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RR Carriers Bring One-Person Crews to the Table

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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by csxengineer98 [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by Limitedclear [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by HighIron2003ar You need two people to keep each other awake and motivated. Cutting costs generates waste that wipes out the payroll savings in many ways. With that $200,000 train passing little rock every 15 minutes 24/7 it should be easy to maintain a decent work force. Not cut people. A bigger question I think should be asked... Where is the money going? Why is there a need to actually remove paid positions from the railroad? [/quote] With all due respect, you don't need two people to keep alert. How many times have I run road freights with everybody but me fast asleep. MANY. I have had three other people in my cab including a senior Road Foreman all snoring away for the last few hours of a trip. In fact having others sleeping nearby makes me more tired than if I was alone sometimes. Have you ever actually run a train? I'm sure you are a great trucker, but trust me there are significant differences. Engineers can and do stay alert. Are we perfect, no, but we do pretty darn well, all things considered. LC [/quote]yea...i hear you limited...i too have been thier.... and that is one thing that pisses me off is right after we get on the engin..the conductor makes a bed... if i have to stay awake..so dose he...i will do eveything i can to make it hard for him to sleep...try and carry on a conversation... open a window so its cold...turn the radio way up...anything i can think of.... its one thing to nod off...its going to happen... its another thing to make a bed the moment i start to pull... but 2 men is better then 1.... if the other set isnt sleeping... and thats the big problem... they dont have anything to do... maybe they should have an alerter on thier side too... how many times have you been running dead on your a$$ and dont remember the last signal you passed...and had to ask the conductor...i know i have done it a few times... and in my mind it is safer if you can get the dead wood sleepers to stay awake... csx engineer [/quote] I think you have a point. Perhaps a low voltage electric shock in their seat that zaps them every time you have to "hit the whisker" would be good. Of course there are those Engineers who would simply use that to irritate and abuse the Conductor and I don't advocate that. You are correct that there are times when having 2 men in the cab is a good thing and let me reiterate what I said earlier, I believe there are places for one man crews, but that the circumstances MUST be right for them to work safely. I also think that in many cases, if used correctly in connection with good marketing that they can increase rail traffic and thus jobs. For example, if you have a large shipper that takes a good volume of cars and only gets a switch three days per week he is building up a pretty large demurrage bill which is probably inhibiting his ability to use rail just because of that added cost. He is likely using trucking to supplement (depending upon what industry he is in) or perhaps shifting production to other facilities due to lack of rail service. The railroad involved has too little traffic on this branch line to justify more service, although the marketing department in consultation with the shipper thinks that volume could increase significantly with 5 or 6 day per week service. Such service would also reduce or eliminate most of the customers demurrage expense and the RRs car hire expense. (As an aside, I have seen this same situation repeated MANY times both on short lines and on Class 1s). In this situation a one man crew can be part of the answer. Another possibility is two one man crews, spread over the days of the week with RCL. This would cost the RR the same crew money as they same number of crew is involved and extra costs such as locomotive time and fuel should be offset by increased traffic from the facility. Now, say the plant does 700 cars/year and traffic increases to 1,000 cars the first year and with a small plant expansion in year 3 to 1,400 carloads. (I'm citing an actual example of a plant on a short line, but this was after a short line took over and the crews used were 2 man, the Class 1 had used 3 man crews prior). It doesn't take much higher math to figure out that if you can do this with only two or three customers on a branch line there will be additional jobs created, especially if the original two man crew was serving two or more such industries. This is where I see one man crews actually creating rail opportunity. Hope that clarifies my position. LC
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