About Correspondence Training

The Railway Educational Bureau has offered Distance Training courses for skilled laborers in the rail industry for nearly a century.

Founded in 1909, the REB is a pioneer in distance training. In these first 100 years, we’ve been training employees at Class I railroads, shortlines, and regional railroads, and our time-tested courses have become widely accepted by the industry. We’ve also helped many organizations outside the rail industry (including petroleum refineries, food-processing plants, and utility companies) learn more about about their roles and responsibilities when dealing with rail freight.

Our courses have been used by tens of thousands of people across a wide range of disciplines to enhance their knowledge in order to help them become successful in the rail industry.

Railway Training Courses

We offer courses covering a broad spectrum of disciplines, including:

  • Basic railroading foundation
  • Freight car repair (carmen)
  • Track maintenance 
  • Locomotive mechanical
  • Locomotive operations
  • Locomotive electrical
  • Machinists
  • Metal trades
  • Signal maintainers
  • Steam engine maintenance

Just the Beginning

Our Distance Training courses are just the beginning for many railroad employees. Our courses provide valuable textbook training that present theory, techniques, and knowledge from which employees draw on. The courses are the ideal supplement to the daily hands-on experience employees gain in the shop or in the field.

Distance Training courses can be used in a variety of ways to help railroads conduct the training they need to keep their workforce up to date. Our Distance Training courses can be used as stand-alone training material or in classroom settings to introduce new concepts and techniques, to refresh knowledge, or to reinforce classroom training. We’ll help you select the courses that fit your needs.

Flexible Training

Completing our Distance Training courses gives you flexibility. Our courses can be completed at any tempo desired. We enforce no deadline unless you ask us to. Take a few lessons every year or complete as many as you wish in a single month. When you’ve finished the lessons you’ve selected, you can easily sign up for additional courses as desired.

We can work with existing training departments to enhance training initiatives already in place. Our Distance Training courses are the perfect compliment to established training programs. You won’t need to spend time developing material because we’ve already done it for you. In addition, our courses are designed to be graded by us so the workload on your training department will be kept to a minimum. We even take care of the record-keeping, and supply managers with monthly progress reports.

As a manager, you can take advantage of the flexibility we offer. Our materials can be sent directly to the student or they can be sent to a managing supervisor to be handed out as needed. No matter how you choose to incorporate our distance training material, we’ll be there for you.

We invite you to contact a student service representative today and put the power of knowledge at your employees’ fingertips.