What a pile of BS!

As described, the person will be responsible for design of live railway dispatch and control systems that operate 24 /7 /365; no down time and no outages permitted! He/she will be on call at any time during those 24 hrs per day to cover any failures. Moreover, he/she will be required to work weekends and nights any time that is necessary to cut-in new software at the control center, or whenever required to support cut-in of field signalling equipment by others.

And yes nowadays, the market is so tight in railway signal engineering and other support positions such as this one, that big bucks is what you must pay if you expect to actually to hire anybody from the outside. You can thank Senator Feinstein for that - it's just another unintended consequence of her draconian PTS legislation.

But in the interest of full disclosure; It should be made clear, that I myself should not complain too much! Though I still think her approach to the issues underlying PTS was fundamentally wrong. It has nevertheless made my retirement very comfortable.

The PTS mandate overnight more than quadrupled the need for such skills. Meanwhile most colleges had long since already dropped their railway specific engineering programs, leaving the supply of railway signal and other railway engineering disciplines flat footed. Therefore, more generally trained engineering types have tried to take up the slack. However, the learning curve has been very steep for them; and many fail to adapt their skills to the peculiarities of railway engineering, before they give up and quit.

Hence the continuing critical labor shortage and high salaries; and the sloughing off of the more mundane and menial PTS tasks to patently untrained and unqualified people (read that as NEW SAFETY HAZARDS). A typical consequence of hamfisted government meddling in a once free marketplace - totally unbalancing it. Too bad it had to be so hamfisted, but that's what we get for re-electing proven idiots to the Senate.