To everyone saying “It won’t work”, “It won’t be safe”, “It won’t be efficient”, etc.
One person crews do work, they are safe and they are very efficient. Besides being a very normal thing in other countries, the Indiana Rail Road has operated with one person crews for years. And they operate everything up to, and including, unit coal trains with one person crews.
It’s been a very successful operation in its 20 years of existance - turning a decrepit ex-ICG line running south and west from Indianapolis into a raging success. The Indiana recently expanded by acquiring the CP operation between Chicago and Louisville. They aren’t exactly a ‘short line’.
Now the Indiana doesn’t have high traffic density and that mitigates some of the potential drawbacks to one person operation. But given the right set of circumstances, in the right situatiions, one person crews will be just as effective on the UP as they have been on the Indiana.
It seems the unions should be negotiating the conditions and situations where one person crews may be used. They could protect their members by seeing that there were no layoffs due to one person crews, for example. But no. The unions don’t even want the issue on the barganing table.
It is a proven fact that one person crews can operate some trains in a safe, efficient manner. For the unions to try to block the idea from even being on the table is a return to the days when they insisted on diesel locomotive “firemen”.
I agree with you that the whole idea of a one-person crew is totally stupid and can be extremely dangerous. For example, what if the engineer should have a heart attack or something like that? If this plan goes through, like the railroads want, then there’ll be no conductors to help them. Or better yet, what if there’s a derailment and the engineer gets killed, who’s going to inform their families? This whole idea is full of baloney and I think the railroads, if this plan goes through, will rue that day very much.
While I agree it is feasible I doubt it is really practical. It has been feasible since they put stokers on steam engines but the challenges of the application would not have been pretty.
Most of the trips I make over the road could certainly be done solo but how lonely and unfulfilling they would turn out to be. I can think of dozens of miles on my route where the rover/utility employee in a pick up is not going to get to my train at all. Then you run into the issue of who is going to train the next generation of employee. The railroads found out about that after they eliminated the fireman’s position. Sure, engineers’ training programs have been implemented and they turn out qualified engineers but some of the polish has been lost. I listened to a dispatcher a couple of nights ago trying to talk a crew through a set of double crossovers with instructions to handline some of them. In frustration, he finally told them to just sit still and let the signal maintainer come out rather than risk the crew running through the switches. Pretty basic stuff but obviously no real comprehension on the train of what needed to be done.
I am not looking foreward to implementation of one person operation. The railroads will not be nearly as well prepared for it as they promise to be. You always hear from the railroad about how two, three, four or five employees dropped the ball and the accident happened inspite of the full crew. You never hear of the times where the second employee reminded the other of an upcoming event and saved an accident or injury from happening. Since no metal was bent those events are not recorded. Socialogically one person crews will make railroaders even more alienated from the rest of the population than the
arbfbe – I’m not much looking forward to it either. But since the U.S. is already rife with truck drivers making very poor wages (factoring their time away from home), working long, solitary shifts, and achieving a sufficient level of safety to satisfy the voters, it’s hard to see how railroads aren’t going to follow the same route, complete with all the problems that will ensue. It will indeed make the job of engineer even less appealing, but as long as the public continues to tolerate a winner-take-all economic system there will be enough takers to make it feasible.
…Is the “raging success” of said railroad due to one man crews…just eliminating one person’s benefits in a train crew…?
I’m not a railroader but for the operation of trains I believe people would still feel a bit more comfortable with at least two man crews operating the train passing through…
Yes, the success has a great deal to do with one-man crews. Cost margins are very thin on any business that can move by rail or by truck.
Perhaps the public would care about two-man crews vs. one. Since they don’t care about Amtrak and commuter trains having just one man in the cab, I doubt that they’ll get too spun up about freight trains.
…Most likely the public doesn’t have any idea what the situation is in an Amtrak or commuter cab…A freight train is not just a straight through operation most of the time. More is required to “man handle” the freight operation with all the set outs, and various operations.
Management, including railroad management has a bad habit of hitching their cart to a horse and riding that horse into the ground. If eliminating one person on a five person crew, i.e. the fireman, then eliminating another must be a good idea as well. Low and behold, eliminating the fireman saved the railroads some money and improved the bottom line. Eliminating the rear brakeman saved some money and improved the bottom line. So let’s eliminate the other brakeman and save some money. But did it improve the bottom line? Likely not, certainly not as much as eliminating the first two jobs. Well, if that did not improve the bottom line as much what did we do wrong? Obviously, based upon past experience, we did not eliminate ENOUGH jobs. So they proceed to eliminate the conductor’s job as well since, in their mind, that will improve the bottom line. The will eliminate jobs until it no longer makes any sense and beyond that. The will ride that horse right into the dirt.
