Pros
Great pay, unless you count the time away from your family. You will have money to buy all the nice toys that your wife and friends can use on the weekends while youre working.
Cons
-No schedule whatsoever -On call 24/7 -Company doesnt care about you, your family or your health as long as they have a warm body to run a train. -No time off, they have a 75% availability policy, which means you can be unavailable 25% of the time, which sounds great, but say you have a family and get sick one month and use 4 weekend days, not weekends mind you..weekend days. What counts as a weekend, if you miss a friday and it goes past 1230 saturday morning by 1 minute, theres your weekend so guess what, you get to work the next 2 months with only 2 weekend days off. And yes, any paid days or vacation days count against you so the week of vacation you take one month affects you for the next 2 months. -Managers are now college kids, no clue what its like to be train service. Expect no leniency if you miss a call to go to work or lay off an extra weekend day in a 3 month period. - Seniority gets you NOTHING, it will get you off of the extra board, once in a pool you get the same job as a new hire that a guy with 45 years has. **Here's my advice to anyone who decides to try this..if you hire on as a conductor, stay a conductor and work the yard, lower pay but still good, set days off, set hours, easy work. Or transfer to be a carman or to the roundhouse right away, if you do it later you lose too much seniority. DO NOT go into the engineer program, once you do that you lose all your options. - Look up the divorce rate of railroaders. If you're looking to never see your wife or kids or any of their activities, this may be the perfect career for you.