This doesn't happen only in railroad operations. Companies are no longer run by people that work their way up from the bottom. Today, it's all about maximizing profit over quality of product and service and maximizing bonuses for the CEO and other C-level management, and ever-increasing stock dividends for the stockholders and investment firms, which drive a huge part of this fall to the bottom. To accomplish this, companies bring in MBAs who live by spreadsheets and have absolutely no clue about the company and its products or services.
To an MBA, employees technically shouldn't be working at all because they cost the company money. IT in particular, is offshored and outsourced so not to cost the company money at all except for the services that they pay the least for. Product development may be done in-house, but all manufacturing and production is done offshore where the company can pay the least. Programming is done through contractors, usually found now in India where they can pay even less, so that very few employees need to be paid. This is why we see a lot of serious bugs and cyberattacks. There's no one held accountable. Once an employee is finished, they are let go until a new project comes along. A programmer may be lucky if they get the same project and company again another time.
I saw this at Oracle. The owner bought a new yacht and land on an island off of Hawaii while telling the sales people that they couldn't receive their commissions.