The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Gateway College pilots a railroad program with SCSU
NEW HAVEN — Jacob Correia can trace his love of trains back to the first time he ever saw one on the railroad.
“My parents gave me train simulators and DVDs. It started piquing my interest and I’ve stuck with it ever since,” he said.
Correia knew he wanted to have a career on the railroad after he graduated from high school, but he didn’t want to bypass something he sees as important: a degree.
After shopping around, he stumbled upon his ideal program: Gateway Community College’s Railroad Engineering Technology program. There was only one problem: Correia, a resident of Massachusetts, needed to relocate, a major financial strain for a recent high school graduate without access to college dormitory housing.
But about two weeks before the start of the Fall 2017 semester, Correia received good news: Southern Connecticut State University was able to pilot a residential program for him, using empty dormitory space to give him an affordable place to live in New Haven.
SCSU Director of Residence Life Robert DeMezzo said this was possible because the university’s residence halls have enrolled below full capacity in the last two years.
“There’s always a handful of spaces we can make available,” he said. “Rather than just leave those spaces empty, we can give them to students who can take advantage of it.”
The SCSU residence life department has not yet determined a quota, he said, but the university is in the early stages of negotiating a similar project with Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport as well.
Rich Halkyard, director of the Railroad Engineering Technology program, said it is unique to the Northeast, and he has encountered multiple students in the past who found the commute or the cost of living locally to be prohibitive.
Halkyard said he believes the RET program is the only of its type in the region because it specializes in something that many programs do not.
“Our program is a blue collar, hands-on training program,” he said.
The other two programs of a similar nature, he said, are located in Georgia and Kansas.
Railroad jobs can be thought of in terms of three tiers of skilled labor, he said: locomotive engineers, ushers and customer service jobs; electricians, machinists, mechanics and closed circuit television technicians; and electrical engineers and railroad designers. The program at GCC trains for that middle tier, he said, where employees must have some skills and knowledge of electricity, physics and math, but does not extend to things such as planning.
Halkyard said a national need for better infrastructure should make railroad jobs more appealing, but what is more important is a “retirement problem” in the local industry.
“Railroad workers around the country are retiring now at a rapid rate, and these railroads can’t find people to replace them,” he said.
Halkyard said railroads also require a different sort of labor now than in past decades.
“Railroads today want a different skill set in their workers. It’s very computerized, with high frequency radios and that sort of thing. These are all innovations in railroading that require a different worker and that’s where a lot of this came from,” he said. “It’s not your father’s railroad anymore.”
Fred Gill, a talent acquisition manager for Metro North who collaborates with the Gateway program, said the company often hires for the specific skills in mechanical or electrical engineering, but the Gateway program teaches those skills specifically for the rails.
“You need a more technical force, and Gateway provides that training,” he said.
Colleen Comito, also a talent acquisition manager for Metro North, said many of the engineers who have been with the company for the majority of the time it has operated are beginning to retire.
“We have had a large turnover with the workforce aging out,” she said. It’s an industry-wide concern, she said. “We’re looking for specific skills and we compete against each other for them.”
She said in the past she has hired a conductor out of the Gateway program.
“If they learn enough about the program and how it operates, we can relay that to other positions we fill,” she said.