“As trains — many carrying hazardous material — have grown longer, crews should not be getting smaller,” said Eddie Hall, the president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union. He praised the FRA for taking the step President Joe Biden promised. Hall said keeping two people in the cab of a locomotive is crucial now that railroads rely on longer trains that routinely stretch for miles.
……huge fucking train on metal tracks…. Yes please have a backup in case one of them is disabled on the job.
I remember when every train had a caboose and 3-4 man crew, minimum.
Now trains are longer, heavier and carrying toxic materials and companies want a single person in control?
please do this for pedestrian metros to.
Why? Passenger trains and subways are already very safe thanks to remote control & monitoring systems, Deadman’s switches etc. Many urban rail sstems don’t use drivers at all! Is there a subway accident from the past 20 years that could have been prevented with an extra driver?
when the blue line in my city went off the rails folks were leaving while the engineer was communicating with central and they barely got the electric rail deactivated. They used to have a conductor who would do that people management. Also back in the day when we had conductors if you were taking the train at a sketchy hour you could make it a point to ride in the car with the conductor who is openly in a train car as opposed to the engineer who is in a locked part of the front of the train and has no visibility into the train but the cameras. Why the F can’t we just use more humans and keep a better quality of life in our processes.
Oh, I forgot about the quality of US infrastrure. If an engineer needs to make a voice call to communicate to unpower the line because a train has derailed, that’s a systemic problem. I think all metros in the EU have telemetry and any major railway implements ETCS. Weird that “safety first” means that schoolkids cannot see the eclipse but public transport infrastructure gets way underfunded.
Also, a certain “blue line” keeps going off the rails in the US. I read this out of context and thought the police staged a riot.
sorry. yeah its just the name of a metro line.
You’re talking about conductors. The article is talking about drivers
Its talking about personelle. there are no other positions besides driver.
I mean, they’ve already got a dead-man’s switch so that if the engineer becomes incapacitated, the train stops, not to mention a lot of logic that they can put on the trains. Are there many accidents that this would have prevented?
Interest in dead man’s controls increased with the introduction of electric trams (streetcars in North America) and especially electrified rapid transit trains. The first widespread use came with the introduction of the mass-produced Birney One-Man Safety (tram) Car, though dead-man equipment was fairly rare on US streetcars until the successful PCC streetcar, which had a left-foot-operated dead man’s pedal in conjunction with the right-foot-operated brake and power pedals. This layout has continued to be used on some modern trams around the world. In conventional steam railroad trains, there was always a second person with the engineer, the fireman, who could almost always bring the train to a stop if necessary.[2] For many decades two people were assigned to electric and diesel locomotives as well, even though a single person could theoretically operate them.
With modern urban and suburban railway systems, the driver is typically alone in an enclosed cab. Automatic devices were already beginning to be deployed on newer installations of the New York City Subway system in the early 20th century. The Malbone Street Wreck on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit system in 1918, though not caused by driver incapacitation, did spur the need for universal deployment of such devices to halt trains in the event of the operator’s disability. According to a Manhattan borough historian, there have been at least three instances where the dead man’s switch was used successfully – in 1927, 1940, and 2010.[3]
The status and operation of both vigilance and dead man’s switch may be recorded on the train’s event recorder (commonly known as a black box). Modern locomotive practice is to incorporate the dead-man’s and vigilance functions under the control of the alerter or the event recorder.[4]
I mean, I get that locomotive engineers are gung-ho on the idea of more demand for locomotive engineers, but does this make sense from a safety standpoint?
