YOu have just arrived to be the new boss of a shortline railroad. You find that poling cars when pole sockes are available, Dutch drops, hopping on and off cars when in motion are all part of the regular routine and are defended as not having caused injuries in the past. Do you allow such practices to continiue? If not, how do you go about changing the practices? These practices have permitted the operating people to get their work done in the minimum of time to maximize their leasure time.
Now suppose this railroad is in a foreign country where the spoken language is not English, although some of the operating people do have a working knowledge of English, and you have just begun to learn their language.
If you are TRULY COMMITED to SAFETY - all those practices have to STOP. Hate to sound draconian, but you implement your Safety Policies and fire the first personnel that violate the policies. You have to get the attention of the work force to the fact they you mean business. It is not going to be a cakewalk for a long long time. To do anything, you will have the get the ‘buy in’ of your subordinate managers who are known on the property so that they will champion and enforce your policies.
Hold on. Some of the practices mentioned would not only benefit the crews, but also the railroad’s profitability. If using a pole gets the job done in 10 minutes rather than 2 hours, or a dutch-drop saves a 1 hour runaround move, then both parties benefit. TOTAL SAFETY would most likely disrupt operations to perhaps an unmanageable level.
Whenever management would get too petty on harassing the employees, or worse when a newly-minted Trainmaster was going to show us “how to do it”, all we would need to do is start following ALL the rules to the letter. Soon the wheels’ turning begins to slow, and eventually management would back off with it’s new policy.
You start off a new policy by firing someone who is doing what everyone has been doing all along, and you’re NEVER going to get a ‘buy-in’ from the ranks. If the railroad is willing to accept the additional costs of doing everything ‘by-the-book’, then perhaps you might have a doable plan. After all, I doubt there are many railroaders that prefer to operate in a genuinely unsafe manner.
I thought there was sort of a consensus around the boards that boarding and alighting from moving wagons (the OP did specify “foreign”) was pretty darn safe IF the employees are properly trained in what to do and when the condition are safe to do it - e.g. is the train moving slowly enough and is the row level enough so the employee won’t break their ankle (or worse) when getting off.
As for Dutch Drops, I found this neat thread on RR.net about the practice (aka flying switch), and again it seems safe IF everyone knows what they are doing (maybe a big IF).
Poling freight cars - this one seems a bit more contentious, as there seems to be no consensus whether it was officially banned by the ICC/FRA or not.
All those banned practices have elements of danger, but so does the unbanned practice. The FRA had said that it is too dangerous to have crew members standing nearby when coupling or uncoupling. So they are looking at ways to fully automate this to be done from the safety of the locomotive cab.
Poling is somewhat unusal in terms of risk because it has the rather hidden danger of the pole shattering under compression. And because the pole has to be manually held against one’s body during engagement, a shattering subjects the user to the risk of violent, sudden death. In addition, because there is very lttle engagement, an engineer is motivated to push hard to keep the pole from falling to the ground.
To a property that has been operating in a unsafe, high number of injuries basis, the conversion to a Safety Culture is in fact culture shock. Culture shock cannot be undertaken in a lassiez faire piece by piece fashion. It has to be tackled head on, with force and power, otherwise the employees will sluff it off as ‘same old, same old, different day’.
The process has to be on going and steady. Those that don’t buy into the culture, both management and rank and file must be dealt with and either won over to the culture or dismissed.
I am sure that the FRA looks at lot of things that simply are not going to happen (well, at least not within the next few decades). Besides, it took the railroads ages to get the engineer out of the cab and onto the ground as a Radio Controlled Operator, they may not want to put him or her back in the cab…
I am not sure what you meant by this - do you mean when positioning the pole? Because in the days of ubiquitious poling pockets, crewman did not have to manually hold the pole while the locomotive pushed the freight cars, only when initially position the pole in the pocket (which I admit things could go wrong during that short opertion), as mentioned in this link
[quote]
The “pushpole” was carried into diagonal place by two men and, at their signal, the locomotive moved ahead until the “pushpole” was secure in the “pol
BaltACD and Zardoz bring different approaches to the question. Which is “right”? The answer is probably “it depends”.
A firm, consistent approach is key, but buy in by those whose “habits” are going to have to change is equally important.
As the saying goes, “Change is not painful, resistance to change is painful”
It is going to take longer than you think it will. And even then, you will never win them all over. Those become the ones you have to remove. The trick is identifying them soon enough that they don’t get someone else hurt and removing them without alienating everyone else.
