I didn't seek higher education, mainly because I still haven't decided what I want to do with my life.
And because I didn't do well in school. My attention span for subjects that didn't interest me was marginal, and my grades suffered for it. Having good teachers certainly helped; for example I got good grades in English 11, while the following year with a different teacher I ended up failing the class. Had to take night school to get my grade 12 diploma, and the night school teacher was a good one so my final grade was good as well.
But most of the practical education and job skills that I ended up putting to use during my life were due to apprenticeship. Working on the railroad opened up so many opportunities for learning many different skills, out of necessity. The other trades in the railroad - electricians, diesel mechanics, yard switchmen, locomotive engineers etc. were sort of specialized and that's what they did. But the guys like me that serviced the actual rolling stock were offered a much wider scope of learning. During different rotations of my apprenticeship, I learned woodwork. We had a fully operational woodmill with all sorts of different saws, cutters, shapers, sanding benches, we built everything from flooring to cabinets in there, including a lot of the furniture, cupboards, lockers and benches used in the actual shop. We had to be trained on the theory and operation of the air brake systems. I was trained both in the shop and in night school classes on how to weld, both stick and wire feed. And there is a lot of welding in the railroad industry for fabrication, repair, building up of worn components, and high pressure work on the aforementioned air brakes.
Then there was the fun stuff. We had a complete paint shop, and were trained on bodywork and painting, with a large variety of guns (mostly DevillBis). Repair work on passenger cars was up to quite picky standards, but I wanted freight car repairs to look good too. I spent time in the tin shop, although technically that was a different trade, but still learned about all their cutters, rollers for seams and beading, soldering and spot welding. We spent time learning upholstery work for the passenger car seating, as well as glazing work due to all the windows they had. Part of the apprenticeship involved one month each year going to a vocational school, but they didn't have an exact fit for our railroad requirements so they sent us to a steel fabrication class where I learned a great deal about shipbuilding that I never needed to know, but it was still fascinating. Those classes gave a good foundation for proper drafting skills, and finally I was able to see a practical application for higher math skills, as we used trigonometry and logarithms to figure out weird angles and square-to-round transitions. I didn't get the math in high school but suddenly it made sense and I was good at it. And doing that drafting work meant that my printing became much more neat and legible.
We had heated boxcars with alcohol burners and convection fluid piping through the floors, we had cars with high pressure nitrogen charged draft gears to cushion the blow when coupling, we had old cars with lots of wood, we had aluminum cars (had to learn aluminum welding as well), something seemingly simple like a plug door on the side of a freight car might have a complex series of gears and lever mechanisms to engage the locked position. I spent years as the fiberglass repair guy, nobody else seemed interested. Everything, everywhere was a learning process and it constantly changed with the years.
I've been retired from all that for nearly nine years, but every time I start a project with a car, around the yard or house, chances are I'm using some skill and knowledge that I originally learned from that railroad trade. They liked me there, I was good at figuring out problems, and I'm glad that I did that work.
