One-Man Crew Plan Raises Terror Fears

Trains Magazine General Discussion
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Front page in the Kansas City Star for Sunday, 25 June 2006.
Features and article by Judy l. Thomas, with a photo of BNSF 5133 at speed, framed by a light on a crossing arm. Full page with graphics on p.8
Link to article:
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/14896883.htm

The major portion of the article is a replay of the old theme:’ Terror Rides the Rails.’ alog with appropriate scenarios mentioned and credited to officials designed to scare the pants off those that do not know or understand the Industry:
"The big fear is that terrorists could take over a train and turn those tankers into weapons of mass destruction. A terrorist attack on just one chlorine car passing through Washington, D.C., could kill 100,000 in just 20 minutes, a scientist for the Naval Research Laboratory told officials in 2004.

Such concerns aren’t unfounded. Between 1998 and 2003, trains, depots, ticket stations and rail bridges were the targets of about 180 terrorist attacks worldwide, according to the Rand Corp., a consulting firm that advises U.S. government agencies. Those attacks resulted in more than 400 deaths and thousands of injuries.

Indeed, terrorists may focus even more attention on rail targets. A new book excerpted last week in Time magazine describes an alleged plot by al-Qaida terrorists in 2003 to kill thousands of commuters by releasing cyanide gas in New York subways.

Last July, a series of suicide bombings on three commuter trains and a bus in London killed 56 people and injured 700. Bombings on the rail system in Madrid killed 192 and injured more than 2,000 in March 2004.

But it’s not just terrorists who are a concern to critics of the single-person crew proposal. Derailments and train wrecks can release toxic chemicals, as well.

#61560; Last year in the United States, 36 accidents forced the evacuations of 7,636 people, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. Chlorine gas rel

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We have seen this all before and discussed it all here in the forum.

Sooner or later the deep pocketed railroads and their powerful lobbing arm will win the single man crew debate. It is just a matter of time. They can throw more money into a congressman’s pocket than we can dream of.

That article points out so many things that are true. Railyards need more security. Just last night I saw a car that looked “lost” driving around in our yard. We never know who these people are. They come and go at will. There are signs up that warm people of remote controlled locos, and other signs that read NO Trespassing.

There are so many concerns from railroad workers. But by the time we call the Special Agent and they get where they are needed the people have vanished.

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I agree with you, absolutely, but there are always new folks coming onto the Forum and with the way the realities are in our world today, it does some good to keep topics such as this on the front burner…As I had prefaced my remarks, “…another take on the old theme of Terror rides the Rails.” Haz-Mat is a reality of todays business world, gasoline in tankers in traffic every day on our roads and tankers and cars with all sorts of chemicals in transit by rail and also by road are facts of life.
The major effect of the attacks on 9/11 was that as Americans, we were robbed of our way of life, and its freedom.

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#60609 Whats with the numbers?

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Hugh:
The numbers, I think compare to ID numbers for links to those specific items, such as thoser that appear at the end of a URL. At least that is what I suspect. They came with the copy I made from the newspaper’s web site.
As was previously mentioned, to some on the Forum this might be old hat, but to others not so exposed on a daily basis to “our daily press reporting style” I thought the article might be of some interest. Such as the various Forum readers, as yourself and the others “across the pond.”
Sometimes, the media is able to not let facts obscure a good story, so they recycle and obsfuscate details [my opinion of some reporters].

