The best account of the management of the Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific is Evelyne Payen-Varieras, "Les cadres salaries du Central Pacific Railroad, 1869-1889," Revue d'historie moderne et contemporaine 55 (Oct.Dec. 2008): 123-59.
Most of the records of the Canadian Pacific remain closed, and so it may very well also be true of the Canadian Pacific.
The best accounts of railroad work and the struggle over it are Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1987),
and Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983).
Transportation Rules, Northern Pacific System of Railroads, in Effect Sept. 1, 1883.
The Burlington's early descriptions of duties were even shorter.
untitled, "Prepared by John B. Nyman," 63, 1870, 6.5, CB&Q.
Pinkerton, His Personal Record, 57-59.
Railroad workers were mobile, but then so were American workers as a whole.
See Stromquist, Generation of Boomers, 193-95.