Need proof? Look at the railroads in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s. Eliminating “excess” capacity was the horse to profitability. They eliminated “excess” capacity to the point that when business did pick up they could not handle the volume any more. Imagine how much profitability could improve if the railroads were not dogcatching so many trains since all that earlier “excess” capacity had been eliminated. They will do the same with employment levels.
In June 1977 Union Pacific served a Railway Labor Act “Section 6” to the United Transportation Union U.P. Eastern District General Committee to establish crew consist manning levels along the lines of what The Milwaukee Road achieved a year or two earlier. Generally this change involved dropping one brakeman from through freights, work trains, and locals plus eliminating one must-fill yard helper postion from switch engines.
It took the Railroad 7-years to reach the Agreement and another 8-years before it was fully implemented, when, on February 1, 1992, all brakemen were eliminated from through freight operations and the second brakeman/yard helper positions were dropped altogether. But do remember this: the Carrier always has retained the right to fill any job they want, at any time they want, with a “standard crew,” e.g., a conductor and two brakemen or a yard foreman/footboard yardmaster and two yard helpers.
Congress passed the Staggers Act in 1980, legislation which largely deregulated freight tariffs but also made cartel pricing sanctioned by the Interstate Commerce Commission illegal. For the first time since the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the railroads had to compete on price as well as service. It took a while before the railroads fully understood and strategically implemented their newly found pricing incentives, but when they did it led to a downward pricing spiral.
The implementation of sophisticated information technology eliminated the necessity of mindlessly transferring information from one piece of paper to another resulting in the severe downsizing of the clerical ranks. Better roadway machinery, better track maintenance techniques,
RRs propose win-win-tie. This is the biggest bunch of baloney ever to be thought up. I sure the Human Resource person who came up with this got what was coming to them. Everytime someone in a management position starting espousing this garbage, I’d draw up. It is the entre to your getting the shaft, the only question is how BIG it is and how Deep are they going to bury it in you.
One man crews may play well in the board room, and in the shortline arena; but out there on the BIG Roads it will translate to lost time, lost productivity, increased terminal dwell time, and ultimately big money. They[ RR employers] will need to decide if they are going to have engineers who are lawyers, or lawyers who are engineers. One man crews and the situations they create will need plenty of explanations!
Gabe here’s your chance to get a Railroad JOB![swg][swg]
I know this has been discussed in the past, and as always I will state my opinion that to have one person on something as large and powerful as a freight train is a terrible idea. At least outside of yard duties. It just doesn’t make sense and it’s a lousy way to get people to lose their jobs too.
The direct capital investment represented by a “railroad train” is between $14 million and $22 million. The cost of a two man crew through the entire cycle time of a trip represents .03% – three one hundredths of a per cent – of the capital investment in the train. The cost savings would represent only .015% of the total direct capital investment in the train.
Few industries would begrudge that level of “human investment” to protect the capital investment.
This argument doesn’t make sense. Wouldn’t the railroad be reducing the risk of having to stop a train for a medial emergency since there is only one person who can have a heart attack rather than two? And wouldn’t they have less families to notify in the event of an accident? Does the conducter really drive over to the engineer’s house to tell his family he was killed in an accident?
With more double track mains this actually sounds like a more feasible action. More ability to pass around the problem. The breakdown is still going to be there with one or 2 people on the train. With more computer operation and more computer monitoring, this seems like an inevitable event. Cell phone coverage is getting better all the time. I am not saying it is perfect, but would the engineer need to “radio” the dispatcher when he could just call him. Railroads could install cell towers (maybe get some revenue out of them. Don’t tell UP!) for low coverage areas.
I doubt one person crews would be used on locals with a lot of switching. There are still cabooses out there for some activities.
Not saying it wouldn’t be boring. Tough to go all that way with one person. Still, other industries manage.
The terrorism argument is a joke though. Other than armed guards, who still could not stop a vehicle attack, a rocket, or sabatoge to the tracks, you cannot secure the load 100%.
I’m gonna get more than one “train cycle” out of my investment, no? Assuming a cycle is 2 days and investment life is 10 years, then 0.03% 36510/2 = 54%
Every industry I can think of has spent capital to replace labor. Name one that hasn’t. Even the USPS…
Why, the tail brakeman would have to run up and become an engineer, wouldn’t he? Field promotion and all…a good day for him. It wouldn’t take more than about 10 minutes of walking up a coal train to effect it, either. Of course, what if he dies of a heart attack over the excitement. Hooo, now we have a real problem. Maybe we need three man crews, you know, just in case…?
I’ve been in worse, but that’s not the point. You and I aren’t the point. The point is that if someone wants better safety, there’s better ways to do it than insist on two men in the cab and resist installation of authority-violation systems that already exist, and already work. And the economics are creating immense pressure that we aren’t going to stop.
This may say more about specialized roles that anything, where unions insist on one person one job, and the engineer couldn’t figure out what had to be done. If you have a more encompassing approach to train operation in one well-rounded individual, you would not have the incident you report above.