Haven’t seen many managers who can do that well all the time. The one method I have used that has yielded some good results was to shift to a self interest basis. Ask questions something like this–
“What would you do if you saw a fellow worker doing something that you knew was going to get YOU hurt? Would you say something? When?”
Interesting topic, thanks to the OP for starting it.
Now it sounds like you are talking about someone manually holding a pole between the engine and a freight car on an adjacent track. Now that’s just dangerous and frankly dumb.
If a poling car is used, the procedure should be much safer, and as long as the brakes on the car are lightly applied when it is “poled”, it should work just fine.
Now a flying drop or “Dutch drop” is dangerous and it’s very good that it is a prohibited practice. A little thinking ahead would make the drop unnecessary, so if one “has” to be used, it’s almost certainly because there was an earlier mess-up in the train consist made either by the yardmaster or by the engineer depending on the location of the spur and availability of runarounds…
No, the production poling I mentioned was done with a poling car. I never meant to suggest that the pole was manually held like later day poling. A good reference on production poling is The American Frieight Car by John White.
What’s made dropping cars riskier is the reduction in the size of crews. It’s hard for a single person (conductor/foreman only) crew to do it. (It can be done although I wouldn’t have ever tried it. I don’t think I could’ve done it.) Even with a helper, the risk is increased if the hand brake isn’t on the end where the car is going to be cut off. Now it’s all moot, since it’s banned on our company. Oh, train make-up is not the reason you would be dropping cars. It’s either because the crew doesn’t want to run around the train or it’s not possible to do so.
We are allowed where specified by local instructions (I don’t believe anywhere on my territory allows it though.) to use a “gravity drop.” You tie down the car(s), run the engine by the switch, line it and then get on the car, release the brake and ride it into the track.
The problem with getting on or off moving equipment is that there are some places where it isn’t safe to do so. When I first hired out, only yardmen could get on or off moving equipment. Road crews couldn’t, even when their train was working in a yard. It went through a few changes, often location specific, until it was finally banned. I think it just got easier to ban it all, then to try to allow it here but not there.
I’ve worked at places where gravity drops were allowed. Learned more about railcars doing one of them then you can by reading15 rule books. Oh well. It’s what they want, it’s what they get.
Here is an exceptionally well done video showing a drop just after the beginning. They drop their whole train with pleasure. There is quite a bit of hustle in their switching with nothing wasted.
I have seen drops executed only twice, and they showed a mastery of perfect timing by all involved. This also means that it doesn’t take much for things to go wrong and put something on the ground, which is why it was always discouraged if not banned.
The main problem with a drop is that you have to get the cars rolling fast enough to completely clear the switch. If they stall, the engine is blocked from getting a hold of them again. It might require a little poling to get out of that problem. But if you get the cars rolling too fast, it is hard for the engine to pull away from them to give room to throw the switch. If the engine is too close to the cars when they pass over the switch, a person might get anxious and throw the switch before the last wheels of the engine have cleared the points; or not get the switch completely thrown before the first wheels of the cars hit the points.
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. If you want complete safety, stop everything and never move. Moving = kinetic energy which is what can break people and things. No moving = no energy = nothing breaks.
The place I work had begun to think that safety was a product, perhaps THE product. They are slowly moving away from that point of view.
The best way to enhance safety is to minimized the amount of activity and motion needed to get a shipment from A to B.
I think the real problem is that you are relying on 100% smooth reliability of the switch mechanism and handbrake. If the switchstand hangs up mid-throw or the handbrake fulcrum or chain hang up while trying to apply the handbrake while in motion, you are in deep doo-doo. There is no “plan B”. - and the consequences can be rather severe.
I saw such a drop done years ago on the C&O in MI. Given the likely origination of the local the was dropping the car, I would presume that this was a common practice for that particular siding.
“Work smarter, not harder.”
I would opine that some folks treat such switching as a card game - working with the cards as they are dealt, rather than a chess game, where you’re thinking several moves ahead.
Of course, sometimes all the thinking in the world won’t change things - in order to change how they switched cars on the aforementioned siding, either a southbound train (originating in Flint or Saginaw, necessitating taking the car there first) would have to make the drop, or the local would have to take the car three miles further up the line and run around it, then come back and spot it.
I don’t know where you guys get your nomenclature, but, this is not a “Drop”. This is a “Swing”. Dropping cars is all done by gravity and requires an incline to get the car moving. Swinging cars requires power pulling to get the cars moving and then pull away from them. And, “Kicking” cars is just giving them a shove, pulling the pin and letting them go.
I’d rather drop, kick & swing cars than eat chicken on Sunday!
