The great debate: To mount or not to mount a moving train?

My dispatch titled “Hunter Hits the Ground Running” generated a slew of responses, to the point that I felt that I was attending a Safety Committee meeting and was about to ask if Canadian Pacific ball caps were being passed out to attendees. The way I put it was that new CEO Hunter Harrison was pressing his people to reconsider the rule banning getting on or off of moving equipment.

So now, an update: The rule changed on July 31. Now trainmen can get on and off equipment going no faster than 4 mph. Prior to the change, crews were called on duty 30 minutes early so that managers could train and certify people on the spot.  

Given the tenor of responses to the earlier blog, there will be much gnashing of teeth and rending of garment. It’s a gutsy move, no doubt about it. Canadian National, which Harrison ran before retiring at the end of 2009, never banned the practice, and no statistics appear to exist in the public realm that prove (or disprove) that letting employees get on and off moving equipment affects the rate of employee injuries. As was pointed out to me by one CP employee, riding out a rough coupling or a jarring slack action upon starting to move were dangers in themselves under the old rule.

Interesting to me is the reaction to CP’s move by two senior railroad executives. One is a fellow who in his early days was a brakeman but now reports directly to the president of his railroad. No friend of Hunter Harrison, he nevertheless is upset that railroads have “dumbed ourselves down” (his words) because employees are too overweight and too out of shape to perform physical duties while switching that railroaders had done the prior 180 years. Moreover, he alluded, the internet is rife with web sites of personal-injury lawyers soliciting railroaders with sprained ankles. This fellow’s railroad, by the way, prohibits getting on and off moving equipment.

So does the regional railroad run by my second acquaintance. While saying in one breath that he’d fire anyone violating this rule, he adds in the second that employees who know how to leverage the momentum of their bodies could probably perform such tasks safely.

What do I think? The prohibition fosters inefficiencies in switching cars; we would probably all agree to that. And the real reason railroads have adopted such a stance is probably less related to statistical proof that getting on and off is hurting people than that it keeps the lawyers at bay. — Fred W. Frailey