Join the discussion on the following article:
AAR: ‘No justification’ for crew-size regulations
PTC is a pipe dream like Reagan’s “star wars”. Im not one who believes that govt should be involved in everything BUT when companies put profits above safety (one man crew) then maybe, I also believe FRA has no marbles in their sack and only enforce law AFTER a disaster. But my opinion is just that, it dont mean much.
@Britt, every time someone mentions safety with two man crews…a bunch of us will point to Europe, which uses a lot of single person train crews without the safety problems, and has for many, many years. Who would you side with, the side with history backing up their statements…or politicians and union members(afraid of losing their jobs, which they wouldn’t because more traffic could be handled requiring even more trains crews).
I agree with Mr. Reid and wonder how much Hamburger (intentional misspelling) is getting under the table from the freight RRs? And I do get tired of the comparisons to Euro trains. Do you know that a “big” train in Europe is 4,000 tons? Do you know what we call that here? A local.
There is a lot of emotion around the issue of crew sizes clouding the facts. Railroads are looking at $$$, unions at jobs, politicians at votes.
Its not just Europe running with single person crews. Australia and Brazil use single person crews in environments which more more closely reasonable operations in North America quite successfully.
From my observations the biggest problem of single person operation is not compromised safety but if things go wrong delays are greater. Day to day issues like a broken knuckle or burst a hose take longer to fix leading to greater train delays.
The unions lost jobs with the bargaining away of the caboose. Surely they learned something from that when it comes to preserving jobs.
Jim N , The unions didn’t bargain away the use of the caboose, and I miss them as much as anyone ! It was a matter of life or death for a lot of the railroads. Requiring a crew of 4 or 5 to run a freight train when only an engineer and conductor was required to operate most of them safely ( ‘featherbedding’ ) was a huge contributor for many of the railroads going bankrupt, and needed to be stopped. The crews were eventually reduced, mostly through attrition.
Britt R , Maybe you’re too young to remember, but Pres. Reagan’s idea was far from a “pipe dream”. We have a missile-defense system in place today, that is helping protect our country from a missile attack (by destroying the enemy’s missile high-up in the sky, before it gets here) and is even being expanded to protect parts of Europe. It was on the news recently that we’re expanding it in Alaska to protect us from attack by China and N. Korea.
I sincerely don’t believe any (successful) company will “put profits above safety” because EVERY accident, especially when It involves lives, seriously affects the ‘bottom-line’, and naturally is not good for the business. By the way Britt, your opinion does matter !!
Not long after the railroads eliminated the cabosse and it’s crews to save money they looked at other ways to save money. First off remember the trains may have been 100 car freight trains back then but many of those were 40 footers not the much longer , larger and heavier cars we have today. They finally got trains to two man crews after attrition of the older firemen. Now they started lenthening out the runs and eliminating crew change points. After that they eliminated most of the car knockers so now a two person crew is responsible to do many of the hookups and their own car knocking tests which can mean walking up to 12,000 foot long train in each direction while attempting to keep some sort of a schedule or die on the hours of service laws. . If anything goes wrong one of the two people on that train has to walk the train to find and and then report the trouble. If they are on double track they would have to make sure the other track is clear. Now cut it to just one person and try to do all the same things while walking away from a running engine. If you are already chasing an unknown trouble you could end up getting a runaway just like the one in Lac Meganatic Quebec while that one person is walking the train trying to locate the trouble. Even profits do not trump saftey.
Donald, I’m just not visualizing a lot of two member crews walking the length of one mile or longer through freight trains, checking for problems or being “car knockers”. The vast majority of the “hookups” I believe are probably done in the yards on these long trains.
I’m certainly not advocating one-man crews for the majority of the freight trains, but I believe most people in the industry do agree that profits should never “trump safety”.
Please excuse my ignorance, but what exactly does a “car knocker” do these days ?
When he uses the word “redundant” is he saying that safety is not important enough to have a buckup system in place. Accident are acceptable and redundant system are not needed to prevent incidents.