For those who can handle the hard work and the irregular hours, America's railroads may have a job for you.

	Lake Fong, Post-Gazette A train approaches the Conway rail yards near Baden. Railroad companies plan to hire thousands by 2010. Click photo for larger image.

Between now and the end of the decade, freight railroads expect to hire more than 80,000 employees, according to the Association of American Railroads.

The hiring surge is partly due to an increase in retirements in recent years. A 2001 change in the federally administered Railroad Retirement system, which took effect in 2002, allows people with 30 years' service to retire at the age of 60, rather than 62, as previously required.

Another factor behind the new job growth is an increase in freight traffic. Nationally, railroads moved their greatest weekly volume in history last month, and their total for the year is up about 5 percent over last year.

"This will be a record year," American Railroad Association spokesman Tom White predicted.

The hiring boom follows years of austerity and downsizing. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, railroad mergers, automation, mechanization and elimination of low-volume operations took a heavy toll on employment. Trains that used to run with five-person crews now have two or three people. The largest rail systems had a combined payroll of about 780,000 in 1960; by 2003, the number was 154,652.

The new vacancies waiting to be filled pay well: an average of $67,128 a year for conductors. Engineers average $75,162 and top out at about $110,000.

But to get those robust salaries, railroaders put up with wearying schedules, physical work and unpredictable assignments.

In recruiting and training, recruiters say they try to present as clear a picture of the job requirements as possible.

"We have company officials at our hiring sessions, and the first 60 to 90 minutes [of those sessions] are a clear and unambiguous description of the jobs and the challenges they will face," said Rudy Husband, a spokesman for Norfolk Southern, which expects to hire about 2,000 people per year for the next four or five years.

Only after that initial presentation are job applications handed out, he said, and typically one-third to one-half leave without filling them out. Recruiting has tended to be most successful in such places as West Virginia, where out-of-work coal miners are accustomed to both shift work and physical labor, and less productive in areas with high-paying job alternatives.

While Norfolk Southern conducts its own employee training, CSX directs job candidates to enroll in railroad training courses offered by vocational schools or colleges in its service area. Those seeking jobs in northwest Ohio or southern Michigan are directed to either Huntington, W.Va., or Cincinnati, depending on where they plan to work. CSX expects to hire 2,300 workers next year, after an estimated 2,150 during 2004.

"We make certain that potential employees understand as fully as possible that railroad working hours can be irregular and they will be expected to work at odd hours and on weekends," said Gary Sease, a CSX spokesman.

Initial training for railroad workers typically takes six months, though, and engineer training generally doesn't start until a year after that.

With about 300 employees, Pittsburgh-based Union Railroad Co. is at the opposite end of the scale from industry giants CSX and Norfolk Southern, but they are also in "employment mode," as Jennie Cochenour, senior manager of personnel administration, put it.

In fact, they have been since the late '90s.

"We did a lot of hiring from the '60s," said Patricia Battiste, director of human resources, "and a lot of our employees are able to retire after 30 years, so those people have been retiring."

Like her colleagues at CSX and Norfolk, Cochenour said that Union tries to describe "as much about the realities of the job as we can" in its help-wanted advertising.

For the majority of railroaders who work the "road," trips are assigned on a rotating basis, with the order of each person's call to work determined by the time he or she went off duty at the last assignment's end.

When the railroad is busy, conductors and engineers often are called back after just eight hours, the minimum rest period required by federal law. And while the maximum on-duty time is 12 hours, crews sometimes can end up waiting aboard their locomotives far longer than that if their legal time expires in an out-of-the-way place.

Scheduling can be particularly hard on the "extra board," a list of mostly junior railroaders who have no regular assignment, but fill in vacancies caused by illness, vacations, or other absences or cover trains not covered by the regular pool jobs.

But even those who have an assigned run may find their start times moved up, or pushed back, by the vagaries of rail operations. Labor contracts typically require railroads to give 90 minutes' to two hours' notice for the call to work.

The nature of the work, which involves being outdoors in all sorts of weather year-round and occasionally requires strenuous labor, has caused many recent hires to quit after a short time.

The hours have been particularly rough of late because a rebounding economy has increased freight shipments, and rising fuel costs and a driver shortage in the trucking industry have shifted a larger share of that freight to the rails.

The change that granted full Railroad Retirement benefits at age 60 has sped up attrition even more, Husband said.

"We were a graying work force to begin with, and this legislation really accelerated it," he said.