How long is an engineers work day? 12 hours max?
But what if he gets over the road in only 4 or 5 hours?
Then what will he do?
Can an engineer be home every night, or so, if his district is 4 or 5 hours long?
12 hours is legal maximum. After 12 hours, he has to stop his train no matter where he is and no matter how busy the interlocking or the mainline he’s blocking is. (Of course, a dispatcher tries to avoid these things.) If he has his job done in 4 or 5 hours and if he is lucky, he can get home with another train and get two days payment out of one working day.
Not neccesarily. GCOR does permit crews that have died on the law to move trains off of busy mains. Also, if the run is done in 4 or 5 hours, most likely he will be run the other way again.
As to clearing a busy main going beyond 12 hours is a no no and must be reported to the fra as they hold the mandate on the 12 hour rule, if it is not reported and the fra discovers the violation the railroad can be fined GCOR has no bearing on the 12 hour rule. As for a 5 hour trip it has not happened to me yet if it did I would have a heart attack, my best trip so far has been 8 hours to Chicago and I am still trying to figure out what went wrong with the dispatchers and yard (lol).
Rodney
we have pools that run from willard, OH to cleveland. The actuall running time is about 1hr 45min. so well say 3-4 hrs. But they dont get to go home. They stay at a hotel in cleveland for 8 hrs of rest “or more” and wait for the next westbound to willard or crestline.
An engineer is usually going to go to his away-from-home lodging facility for rest, regardless of time on duty. Sometimes, he’ll get to double back to his home terminal on a train, depending on requirements of trains run and crew availibility. As for being home every night when working on the road, that would be mostly a pipe dream, unless he hits it right or works somewhere that they trade crews and directions midway through the trip.