Two‐Person Train Crew Rule
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A rare bit of good sense coming out of government.
A LOT of bad stuff can go on, out on the rail. Illness, exhaustion...that is, falling asleep. It happens. The way the workday is set up for railroaders..."Road" crews are on-call, 24/7, and when called are liable for work up to twelve hours. Since most railroad contracts stipulate pay by the job, not the hour or mile...railroad management will try to get all the for-free out of them.
When I started with Conrail, running Cleveland-Columbus, Cleveland-Buffalo...if all went well, a typical day would go by in 7-9 hours. Conrail's people liked that - because the quicker you were off the train, the quicker you were legally rested and able to take the next job. What that meant for management was, fewer crews on the roster - basically, lower cost-per-terminal, less medical-insurance cost, less pension liability over time.
Plus, a crew not worked to exhaustion was less likely to make a fatigue-induced error.
That's enlightened management. It's gone, now...the five major railroads now...none of them see it that way. CSX was one of the worst, when I was with them - actually holding trains outside of Buffalo-Frontier or Collinwood Yard, until the crew was close to "outlawing" (running out of legal hours). CSX called it "Scheduled Railroading" - meaning they weren't scheduling a recrew until 12 hours after you'd taken the train over. And to avoid "dwell time" in the yard (it cut into a Terminal Superintendent's performance rating) they'd stage trains on the main line outside of town.
That's a long-winded backdrop. What I'm saying is, the hours are chaos.
WITH that, there's the health issues of locomotive engineers. Even back 20 years ago, Type II Diabetes was epidemic on our roster. We weren't getting exercise or sleep, and meals at the other-end terminals were often quick stops at the Fallen Arches. True story: An engineer working a yard job at the Chrysler Twinsburg plant, which Conrail serviced...had a heart attack on the job. Yup, Chrysler had an EMT and ambulance on duty, in compliance with the UAW contract. They could do little - inside the loco cab, they couldn't get the best access to him, and he died behind the control stand, there while they tried to treat him.
He weighed 400 pounds, and the Chrysler people had to bring welders in to cut the side of the locomotive cab out, to get his body out with a basket and a fork lift. Grotesque.
So. Putting such people, in such shape, so likely to be tired, or to have blood sugar issues...out there ALONE, is like strapping a time-delay bomb to your dog and tying a tin can to his tail. SOMEWHERE he's going to kill someone, and himself.
I'd experienced this myself. Before I was diagnosed diabetic, I had what I now know as a low-blood sugar event - working a local switch job, with two other crewmembers, both of them on the ground. I wasn't familiar with the job. I was literally lost, for about 20 minutes while working - but somehow I got the idea it could be low blood sugar, had an Atkins bar I'd packed in my grip, and came right back. What of someone who hadn't known enough to realize what was going on?
Rail Link - now gone, sold to BNSF - did it best. BOTH of the two crew members were carded engineers and they were to switch out duties halfway through the work. It was informal and the senior member decided where, or even whether (some new hires were shaky on skills) but it worked.
The ONLY way a single person even COULD work a train, is: First, scheduled work assignments. That would take a lot of logistic prep, and even then, delays and mechanical issues would interfere with that.
SECOND, have road or zone utility men, ready to rush out, if there's a problem on the train - brake pipe separation at car couplings, sticking brakes, need to switch out a bad-order car...anything that involves anything behind the power. There's no way to switch a train when the only man is back at the place a car needs be removed or added. "Remote packs" are used on some yard jobs, but to do that on a mainline switch job, leaves both front and rear unprotected (yards are closed areas and when a remote job is happening there's warning signals) and if anything happens to the employee at the point of the cut or tie - like his falling under the train, and yes, it happens - nobody would be there to help, call for help, get him or remains, out of the area.
To try to work like this is insanity. Amtrak has a single man at the controls now; but the head conductor is in the train, is trained to do more than just punch tickets, and is in radio communication with the engineer at all times. Not quite the same. If an Amtrak engineer falls over dead...if the conductor can't raise him on the radio...there's emergency brake activation inside the coaches.
Frankly, the railroads would be better off doing radio-controlled remote operations from their dispatch desks. There, at least, the person controlling the remote equipment, would be around other people...in event of emergencies, mistakes, malicious actions by angry employees.
Things happen, out there. I was working for the DM&E, a Class II regional, in 2010, in South Dakota. Long-term temporary hire. The winter's first snowstorm hit; I was the conductor on the job (they were short conductors and I was a temp hire) and I had to walk back 40 cars to make a cut to pull some cars out of an ethanol plant. The snow was about 2 feet deep, with drifts that were getting deeper as I got closer to the point of the cut...and my radio quit. I was freezing my jewels off. There was no cellular signals. I wasn't sure I'd be able to get back to the head end to change my radio, even.
What if I were doing that alone with a belt remote pack?
FWIW, I quit a couple weeks later. That was too intense for me...the job isn't worth dying over.
Again I say: Rare good move by the government. They did it to appease the unions, but no matter...it had to be done.
I used to hear that a lot.
Back in the 5-Man-Crew days, old heads could be vicious. The new hire would start out as a "Head Man" - head-end brakeman/flagman, to help the fireman with what work there was forward. Cut the power, test the train brakes, flag a crossing if the signals were out of order.
So...when there was a crew ordered for a coal drag...the conductor often took the Head Man aside. "Wanna ride the caboose today?" Yeah. Yeahyeahyeah.
So the conductor would take his work up front, and leave the rear brakeman and Head Man in the "van."
They were there for a reason. A coal train throws up a LOT of black, gritty dust. Same crap that coats coal miners, would get all over whoever was riding the rear.
THEN...there was the rough ride. EVERY rail car has about four inches of slack - two inches per coupler joint, and with auto racks, there's THREE FEET of in-and-out spring action on spring-loaded drawbars.
If you have fifteen cars, that's nothing. If you have 100 cars...200 inches, in and out. If you have a solid auto-rack unit train...say, 50 of them...that's over 150 feet of slack.
Starting and stopping are rough. It's easy to get the head end moving at six, seven miles an hour before all the slack is pulled out, if not very careful. Going from 0 to 10 mph instantaneously, is a bit rough - railroaders have been literally killed that way; many more have been crippled. Not fake injuries, broken backs and a wheelchair forever.
Those cabooses went away for a reason. I miss them, too - because they were excellent shoving platforms, backing up. A man has to be on the point on a reverse move; and it goes without saying it's better to have a caboose to ride than the side of a boxcar. Back when I started out, many local jobs still had cabooses, and when you had such a job, it was a literal joy.
But those days are gone now.
FWIW...some trains still have three man crews. ALL trains SHOULD have three man crews - it makes it all a lot easier, all the stuff that you have to do, or might need to do. Five men is overkill, but never did we have a job where the third man, even if just a trainee, didn't have something to do, over the course of the run.
