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Raw188 3 posts, incept 2023-02-19
2023-02-24 13:04:28
I’m an engineer with a different railroad, a thousand mile
away from NS, so I don’t know ‘exactly’ what differences are
between how they do things and how my railroad does. But all
railroads do operate under a shared basic rules book. Using
that basis and my 15+ years of experience I’ll share some
thoughts.
Our hot wheel detectors are spaced out about every 15-20
miles. If the detector announces a failure there is a table
that determines the crews required action. It depends upon
the type of train, the type of failure, and sometimes the
elements of the track ahead. Sometimes it’s required to slow
to 30mph until the next detector finds the same defects.
Sometimes it’s required to immediately stop and inspect the
train. Sometimes you have to set the defective car out from
the train. Sometimes you can ‘fix’ the defect. Sometimes to
can simply continue on to the next terminal at 30mph.
Whatever the case, however, any defect detection will at the
very least, slow the train down.
No crew would ever willingly ignore a detector failure
message. One, obviously because we live in the same
communities we run our trains through and have no desire to
do what happened in Ohio. Secondly because the primary job
of railroad managers is to fire us. No kidding, that’s what
they spend most of their time trying to do. Ignoring a
detector is something that can’t be hidden and will 100% end
up with the entire crew getting fired. Third, we simply
don’t care about moving the company’s freight. The
incentives as an employee are not for moving freight. As I
noted about the firing, that incentive is tilted toward
following the rules or getting fired. I don’t get paid a
cent more if the train moves slow or fast. In fact, if we
have to stop the train and fix **** then I usually end up
making more money and my friends working here end up making
more money and they end up needing more people to move
trains so more of my friends end up working and making money
too. Not only are we making more money, but we are doing
less actual work. Everybody stops their train and takes a
nap. The trains don’t make it to the terminal in time for
them to make us do all the work there. Paid more, less work.
It’s perverse, but almost every railroad employee laughs and
smiles when ‘meltdowns’ happen. We make money. The managers
go powerlessly bat****. The company, which cares so much
about us, gets ****ed. It’s a win-win.
So, in my opinion, this crew would have stopped at any
option to do so and had no incentive or reason to keep going
if they knew there was a problem.
So, guessing at what happened?
As I said, my railroad has these hot wheel detectors spaced
out about every 15-20 miles. When I started at the railroad
these detectors would announce on the radio when your train
first started over them. After your train finished
traversing them, they would announce over the radio that
there were no defects detected. If the detector found a
defect, it would immediately sound a tone and announce the
type of defect and its location (how many axles from the
head end).
Several years ago, coinciding with the railroads push to cut
costs, they started changing the detectors so that they
would not announce an ‘exit message’. That is the message
that said there were no defects.
Why? The official reason is to prevent ‘excessive radio
transmissions’. LOL!
My guess is so that the ‘experts’ in the back office can
reduce the sensitivity of the defects that actually get
alarms announced and they can determine if those defects
that don’t reach those levels even get reported to the
crews.
That guess is reinforced by this NTSB report that talks
about temperatures and critical levels. We, in the field,
know none of that. Either the detector announces a hot axle,
or it doesn’t. And our action tables speak nothing of
temperatures or critical levels either.
Further reinforcing my guess on what they are doing is
actual experiences where I have multiple times went over a
detector, received no message at all, but later received a
call from the dispatcher telling me I had some defect and
what ‘they’ already decided was the next course of action.
This would point to the detector notifying the headquarters
of a problem that the crew is not notified of. That would
indicate that the people at headquarters look at that
notification and ‘they’ make the determination of whether
the standard response that the crew would make is necessary
or if something lesser can be done.
In other words, they are playing interference with the
notifications so that they can prevent their trains from
being slowed or stopped by the immediate notifications and
the ‘safest’ course actions required by the crews.
That these changes in how they treat the detectors came in
conjunction with their push to cut costs and increase
productivity further reinforces this conjecture.
We, my local coworkers and I, have noticed these changes.
Have guessed as to their purpose. And we have shaken our
heads at the short sided stupidity of it. I personally have
said that this would all work fine for them until some idiot
in the back office looked at something and decided ‘it’s
fine, it will make it a while longer’ and didn’t tell the
crew – only to have the train derail haz-mat all over some
small town.
Well, now that’s happened.
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h/t dr0id