Word: switchmen
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Dates: during 1963-1963
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...Switchmen's Union of North America (18,000). Boss of the Switchmen's Union, founded in 1906, is Neil P. Speirs, 50, a business administration major at the University of Idaho who left a white-collar job to become a switchman during the Great Depression because the pay was better. Switchmen are essentially brakemen who work in railyards rather than on the road, taking over from road crews as the trains pull into the yards. In recent decades, automatic switching controls have taken over much of the switchmen's former work, so that, like firemen and brakemen...
...party, or of the Russians. But he takes pride in doing his job well. When a Russian troop train must be rushed through to put down the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he shunts off local traffic to let it pass. He rejects a colleague's suggestion that the switchmen should hold it up. Such a gesture is a frivolous sop to their own private feelings about the Russians, he argues. How long could the switchmen delay them? he asks. "They'd still have made it by tomorrow morning...
...accepted and the unions summarily rejected. Under the commission's recommendation, some 13,000 firemen with less than ten years' service would be dismissed in the first year; 27,000 others could hold their jobs until retirement, but would not be replaced. Another 20,000 men. mostly switchmen, would be eliminated gradually. The Pennsylvania Railroad, biggest in the U.S., has already announced plans to drop 3,100 firemen...