Re: Straight to engineer

When the railroad needed some additional men to run engines it had them take a series of tests and run certification trips with the road foreman of engines. Then they would go back to shoveling coal until extra engineers were needed, like a stock rush for example.
Usually men had to fire for a specified number of years before they were considered for promotion. In the early days railroads did hired men who ran engines for other roads (A.A. Rowe, for example).
The time men spent firing before being set up to engineer was based on need.
There were some exceptions. On the 1937 senior engineer J.W. Hopper was hired as a fireman on 12-11-1889 and not promoted to engineer until 9-28-1897. No. 2 man J.F. Clark was hired as a fireman on 7-22-1890 and promoted on 12-21-1890.
In the early days the wait was about four years. Later, thanks to the Depression the wait was longer. There was a further wait to be qualified for passenger train service.
Also the narrow gauge heads on the Fourth Division were notorious for not letting the fireman run the engine, according to Paul Connor, whose grandfather Steve worked out of Durango. That lead to new engineers who were not quite as good as they could have been.