EXPOSED
The modal worker here is a freight conductor whose day is physical and outdoors: riding the point, throwing switches, coupling and lacing air hoses, walking a mile-long train to find a broken knuckle or dragging equipment, protecting shoving movements in yards. That work is nearly untouched by language AI and badly served by current robotics; what is exposed is the paperwork layer — switch lists, train consists, work orders, delay reporting — plus the yardmaster tier, which is essentially screen-based sequencing that optimization software already does well. The real threat is not an AI conductor but single-person-crew rules: PTC and remote monitoring give carriers the argument that the second seat is redundant, and that fight is being settled by regulators and unions, not by model capability.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $65,990 → $78,000 -5.4% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+1.1%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 46,440 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +1.1% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 61/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~3,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
TrainmanConductorCar ChaserMotor BossRoadmasterYard PilotYardmasterCar SpotterTrain MasterYard ManagerYard SpotterCar DispatcherRoad ConductorTest ConductorYard ConductorCar DistributorRoad SupervisorTrain ConductorYard SupervisorDispatch ManagerOutbound ManagerTicket CollectorTrain DispatcherEngine Supervisor
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Throwing a hand-thrown switch, lacing air hoses in the rain, and walking 6,000 feet of train to replace a knuckle are nowhere near automatable, but the other half of the job — building switch lists, verifying consists against waybills, keying delay codes, and the yardmaster's whole classification-sequencing task — is already software work, which is what pulls this off the 17-18 a pure ground-crew job would earn.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments Riding the side of a moving car, protecting a shove from the point in a dark yard, climbing on ballast in ice, and setting handbrakes on a grade are uncontrolled-environment physical tasks with real fall and crush exposure; 17 rather than 20 only because yardmasters do the same job from a tower and the conductor spends long stretches seated in the cab.
Licensed human required and personally liable 49 CFR Part 242 requires FRA conductor certification with named revocable authority, and a conductor who violates a restricted-speed or shoving instruction is personally decertified and can be charged — but certification is carrier-issued and territory-specific, not a portable professional licence, so it protects the seat far less than an engineer's or a pilot's ticket.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls When a defect is found en route, the conductor decides whether to set the car out, hand-brake it, or move at restricted speed to the next siding, and under GCOR the conductor is jointly responsible for train movement authority — reading a track warrant wrong or misjudging a shove kills people, which is why this sits at 14 despite the rulebook covering most routine moves.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (13/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (12/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (5/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (14/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 31 of this occupation's 61 points (51%).
Embodiment (17/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Commercial Pilots SAFE
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 77/100 — SAFE.
FRA's 2024 final rule (49 CFR 218 Subpart G) requiring a minimum two-person crew on most freight trains surviving legal challenge — BNSF and AAR petitions are pending in the Fifth/Eighth Circuits — plus state two-person-crew laws (AZ, CA, WA, KS, NE, OH, MN) staying in force. If the federal rule stands and is extended to yard/terminal service without the waiver pathway, the certified conductor becomes a legally mandated seat rather than a contract concession.
Task-mix shift: if optimization software absorbs routine yard sequencing and switch-list generation, the surviving yardmaster work is exception handling — derailment response, hazmat consist decisions, hours-of-service crew shortfalls, weather embargoes. This tier genuinely exists and is where the discipline currently lands.
Same two-tier effect on the conductor side: paperwork (delay reports, consists, work orders) is the automatable tier; if it goes, what remains is walking the train, knuckle changes, air hose lacing, and shoving protection in unmapped yards, which no deployed robotics handles. Score rises by subtraction, not by new capability being blocked.
A post-East-Palestine addition to FRA conductor certification (49 CFR 242) making the certified conductor the named responsible party for hazmat placarding, air brake test certification, and shoving-move protection — i.e. an individual whose certificate is revocable for a signed-off defect, analogous to how the mechanical inspector role works. Precedent: NTSB recommendations and the Railway Safety Act of 2023 text.
Only a marginal route: if PSR-driven train lengths (2-3 miles) keep growing, per-train ground inspection and defect walking increases in duration and unpredictability, and FRA rules limiting reliance on wayside/machine-vision detectors in lieu of walking inspections would lock that in.
The limit. trust_premium has no route — freight shippers buy carload rates and transit time, and have no visibility into or preference about crew composition; passenger conductor visibility is a different, much smaller occupation. The whole score here is hostage to one thing: whether the FRA two-person-crew rule survives litigation. If it is vacated, liability_shield falls rather than rises and no other lever compensates.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 3,800 | $80,000 +3% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 190 | $46,440 -40% |
| Savannah, GA | 90 | $38,020 -51% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 80 | $96,120 +23% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 70 | $45,600 -42% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 70 | $59,790 -23% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 50 | $92,400 +18% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 80 | $96,120 +23% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 50 | $92,400 +18% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 3,800 | $80,000 +3% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 61. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.