googles
It sounds like this particular incident, a little over twenty years ago, might have been resolved with two people in the cab – but it also ended without anyone being hurt, and required a complicated series of events to go wrong, where actions were taken that both disabled the dead man’s switch and to set the train to accelerate. I’d think that one could reasonably change the UI on the controls to avoid that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSX_8888_incident
Before leaving the cab, the engineer applied the locomotive’s independent air brake. During mainline operation, he would also have applied the automatic air brake, which would set the brakes in each of the train’s cars. But, as is normal for intra-yard movements, the air brakes of the train were disconnected from the locomotive and thus were not functional. Furthermore, applying the locomotive’s brakes disabled the train’s dead man’s switch, which would otherwise have applied the train brakes and cut the engine power.[1]
The engineer also attempted to apply the locomotive’s dynamic brake to slow the train to a crawl; dynamic brakes dissipate momentum (kinetic energy) by using the momentum of the train to drive the traction motors, generating electricity exactly like a regenerative braking system does in a hybrid/electric automobile, which slows the train. However, the engineer “inadvertently failed to complete the selection process”, meaning that he in effect set the train to accelerate, not to brake. Using the power throttle handle, the throttle for the traction motors was set at notch 8. If the dynamic brakes had been properly engaged as intended, the locomotive would have used the motors against the momentum of the train as generators, causing it to slow down. Instead, the train began to accelerate. Therefore, the only functioning brake was the air brakes on the locomotive, and this was not enough to counteract its power.[1]
The engineer climbed down from the cab, aligned the switch, and then attempted to reboard the accelerating locomotive. However, he was unable to do so and was dragged by #8888 for about 80 feet (24 m), receiving minor cuts and abrasions. The train rolled out of the yard and began a 65-mile (105 km) journey south through northwest Ohio unmanned. Attempts to derail the train using a portable derailer failed; the portable derailer was thrown off the track by the force of the train when struck. Police officers attempted to engage the red fuel cutoff button by shooting at it; after three shots mistakenly hit the larger red fuel cap, this ultimately had no effect because the button on former Conrail SD40-2s like CSX 8888 must be pressed for several seconds before the switch is activated, causing the engine to starve of diesel fuel and shut down.[7][8] A northbound freight train, Q636-15, was directed onto a siding where the crew uncoupled its locomotive, CSX #8392 (another EMD SD40-2), and waited for the runaway train to pass. #8392 had a crew of two: Jesse Knowlton, an engineer with 31 years of service; and Terry L. Forson, a conductor with one year’s experience.[9] Together they chased the runaway train. An EMD GP40-2, CSX locomotive #6008, was prepared farther down the line to couple to the front of the runaway to slow it further, if necessary.[10]
Knowlton and Forson successfully coupled onto the rear car and slowed the train by applying the dynamic brakes on the chase locomotive. Once the runaway had slowed to 11 miles per hour (18 km/h), CSX trainmaster Jon Hosfeld ran alongside the train, climbed aboard, and shut down the engine. The train was stopped at the Ohio State Route 31 crossing, just southeast of Kenton, Ohio before reaching locomotive #6008. All the brake shoes on #8888 had been completely burned off by the heat, since they had been applied all throughout the runaway trip.[1]
Are there many accidents that this would have prevented?
We don’t know, because the norm has been two-man teams. The question shouldn’t be “is this making things safer”? The question needs to be “will reducing crew sizes still be as safe”? The burden of proof needs to be on the rail operators to show how they have mitigating controls in place to prevent failures which may have been caught by that extra human operator. Ultimately, this is about systems failure and avoiding low incidence, high damage failures. While technical controls are fantastic and should be used, they are often inflexible and don’t respond in the same way that a human can to prevent or mitigate a disaster. Humans are often a critical layer in the Swiss Cheese Model for preventing these sorts of failures. Fewer humans may well mean fewer chances to stop something getting through.
That all said, if railroads really want to have data driven safety, then we really need an organization, similar to the FAA, which is empowered to enforce safety standards and require companies to comply with safety recommendations. And I doubt the railroads would be happy about that. It might mean actually implementing safety upgrades and maintenance in a timely manner.
It might help with prevention but a bigger thing is when an accident happens there is help to deal with it or worse if one is to injured they can be pulled out or at the least someone can still report it and such.
Sounds like it could have been avoided either with better logic in how braking was applied and how the dead man’s switch was disabled (because if a locomotive is configured to move, I don’t think it should ever be disabled), or by keeping one person in the cab any time the engine is running.
I don’t think the problem is so bad that we need to babysit the locomotive at all times.
