I've Been Working on the Railroad Part 3

Getting off the extra board

In 1977, the clerk’s extra board on the BN was strictly seniority. The jobs needed for the day would be filled in seniority order. The less seniority you had, meant the less you worked. As a clerk we had three distinct call periods during the day: 5-7 am for jobs starting from 6-8 am,  1-3 pm for jobs starting 2-4 pm and 9-11 pm for jobs starting 10-12 pm. It was before cell phones and you needed to be available during the call times in case they called. In most cases, you only had 1 hour to get to work and it could be any of the outlying stations in addition to the yard offices, freight office, roundhouse, material shop, etc. It was hardest for me to meet that afternoon call time, as by that time of the day, I would be wanting to be outside in the summer or off doing something. If you missed a call, that meant you would not work for the day unless by chance the list got down to you at the next call period.

As you can see, then, a goal would be to get off the extra board as soon as possible even for a little while. Fortunately open jobs were posted quite often and were assigned via a bidding process with the most senior person getting the bid. If you were free, you could also move on an open job (as long as it wasn’t posted) such as a vacation vacancy. Of course, it would be assigned to the most senior person. Even if you were assigned one of these jobs, you were always subject to replacement if a more senior person chose to “bump” you from that position.  These rules were quite complicated but did serve to ensure that the railroad had workers covering all their positions while retaining the integrity of the seniority system as set forth by the clerk’s union.

Nothing stays the same, however and with the acquisition of the Frisco railroad in 1980, the union negotiated some changes to the extra board. It would now be a rotating extra board with the same call periods. This meant that despite seniority, as the people older than you got called, you would rotate to the top to get called in the rotation order. Another big change was that this would now be a Guaranteed Rotating Extra Board meaning, that if you were not called that particular day, you would get paid anyway (up to 5 days a week) simply by submitting your Guarantee form.  As always, the railroad could call you outside of the designated call periods but if you didn’t answer you were not penalized. The jobs they would call you for outside of call hours would be specifically for over the road van transport of train crews.