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Feds want two-man crews
This is a major step forward for safety. Trains carrying passengers, trains of more than one hour schedules, and freight trains operating on passenger railroads should all have two many crews for passenger and train safety. Additionally, time and motion and other work studies for the past one hundred years have indicated that a second person has been a factor in keeping both alert…not just four instead of two eyes and ears but also verbal contact keeping both more alert. Our business models and plans indicate better returns on investment, i.e., more money kept by the business, when only one person has to be paid. But two people being paid is protection against damage and supports safety of life, limb, and property and assures efficient operations.
Actually, this is a step backward for safety. A second person is a distraction more than a protection. ’
There ARE protections that are needed: PTC, fatigue management practices and the Japanese practices of “calling” signals and such.
Of course management thinks this is unnecessary…having one-man crews increases the profit margin, thereby pleasing Wall Street (and improving CEO bottom lines)!
There was a head on collision of two UP trains at the south end of Hoxie, Arkansas a couple of years ago. Both crew members of the train that ran the signal were asleep. Another example is the UP crew that ran into the side of a BNSF train at Rockview, Missouri because both were asleep. It isn’t a guarantee of being safer.
We have no idea of how many times that second or third crewman made a contribution to averting a disaster. The “buddy system” is a tried and true method.
To all previous posters…just how many times do we have to mention Europe(and other places) before it starts sinking into peoples brains? Once PTC is up and running smoothly a second crew member isn’t going help anything, even fatigue won’t be as much of a factor(though I notice no one has really delved into how much a persons mental state affects fatigue, as in you can teach yourself to accept what ever hours you want your body to consider normal, it just takes work).
To GERALD L MCFARLANE JR, you mean like what happened recently in Bavaria? Where two trains under PTC collided? Anything mechanical can fail. I saw a ton of programming failures and electrical glitches cause machinery shutdowns a decade ago in controls that had decades of design and use in industry. Funny what a little spike in the electricity can do to an electrical control panels thinking processes. And these were in controllers that were designed to operate 24/7 without fail. The local power company even had an engineer many years ago prove that there were standing waves in the commercial power grid that could play havoc with electronics.
I’d like to see the science. We operate thousands of trains daily in this country. Even with our very small accident rate, we should be able to see if there is a quantifiable safety improvement with–or without–2 person crews.
If the thinking by the feds is that two person crews make trains safer, than two person crews in tractor-trailer semi trucks should be the rule as well. These trucks kill and injure many more people annually than trains.
Why aren’t the feds making the trucking industry operate under a Positive Tu
Why aren’t the feds making the trucking industry spend billions on developing and implementing a Positive Truck Control system like they a making the railroad do for trains?
Mr. Schneider has the best point - where’s the science. There is certainly enough data to see if two man crews make a significant difference. Part of the PTC “sell” was that it was going to save railroads money - if not in labor savings, how else?
I like what Mr. Losleben has to say - if its good for trains, why not trucks.
Finally, to Mr. Nadolski - what’s good for the bottom line is good for the railroad industry. The lower the costs the lower railroads need to charge - the lower the charges, the more traffic that will flow to railroads. Remember also that profits are what allow investment in infrastructure. No profits - no investments.
Who remembers the featherbedding days with five man crews. The railroads were basically bankrupt because of their high costs. They were losing money and certainly not investing in their plant. Most traffic moved to trucks. Obviously not as simple as that - but mandated labor costs were a big contributor.
When I worked for the RR, there was an ‘alerter’ that went off if no activity in the locomotive cab. I believe the engineer had 20 seconds to acknowledge or the train stopped. I also know most anything can be by-passed.