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I didn't mention our other two mains because they really don't go through Galesburg Yard. From the old ATSF the trains have to go through a cutoff to get into Galesburg Yard. <br /> <br />I am the youngest in seniority of the three engineers left in Galesburg. I work the rip track. Flat switch is all we do. Probably the reason that they still have an engineer on the job. Flat switching doesn't appear to be much fun with remotes. I watched a switchman try to take slack to cut off a single car that had a BO handbrake. The remote kicked the car about 5 car lengths. They don't have much finesse. <br /> <br />Going over crossings is not considered a problem for RCOs, the ones in Galesburg do it daily. The biggest problem is keeping both boxes close enough to the locomotive to maintain radio contact. If one box loses contact the brakes get set. A number of knuckles have been torn out because they use air in the head end of the train, when contact is lost the remote sets the brakes on the cars the run-out can be rather harsh. The boxes transmit about a mile, give or take depending on the conditions. They put up two repeaters in Galesburg to keep them in contact. If you tend to range out of the yard away from the repeaters with big cuts of cars or around curves that have structures that dampen out the radio signal there could be trouble.
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