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I'm an Engineer/Conductor for a Northern California shortline. I am getting tired of the industry and the trade journals pushing the remotes. Have any of you folks had to work with one for 12 hours? It's not much fun. I does NOT increase productivity, but rather increases the time need to do switching. One must go slower in order to use remotes more safely.......safely is a relative. As far as I'm concerned remotes are not safe. We ourselfs had a bad accident recently where one of our Engineers lost a leg using one of our remote units. Let's face it everyone, corperate America is getting more and more greedy. Their answer to making more money has been and always will be to try any scheme that involves cutting back employees to gain more money in their pockets. Remotes do this by cutting out one person on a crew, the engineer. For a while, my company was considering having us run with just one guy on the train while using the remotes. Imagine the fun of having to make the cuts, the joints, throw stiff switches, climb up and down equipment, etc, all the while you having to wear a chest pack tranmitter that weighs about 4 to 6 pounds. Doesn't sound like much until the end of a 12 hour day , but you try it and see how your shoulders and back feel. Now the railroads want to use NO MAN TRAINS!?! This is really getting out of hand. It's bad enough that you can't feel the train when you use a remote....and by the the way, the term remote is being used incorrectly in the industry. A remote is any device that you move via a connected cable and a device using a radio signal is a radio control unit. At least with a remote and a person nearby it's not as bad becuase you can at least see most of what's going on. That is you might be able to see that those rear two cars have come off the track back there at the switch it they just split. With No Man trains how are you going to tell what's going on in back of the units? Put more electronic devices to monitor the train movement and spend the same amount of money that could have spent on the crew members to operate the train. I would like to add that remotes not only jeapordize the safety of the those who use them it also jeapordizes the general publics safety. Just think of what No man trains are going to do. Sorry, I can't sign my name in fear of the company seeing this.
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