So I heard on the news the Obama Administration is going to try and take up this issue via regulation before they leave office. Believe it or not I am in favor of the two person crew minimum based on my past Army experience with moving heavy equipment with limited visibility. It is extremely dangerous in my view to do so with only one person and we saw one disaster already with a short line in Canada with a tank train in which the train rolled away and wiped out a whole town. Army requires two people to move a armored vehicle on post in built up or bivowac areas one of the persons has to be on the ground in front guiding the driver…that comes from years of experience where people got ran over from tanks in their sleeping bags while resting in their tents or on the open ground.
Same deal when loading armored vehicles on trains, min of two people required. You just need the second pair of eyes as well as oversight sometimes. So I hope they keep the crews at two people. Seriously doubt automation is at the point where the second person is no longer needed. I think the railroads are pushing the issue much too early and technology will not be able to make up for the missing second crew member.
I don’t think the rails are “pushing” one-man so much as resisting having two-man set in Washington stone that will be next to impossible, politically, to relax in the future.
I do not believe that the Lac Megantic wreck is evidence of inadequacy of one-person crews. It was caused by a failure to follow the rules of train securement. The same thing may have just as likely happened if there were five people in the crew.
Yes those in Australia and South Africa are in sparsely populated areas but the argument presented in the opening post had nothing to do with population density, just the prevention of a locomotive running over someone in their sleeping bag (LOL).
“Pushing” --My thought is that the operative word here is ‘pushing’. I would suspect that the motivations from the railroad side would be the ‘beancounters’ who would be looking at the cost-benefit analysis…ie: ‘Cheaper is better’ from their standpoint.
On the Union side, maybe they might view the situation as a reduction in dues payers /their bargaining power(?).
On the Regulators side(?) who knows(?) Could be anything from the writing of a new regulation, to the enforcement of the regulation (a need to add more enforcement(?).
From the actual employees sude: could be the fact that another pair of eyes can be a ‘good thing’, another pair of hands, similarly(?). I have driven both as a single operator, and as half of a ‘team’. Simply, having another person along is a detrement to boredom, and an ability to get some relief when to the point of one being ‘over-tired’, can be helpful. Not to mention another point of view when faced with a problematic situation.
In the case of railroad employees (T&E) having to ‘hold’ at some point; for possibly hours while ‘monitoring’ radio traffic for some instructions, could be a factor. Particularly, if a single employee should ‘nod-off’ while waiting for possibly an extended period of time(?). Potentially, bad things can happen.
I know that many short line operators do run single person engine crews. The areas I am familiar with also seem to have another ‘crewman’ in as company vehicle, operating in conj
The length and weight of a train, while a factor, isn’t a huge one in the debate. Depending on where you are running, a long and heavy train can be easier to operate.
I disagree, had there been a second person there as oversight, likely that accident would not have happened. I have seen accidents repeatedly happen in the Army with heavy equipment where only one person was allowed to perform a task with nobody checking. I had a crew member myself tighten the lug nuts on a front sprocket wheel of an armored vehicle, which I drove for about 80 miles on German roads then paused and did a vehicle check while I was paused…only half the lug nuts remained in that same sprocket wheel. Someone incorrectly told the idiot tightening the lug nuts that if he stood on the wrench they would be torgued to his body weight so the guy never used a torgue wrench as he should have. Could have rolled the armored vehicle if that sprocket wheel came off and cost me my life (crushed me in the rollover) but thankfully it was caught due to my checking the vehicle when I could after so many miles operation. Second pair of eyes should have been in play during maintenence.
Who was told … by someone else at the RTC … to leave the sick unit running, and shut down everything else. And then was told not to return to the train a few minutes later. Then someone else, in the fire crew, shut the engine down without applying the automatic brake, and asked a trackworker with no knowledge of locomotives rather than the engineer (right there at the Auberge!) or anyone at the RTC if that was OK. Then you have a safety device bleeding off just the right amount of air not to release the automatic brakes.
