Evening.

First of all if this is in the wrong section please feel free to move it.

Im new to the forums and was just after some info to help me make a more informed decision.

I recently applied for a job as a trainee loco assistant with Railtrain Pty Ltd in the Geelong area (Vic for anyone who was wondering)

i was excited to be told i had an interview and even more excited to be told a few days later i was successful in my interview and would be able to start my training (providing i pass CAT 1 ect...) But my excitement changed rather fast when i was told all the geelong positions had in fact been filled and after my training in Geelong i would actually be sent to Marybourough, Vic i assume still working as a casual with PN

Now my Delmar is my partner and her kids. So a simple decision has been turned into a rather hard one as my partner is not in the position to move closer to Marymourough for various reasons.

I was wanting to know if anyone in Victoria (or anywhere really lol) has worked as a casual for Railtrain Pty Ltd?
I was told in the interview they has an agreement with PN to try and provide casuals with minimum hours. but like people know the reality could be after 6 months i could be out of work. Just curious of other peoples experience with Railtrain / PN

Also iv been unable to find any clear info on what freight actually comes out of Marybourough and what type of work i would most likely be doing (eg i was told the Geelong positions was for the up coming grain season)

The money on offer is a good incentive and i hoping this will be a good foot in the door as jobs like this dont come along to often. So any input people have about the above would be greatly appreciated

Hi Sunbury23,

Sent you a PM.

Railtrain can and will direct their labour-hire contract train crew to go to a different location as needed to meet the requirements of the customer (mainly PN/Asciano that is no longer Asciano as of Friday last week), and even after a person has been allocated to a particular PN depot location, they can still be told their home depot is now somewhere else. That happened to quite a number of Railtrain's casuals that were put on last year.

However if you've been accepted for work at a particular location, every effort should be made for you to work out of that location especially if you make a commitment to go there. However remember that being casual, there is no requirement for RailTrain, or PN, to facilitate relocation.

That said, in last year's big drive to recruit casuals for Graincorp's work, loads of crews were slated to be placed in VIC locations but then weren't after climate conditions reduced significantly the harvest yields in VIC while in most of the NSW grain regions the yields were a lot higher. Railtrain's casuals are expected to be 'mobile' to a certain degree.

This year current predictions are for an overall harvest yield across NSW and VIC that is 50 percent more than last year. But that is highly dependent on the weather between now (late winter) and harvest time (Oct to December mostly).

Hence the sudden surge of job ads from Railtrain (and via other companies such as Rocket Rail) to recruit lots more labour-hire contract casuals for Graincorp contract fulfillment with PN.

I do not know what pay rate Railtrain pays it's labour hire contract casuals, but I have heard that a lot of them who were hired as assistants had their contracts re-done to make them qualified drivers.

Qube (until last Friday a seperate rail company to PN/Asciano) has also been pushing hard to recruit casuals recently, along with Momentum Rail (though I think Momentum's hiring is mainly for SCT when they start running their own trains on the East Coast). SSR which also runs grain trains has NOT done any hiring of late except for one round of job ads some months back. That could change any day though. GWA/Freightliner could also start hiring in NSW for grain work.

Remember that GrainCorp is not the only grain marketter in NSW since the 'single-desk' system was abolished - there are other players now such as Emerald, Viterra, BFB, etc. all of which will play off rail operators against each other to some extent to extract the best cartage deals.