FORT WORTH, Texas — BNSF Railway has cut jobs from mechanical shops in Kansas and Nebraska and has offered affected workers positions at facilities where it is hiring.
The railroad did not say where jobs were cut or how many positions were eliminated. But local news reports said that more than 100 positions were cut at BNSF shops in Alliance and Havelock, Neb., and in Topeka, Kan.
“We work continuously to align our people and resources with customer demand to deliver the industry-leading service our customers expect. This is a necessity for any network business to optimize the operation and run as efficiently as possible,” a railroad representative said in a statement. “While the underlying economy currently lacks clarity, BNSF is pursuing and capturing growth in several areas. We have an imbalance of employees where growth is occurring among some of our mechanical work groups.
“We have team members in locations on the network where there isn’t sufficient work and simultaneously not enough team members where the growth is occurring,” the railroad said. “Work groups must be readjusted to ensure we have the right people in the right place at the right time to best serve our customers’ current transportation needs and be positioned for future growth.
“There is an urgency as we are seeing this growth now and we want our existing employees to have the opportunity to do the work. To accomplish this, BNSF has offered location transfers with incentives targeted to those locations where there are open positions,” the railroad said. “BNSF has also offered craft transfers for mechanical employees to be retrained for other open positions on the BNSF network. There are currently several hundred open mechanical and engineering positions on our network.”
The increase of housing prices due to inflation will be very hard on those moving.
Yes it will ! I imagine the BNSF Railway management won’t be including that factor in their relocation “incentives.”
Probably not a fun prospect for affected BNSF Railway personnel to have to face relocation to another work site (and state), but such is the nature of the railroad business, I suppose.
I gather that the drop in coal traffic on the Alliance Division in recent years has thus impacted the workload at the Alliance shops, and thus the job cuts there. I didn’t realize the Topeka shops (ex Santa Fe) were still operating.