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I swear, if there was ever a bad side to railroading this is it! A one person crew? Come on now! It should be known from this day on throughout the ranks of railfans, railroaders and the general public alike that if this country goes to one person crews, NO RAILROAD ANYWHERE ANYTIME CAN SAY AGAIN… " Safety First! " This is ludicrous! the epitomy of stupidity! Infact railroads should be federaly forced into using cabooses again. I have personally seen with my own two eyes on the NS in Manassas Va the problem first hand. On the way into Manassas from the west a coupler was broken. well thats single track area. luckily the 2nd loco in line up of 3 had a recorder on it. problem was here was all these NS people standing around trying to break into the cabinet that housed it. Now I know as fellow railfans your laughing at this because it did truly resemble a 3 stooges routine except there was more like half dozen of them. come to find out the engineer was a newbie! Can you believe this BULL??? So there i was completely familiar with the locomotives, the railroad, the situation and knew i had the proper tools to lend a hand, and the only one NOT on the clock. to this day i dont feel bad at all that i didnt help. all those times i offered to “help” them (railroads) by offering my services and was, well not harrassed about it but kindly pushed aside. And ya know, im really tired of it. they honestly think we (railfans) would be a safety risk. the line was backed up now because of the time lost in changing the coupler and short on crew onboard during incident in middle of nowhere. plus now this debochery when train pulled into Manassas. I gotta ask, are railroads and their executives really THAT STUPID? the ones i have met, well, they truely have no clue. i bet the young engineer/conductor/brakeman (whichever he was supposed to be at that moment) got reemed aswell.
ya know, this is my country, i was born here. these are my railroads, they are what truely made this country great! and i love trains and railro

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One man train crews - BAD IDEA!!! Imagine sitting a a siding at 2:00 am in a less than desirable neighborhood full of crack heads, criminals, juvenile gangs and other trouble makers. You’d be more vulnerable than an all night clerk at a Circle K convenience store. You’d *** well better know if I was put in that position I’d be packing some heat.

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The coke snorting bean counters think that one man crews are such a good idea that they are willint to further compromise the safety of the rails, which has already been compromised to the breaking point by the rise in deferred maintenance on the railroads nationwide. Who is running the nations railroads, a bunch of freshly minted MBAs high on cocaine and who knows what else? As for the remotely controlled locomotives being used in a number of switching yards, these should not be allowed to lock couplers with rail cars containing such dangerous commodities as LP Gas, Sulphuric Acid, Chlorine, and t he like. If the railroads MUST use the remote controlled switchers, they should keep the manual controls in the cab so that they can be operated manually by an engineer who knows what he is doing. In this climate of terrorism, this is no time to t urn the art and profession of railroading over to a bunch of mindless robots and yet, with the remote controlled switch engines, that is what is happening. It does not take much imagination to picture what can happen if a group of terrorists were to get control of one of these radio controlled locos and pack the cab full of explosives and run it into a target. The scenario would be far worse than 9/11/ . Is that what the top railroad execs want?

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Interesting responses, One man crews might look good when stacked by themselves against the bottom line, but practically speaking, they are going to be a real drag on the system, when put up to compliance with rules (GCOR) that was written for crews of larger size, walking a train length in some places might be a practical impossibility, and “packing” might give an individual crewman a sense of protection but what does it do to a co worker who, not knowing all the details miagt walk up on that armed employee, would really get ugly real fast, in particular in a ‘rough’ are.
Are the rules going to require an engineer[single crewman] to diagnose and repair problems and get the train back rolling? I think that delays enroute will kill fluidity of the line, and create more need for more crafts to be placed in locations to cover cronic trouble spots, like a ‘flying squad’ to race to locations of stopped equipment, and make repairs, or at the very least to send two locomotives out in place of one, to be a backup for breakdowns
One man crews might look good on paper, but the headachs will far outweigh the benefits…

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I dont care what the hell the RTC says, Im NOT walking the train at night in Chicago. What happens when there is no crewmemebr in the loco?

Most importantly, WHY DO WE TELL EVERYBODY HOW MANY PEOPLE WE CAN KILL BY DOING SOMETHING??? WHY GIVE THEM IDEA’S???

