerry's Age of Steam Roundhouse, so "rebuilding" and/or "restoring" two locomotives a year is completely out of the question.

You are correct. In the case of Spencer Shops on the Southern, repair work in the 37-stall roundhouse was limited to 3 days maximum. They had drop pits for wheelsets, cranes for moving parts, and plenty of tool chests, but that was all. Wheelsets were taken to the machine shop for replacing tires, other parts were taken to the boiler or flue shop, or the locomotive was repaired in place. The back shop (erecting shop) was where most of the steam locomotive repair and overhaul was done. There was space for up to 15 locomotives at a time, with at least one being returned to service every day. In all, there were up to 10 buildings being used in some capacity to repair and maintain steam locomotives, and over 3,000 people through WWII.

 

Today, stream locomotive restoration mainly takes place in roundhouses since those buildings have survived, while the others were torn down. If the whole complex did survive, it was turned into a museum like Spencer, Sacramento or Baltimore, mostly unavailable for huge restoration projects. At Spencer, most of the restoration is handled by volunteers, none of which worked with steam (or diesels for that matter) on mainline railroads. Spencer was lucky in that 20-30 of the original shop force returned in the 1980s to restore a steam locomotive, and passed most of their knowledge to younger volunteers on hand. I was one of those fortunate volunteers to learn this first-hand knowledge. 

 

Restoration does take place today, but it takes longer than the 2 weeks it took to compete an overhaul at Spencer back in the 30s-40s. Now, it might be 6 - 12 months and cost $500,000 or more.