BNSF Railway Employee Reviews for Conductor

"I have worked at BNSF for more than 20years. This used to be a good job! They don’t care about employees. All they care about is $$. Most people are tired of the abuse. It has become a fuel savings company. They run trains in 3 gear to save fuel. So you spend more time away from home so they can save fuel. On the road after 12 hrs you are working for free. If you take this job you are working for the devil! Please choose a different industry. They want to go one man crew or no man crew on trains."

"You have no life, no birthdays, holidays, and emergencies don't matter anymore. You will have vacations, 401k, excellent retirement and benefits, and have easy days, and days that are complete hell, mainly caused by either the weather or the people you work with. Both of those make a huge difference in your work day. IT'S THE MOST DISORGANIZED COMPANY EVER, but chaos pays well. My first year I netted $72k, and this year $84k even though taking 3 months for training in which training pay sucks as I switched from track maintenance to freight conductor in June.... pay is a step-rate, and over a 5 year period will climb to 100%. Seniority is hard, and over time it gets easier, but at first it's stressful as hell. Look into where you're applying, as far as which union agreement it is, whether you hire on the BN side or the Santa Fe side. Guarantee rates of pay differ from region to region, and so do the kind of trains that are run. Remember, running the road trains, pay is made by mostly milage, so places like Arizona, California, New Mexico, etc...that run high priority stack trains that rarely get slowed down, and move at 70 mph from a to b, pay the most, differently from a place that has lots of stop and go industries and switch work that doesn't allow time to get good mileage in.....homework pays off... there's guys that make $2k a half, and there's guys that make $11k a half (every 2 weeks), all depends if you want a life or not... good luck!"