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Hello, I am new, this is my first post. I am a Licensed Electronics Tech for BNSF. I work on equipment petaining to positive train control. I am not here to take sides, but I do want to clarify one thing here. Positive Train Control will make it much more difficult for a terrorist to steal a train if not impossible. This system uses GPS technology along with other radio systems and existing wayside systems to monitor where a train is, it’s speed etc and the system constantly compares this to where the train should be, and how fast it should be going at a given time. IF a terrorist or engineer for that matter would ever move a train when it should not be moving, or tried to hijack a train and tell the engineer to exceed speed limits for example…then the PTC system automatically shuts down the train…and at the same time informs the dispatcher of all of this…In real time. BNSF has been using this system on a trial basis between Beardstown, IL and Centralia, IL successully for a long period of time now. It has stopped or slowed a train EVERY time it should have been stopped or slowed and not once did it stop or slow or delay a train that should not have been. BNSF, from what I understand will probably begin implementing this system more and more in the near future…again, I don’t know what to think about crew sizes etc…all I know is that it’s my job to understand what this stuff is, what it does and how to fix it. If any of you have questions, I’d be happy to try and answer them. THANKS.

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I’m actually amazed that someone hasn’t started lobbying to bring back cabooses for security. Maybe the Department of Homeland Security could put a couple of guys back there to watch the train. I wouldn’t be surprised if the DC city council tried to require armed guards on all the trains passing through the district.

I think I am more concerned about the trucks full of propane, gasoline, and other chemicals which would be easier to get to, can disappear for a while, blend into normal trafffic, and be deployed by the badguys at much more critical or high value targets. I still remember a truck full of explosives was stolen from a construction site north of Atlanta before the Olympics. They still haven’t found that one.

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[#welcome] Zerovoltz,
Congratulations! On your first post. Feel free to join the conversations, and surely, your expertise on the electronic aspects of Positive Train Control will be appreciated by most everybody here, and anything else you want to add comments on.

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Although I dont agree with the thought of one man crews, the only terror is in the minds of those union members who stand to lose their jobs.

This is more about jobs than the unions concern for the safety of the public.

Simcox

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I know very little about what the job of being an engineer entails, and again, I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion on weather or not a 1 man crew is a good idea or not, but history tells me that technology eventually causes changes in the number of employees a company needs to operate. I will use PUNCH CARD Technology as an example…when those things burst on the scene, IBM needed alot of people to run punch card machines, and people to maintain them and build them…several colleges even offered degrees in punch card operations…and then one day, the computer was able to do the job of the punch card machine and do it with fewer people, at a cheaper price…this caused a good number of people in the punch card industry to lose thier jobs…and that is sad, but in a capitalist system, business can’t keep people employed just so they can have a job…business’s aren’t in business to employ as many people as they can, they are in business to make money. If IBM and others had kept the punchcard systems they had around, then they would have gone out of business altogether, and therefore even more people would have lost their jobs, alot of retirees portfolios would have sunk etc etc. So, basically, it is a sad but nescesary thing sometimes for people to lose their jobs because technology changes things…let me reiterate…I DONT have an opinion on crew sizes…I am also in a union and I am all for anyone or any group getting the best deal they can…so I understand why this is a contentious issue to the engineers union. Hopefully it will all work out.

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Well, I’m confident that one person crews will work just fine in certain applications. They already do. And if the unions take care of their members as they should, nobody will loose their job.

Now that I’ve enraged several of you, let me ask a very real question. What is wrong with a one person crew in the following circumstance.

The Sioux City area has two major meat packers. (and some smaller ones.) Tyson has a facility near Sioux City that has the capacity to slaughter 6,000 cattle per day. The John Morrell division of Smithfield has a large hog plant in Souix City. I don’t have the production figures for that plant…

But, between the two facilities a good estimate would be at least 120 truckloads of fresh beef and pork leaving Sioux City each workday. That would be a truckload outbound every 12 minutes. The railroads have virtually none of this high volume, long haul business. (they might catch a frozen export load every now and then)

Now thiis meat goes all over, but it is mostly moving to population centers a long way from Sioux City. Places such as New York, Boston, Philladelphia, Los Angeles, etc. Because of this diversity of destinations, the CN can’t possibly run a conventional double stack meat train with reefer containers out of Sioux City; there’s one big origin, but numerous destinations. If it were to successfully penitrate this market, the CN would have to drive a hot intermodal train into Chicago and make connections to the NS and CSX trains leaving for Boston, New York, etc.

What would be the operating problems resulting from a small (say, 40 or so cotainers/trailers) intermodal