Some of the cause was “single-man crewing” - but nowhere near enough to cause the accident. The only effective aspect would be whether Tom Harding was too tired to set more ‘brakes’, or was told to quit setting brakes too soon when another crewmember could have been assisting in putting them on … and since he thought ‘seven brakes’ (did he think each locomotive counted as a ‘full’ braking unit? that was never quite clear to me in the TSB material) was adequate, why would two people not think the same? Likewise, while it’s possible that a second person would question Farnham’s decision to leave the deflicted unit running and shut down the good ones, I saw nothing in the report that indicated that two crewmembers would be ordered to do anything other than just what Harding alone was.
There are many reasons not to use single-man crews; Lac Megantic is not really a particularly serviceable one.
It blows my mind that a train would be allowed to be parked with the automatic released - granted you should never rely on air to hold anything, and you should always test your handbrakes thoroughly, but still… But apparently that was how it was supposed to be done (from what I read).
Just like many disasters - it was the culmulation of stupid decisions that caused the major incident.
I don’t know whether not applying the automatic was a violation in the procedure, even though it might have prevented the catastrophe. I don’t recall the TSB report saying it was a violation. I assumed that since securement must not rely on air brakes, the choice of whether to apply the automatic was moot.
So I concluded that the choice to leave the automatic released was okay, but setting insuficient hand brakes and relying on the independent brakes to hold the train was the fatal error, and a clear violation of the securment rules. Oddly, the engineer did perform a push-pull test, but he did that with the independent brakes applied.
The engineer demonstrated a lack of knowledge or lazy carelessness in the way he attempted to secure his train. Depending on the comunications, some of this carelessness and ignorance may have been affirmed by the engineer’s supervisors as well.
Could an additional crew person have made a difference? Sure. He may have understood and been willing to abide by the proper procedure. Or he may have gone along with the engineer in his lax performance. A second person may have actually reinforced the lax attitude of the first person, thus giving confidence to the improper procedure. It would be like peer pressure reinforcing bad behavior.
There is no certain point at which “extra eyes” would have prevented this. Therefore adding extra people to
happened with two men in the cab. Ran through multiple signals and still went into the water. Did they both fall asleep? I believe that the second set of eyes may be a false sense of security. The systems need to be as idiot proof as possible but anything made and/or operated by man can fail. We have to accept some risk and be aware of it.
When
I have always gotten a laugh out of highway signs that say “TRAVEL AT YOUR OWN RISK” because since when don’t you travel at your own risk? When you drive on the highway, you assume no one will drive the wrong way on a divided highway but it happens. Yesterday on I88 in Naperville is just the latest. Who would expect an airliner to run out of fuel but the plane carrying the soccor team that crashed did. It becomes very easy to become a fatalist. I am a fotunate man who had his wife fall asleep at the wheel on I65 doing 70 mph and we both walked away from the crash. Just wasn’t our day but could have been so much worse. Good airbags, car design, no traffic and helpful people came to assist. Car was totaled. I was dozing and she succumbed to the boredum of the highway.
Too Many Soldiers Getting Run Over by Tanks, Report Says
WASHINGTON (AP) –The Army, alarmed by the number of its soldiers who are being run over in their sleep by tanks and other vehicles, has launched a new safety campaign and demanded stricter disciplinary action by officers against troops who ignore safety guidelines.
‘‘Getting run over by a tactical vehicle is not and should not be something soldiers expect to happen - especially when they are sleeping. But happen it does - and too often,’’ according to a report appearing in Countermeasure, an Army safety publication.
The report said that from March 25, 1984 to Oct. 28, 1986, 22 sleeping soldiers were run over in 19 separate accidents during field training exercises.
‘‘Seven of the soldiers died,’’ the report said. ‘‘Eight of the accidents involved tracked vehicles; the other 11 involved wheeled vehicles. In three of the accidents, two soldiers were run over.’’
The report concluded that most of the accidents occurred for two reasons - soldiers went to sleep in areas where they shouldn’t have, and vehicle drivers failed to send out crew members as walking guides to spot sleeping soldiers.
It found that 74 combat vehicles had been involved in accidents over the past three years because of improper ‘‘ground guiding.’’ Those accidents resulted in 71 injuries and 12 fataliti
You had to go back to 1958 to find an example? That should tell you something. Of course accident investigations back then were not as carefully examined either because we did not have the technology nor the medical knowledge we do today.