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Engineers: change rules to lessen fatigue
30 years ago there was a proposal made to the brotherhoods to split the seniority rosters into two groups: days and nights. The idea was that even if you did not the exact time of your call you could at least plan on it being within a certain 12 hour period. The brotherhoods rejected the proposal. Now they can watch their jobs disappear under PTC.
Daniel: Splitting the seniority roster would have been unworkable because trains don’t always run evenly day and night. How would you equally distribute the work if one week most trains came in at night and half your crews were assigned to the day shift? With today’s technolagy there is no excuse for not haveing train lineups accurate at least most of the time. That way trainmen could get a good idea of when they would be called and could plan their rest accordingly. It would be a lot less expensive than PTC.
Chris: No one said it would be an even split and even at it’s best it would not be perfect. It would still be better than dead crews. In the meantime our trains are still going ‘bump’ and PTC is being forced on us. Life is all about coping with discomforts but sometimes we can chose which discomforts.
There is no reason trains (during normal times) couldn’t run on schedule. This issue will end the use of crews on trains once PTC is required. Once again the unions will be their own demise!
It seems to me that the relatively high pay is in large part because of the unpredictability and undesirability of the scheduling. It’s conceivable that for less pay they could hire more crews and thereby achieve more predictable assignments, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
It may seem like a simple thing to schedule crews but there is always the problem of mechanical failures, accidents, and bad weather that foul up the best of planning. Weather and equipment failures caused the AutoTrain to need 3 crew sets instead of 2 as it went on the law at Satsuma, FL in June. When a crew gets called for a train and clocks in, a dead freight on a single track main can make all the following trains late and have a ripple affect. So like in the case of Amtrak 92 recently, a night run can turn into a day run, a day departure of 52 can turn into a night departure and all crews get messed up.
Shorter more frequent trains would also help. More likely to fit sidings and yard leads. Less likely to have mechanical problems like broken knuckles en route. Better car cycle times. More likely to be a train needing a crew at a given crew change point so more likely to be able to assign a crew within a scheduled call time without long lags before it can depart.
But one big force to the trend to longer trains is crew costs. So there is a tradeoff here.
I drive a mail truck at night on a regular schedule but I drove OTR many years and at times it was hell varying between day and night schedules. Now I least sleep at the same time every day and feel I’m much safer. We need to get these crews on at least knowing which 12 hr period they are going to work on. Bet if you started jackin around the work schedules of the people that schedule you would see some changes. You have to walk in the other persons shoes right? But I’m a hopeless optimist
The class 1 railroads need to build train handoff buildings for management. What do I mean? Well say in Chicago have a building where management from all 6 class 1s as well as IHB and BRC could be located along with the main (van) aka “taxi” companies management for better train handoffs between roads and have all the crew callers based here as well. So all of the main railroads could better handle the logistics of crews. In this day and age of computer tech there is no reason bnsf management should not be able to go online and both railroads see where a train is in the flow to hand off from one road to the other. You could also put Metra and Amtrak management of some sort in the same building.
Then after using this as a model do the same thing in Minn/St. Paul/Seattle/Portland/LA/DFW/KC and so on…
I understand fully, having been an over the road bus driver living on the extra board for a lot of years.
They should look at airline crew scheduling–it has gone from 14 hours mixed day and night normal,16 abnormal to improved rest periods and weekly max schedules. As technology changed so did crew schedules. Crews have been reduced from 3 to 2 when the airplanes were developed without flight engineer crew members and went to jet engines from reciprocation, gasoline and propellers. The mechanical work load decreased somewhat but the hours and weather did not. Max is 30 hours in 7 days block to block and 100 hours a month max. These are actual hours. A 30 hour rotation could take 4 days minium depending on where it went and rest periods. Thee is alot in common with railroad and airline practices–they just use different names, An airline pilot reserve spends alot of time on the board too–seniority dictates…
I wonder if it would be possible to train/qualify several crews on an entire train route, then let three different crews work a single train from point A to point B (an addition of a “crew car” would be needed so that they could have the comforts of a layover hotel room)
I worked in trucking both as a driver and in dispatch. We had many of the same fatigue issues due to the irregular nature of the business. Even in a company with a good safety culture, there will always be pressure to get the load there on time. Hours of Service rules were revised a few years back, but this has not been a cure all, and indeed has created some other problems that did not exist before.
Even with good dispatching, there will always be customer created problems beyond our control that affect the driver’s ability to get over the road within those constraints. The 14 hour rule in trucking works a lot like the 12 hour rule on the railroad: once that 14 hours is up, it doesn’t matter if you’ve run 5 miles or 500, or if you have 9 driving hours left, you have to be parked. Now that most of the large truckers have gone to electronic logs, the system put you in violation even if you are one minute over, unlike the days of paper logs, where you had some leeway.
Fatigue will always be a part of the industry-unfortunate but true. In railroading, as in trucking, things happen.
Despite the best planning, there will always be a problem causing delays. That said, if everyone concerned is really interested in safety, they will find a way to work together to reduce the problem to the minimum. No one wants to lose work, especially if it’s mileage based. No miles=no paycheck. Still, if railroad managements are serious about safety, they should allow crews a certain number of “layoff” days for such events. Forcing an engineer to run tired is asking for trouble. I know at least one who was off for months due to being involved in a rear end collision, largely due to a microsleep condition caused by extreme fatigue. It was a miracle he was not killed, or anyone else. Safety is important-it allows us all to live to see another day.
It used to be when airline pilots were on reserve we had to be available 24 hours a day. Now there is an 8 hour window when we cannot be called. Reserve is the same as the extra board. All lines of time are bid the month before.
Easy fix is make all the office people show up at odd ball hours and then announce forced overtime then the next day tell them to take the day off so they don’t get overtime then call them that evening and tell them to come in but it’s a new clock day so it’s straight pay. Siemens tried doing that to me but it did not work.
Donald-I can appreciate that. For a long time, I have said that anyone who comes to work in an office position that relates to operations-fleet managers, load planners, account reps-should be required to go out with a driver for two weeks, unless they have at least a year of verifiable OTR experience. When the driver is driving, the account rep is sitting in that buddy seat. If the driver is at some grocery warehouse, the FM is in the trailer throwing boxes alongside him. If the load gets delayed, and the driver now has to run all night for on time, the load planner also does the all nighter. One condition: no hand picking the loads, so that driver gets all easy stuff.
The only way any of these people will ever understand what life is like on the ground for the guys who do the work, is to be out there and have to deal with it on a day to day basis. Let them learn what it is to be away from home, either overnight, or for several weeks as in trucking. Let them see what it’s like to not get a shower for a couple of days because there is either not time, or no fuel stop convenient. Let them eat French fries out of their cup holder at 11 PM because there is not time to stop for a real dinner. Let them live in the back of a truck for 14 days to get the full experience. I realize most of those situations are not specifically applicable to rail operations, but it’s analogous, and the desk jockeys(I was one too, but with five years OTR) need to understand that the decisions they make, or fail to make, have a real life effect on someone’s life, health, and safety.