Yes, an oversimplification. Some railroad civil engineers, some railroad locomotive engineers, and many machinists did head north, but I have not seen any contemporary documents bemoaning the exodus. The main loss for the Confederate railroads was men being laid off in late 1860 and joining militia or newly raised units and thus becoming unavailable for the railroads. These were the men that the RRs were trying to get detailed to them during the war.
The machinists loss would be significant, because locomotives of the day were hand build and parts were not interchangeable. Southern elites looked down on mechanics and IMHO no one at the beginning of the war would note their migration North other than comment good riddance to these Yankee mechanics.
Rails to Oblivian .pdf
By 1863, the locomotive maintenance problem had become acute. In that year, the annual report for the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad listed forty locomotives on the roster. Of that number, nine were classified as "useless," and another nine as "awaiting repair." It appears that all of this attrition was due to normal wear and tear, not to enemy action. Since locomotives were non~standardized hand-built items, it would have been difficult or impossible for the Virginia and Tennessee to salvage parts from one locomotive to keep others running.
However, the most critical personnel shortage was not among operating crews; rather, it was the inadequate supply of "mechanics," or machinists, for locomotive maintenance. Locomotives in the Civil War era were not mass-produced items. Replacing a part often meant fabricating a new one. Mechanics capable of such work were skilled craftsmen who underwent extensive apprenticeships before mastering their trade. The Confederacy had only a small pool of such skilled workers when the war began, and had no time to develop apprentices into master machinists or metalworkers. Moreover, the railroads had to compete with the armaments industry for these critical personnel. The shortage ofmechanics on the Confederate railroads set up yet another vicious cycle-maintenance deferred because of the lack of skilled labor invariably resulted in even more serious problems later.
Both the CSA military and armament factories took skilled railroad men.
Railroad personnel constituted another asset that declined as the war progressed. Railroading in the 1860's was a manpower-intensive business. A typical train, carrying 100 tons of cargo, required a crew of five to seven men. (In contrast, a freight train today needs a crew of two to move 10,000 tons of cargo.) The crew included an engineer to operate the locomotive, a fireman whose full-time job consisted of fueling the firebox and monitoring water levels and steam pressures, and a conductor who supervised the overall operation of the train. The remainder of the crew consisted of brakemen, who clambered from car to car to set manual brakes when the train was required to slow or stop. In addition to train crews, railroads employed track crews to maintain the right-of-way. Heavily-traveled lines employed as many as four to five men per mile of track just for maintenance. Additional personnel included station agents, telegraph operators, switch-men to operate the manual switches that diverted rolling stock from one track to another, craftsmen and laborers to maintain rolling stock, and accountants to keep the books.
The Confederacy started the war with about 16,000 railroad employees. This figure began immediately to decline. Some railroad workers from Northern states went home at the time of secession. An unknown number of others volunteered for military service. Still others were drafted. The Confederate conscription law of 1862 initially exempted railroad workers, but not all draft officials honored the exemption. Moreover, the law was amended in October 1862, narrowing the railroad exemption to management and skilled workers. Another amendment in 1864 further narrowed the exemption. Competing demands for labor, such as the armaments industry, depleted the ranks of skilled railroad workers even more.
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