Pros
Good retirement through Railroad Retirement Board. Medical benefits are still decent so far. The work itself is not all that difficult after you learn it.
Cons
No schedule whatsoever, just on-call 24/7/365. Predicting when you will get called to work is extremely difficult due to inaccurate train lineups. Planning even the simplest of events with family is nearly impossible. Draconian attendance policy does not allow for sufficient time off without facing discipline. You spend most of the time due to irregular sleep patterns, and often have to sacrifice sleep time to get basic household chores done or share a meal with your family for the first time all week. Often you spend over 24 hours in a hotel away from home, which resets your consecutive days worked under the Federal Rest law, which prevents you from earning 48 hours off at home, so now they can make you work even more without seeing your family. Upper management is totally out of touch with their workforce and the work they do; they preach safety and caring, but only act upon maximizing profits for themselves and shareholders with no regard to how it actually impacts the people doing the work that brings in their record profits. Then they task lower management with handing down discipline to employees who make even the slightest petty infringement on rule compliance. We must follow all rules at all times, but management is free to bend and break rules whenever it suits their convenience with nothing more than signing their initials to it. Even though this job is union protected, the union has little power against the company. Federal law prohibits the unions from striking except under certain circumstances. Even when those circumstances are met, strikes are pretty much always blocked by the government. With billions of dollars in profit every quarter, the company can buy any politician or government official they need to get their greedy way.
