Every railroader has heard the pitch. Usually on the first day, sometimes before the drug test. Stay thirty years, make it to sixty, and you and your spouse walk away with a pension the rest of the country does not get. The hours, the nights away from home, the holidays spent on a locomotive, the phone that rings at two in the morning: Railroad Retirement is the industry’s answer to all of it. It is the reward for staying.
The question we think working railroaders should be asking is not the one the headlines ask. It is not whether Railroad Retirement will be there when you retire. The Board’s own actuaries answer that one every June, and their answer this year was yes, for twenty-five years, under every scenario they ran. The better question is what those scenarios assume about railroad employment, and whether the industry being built right now, through Precision Scheduled Railroading, through the largest merger in rail history, and through the push toward one-person crews and automated terminals, looks anything like the industry the actuaries modeled.
For a thorough review and discussion about railroad retirement, click here to read the full story.
