Certainly not fail-safe.
But without shove lights, the yard won’t be asking a RCO guy to shove blind. I mean there’s the obvious times a railroader will shove blind… like when he’s throwing 12 cars into a 20 car track that’s empty… but even now with just one man on the ground they want you ALWAYS to protect the shoves. Just means a lot of walking back and forth from the bottom, which takes long yeah.
And that means shippers and receivers will be scramming about their shipments.No wonder why a car can have long terminal dwell time and may end up with flat wheels in the process…
Seems to me the railroads should rethink their stand on one man yard crews and go back to being a transportation system that moves freight.
I wouldn’t really say car dwell is too bad… at least not where I work. Granted it’s not too hard to keep car dwell low in Charlotte considering our yard probably holds ~140 cars at best, if I had to guess. We don’t have RCO here either, though.