Look at all the fall protection devices where cars or locomotives have to be loaded or serviced from above. Elaborate beams and trolley systems are in place with the worker wearing fall protection harnesses attached to same.
This was unheard of even fifteen or-so years ago.
Regards, Ed
Since you aren’t familiar with me and I don’t visit this part of the forum much, I’ll explain the rationale behind my “opinion”, and give some background on myself. (I had read the text of the orders that were subsequently linked, but chose not to add the links to my post)
I work for Canadian National as a conductor and locomotive engineer, depending on where my seniority puts me at any given time. I’ve run trains on some lines with very steep grades.
The timetable footnotes for those lines still contain a requirement for retainers to be used when descending the grades, unless the lead locomotive is equipped with a functioning pressure-maintaining automatic brake valve (which is pretty much every locomotive these days). Dynamic braking was not absolutely required on these lines until about 2008 (see below).
CN continued ordering new road locomotives without DB until the early 1980s (no DB on the HR-616’s), and ordered a small minority of their previous road units with it (some SD40’s and SD40-2W’s). These units were supposed to be assigned to unit trains on the steeply graded lines I mentioned, but this did not always happen and trains would sometimes operate there without DB right up until about 2008, when our operating rules were changed in the aftermath of a fatal runaway on the former BC Rail line north of Lillooet.
We have one train that still requires retainers on each trip, the only such remaining case on CN’s western Canada lines. But they are not for our train handling purposes, rather they are used so the customer to load this unit train on a 2.4% grade by themselves without any locomotives attached.