Freight railroads must keep 2-person crews, according to new federal rule first proposed under Obama
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apnews.com
“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.
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?
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
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.