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Poor Ed, musta sprung a leak in his hose. If you care to read the very first post on this topic, you would see that the topic starter himself put forth the proposition that it might take twice as long to walk a train as before when there was a rearend crew to supplement the head end crew. It was put forth as a "what if" statement for the purpose of generating discussion, not as a statement of fact. Too bad you and that other "you" can't discern between a "what if" statement and a statement of purported fact. If you care to actually read what I said, I put forth two "what if" statements to bring to light the point of the discussion, namely if it is necessarily a positive thing to cut out assets under the guise of productivity gains, when in fact such cuts might actually interfere with the real end game of railroading aka garnering business and staying on the positive end of public relations. Such asset reductions may actually result in higher costs in other areas such as higher insurance premiums, because there were no eyes and ears to catch a problem somewhere in the consist. It is consensus that a head end crew will not notice anomolies back in the consist such as a derailed wheelset being dragged along between the rails cutting up the ties until finally the car itself goes off track, or a broken wheel causing sparks to fly along the right of way, catching everything on fire in the process. When there were eyes and ears at the back end, these anomolies were noticed in a more timely manner, thus preventive action could be taken much sooner before too much damage was done. Up here in the PNW there are at least a dozen ROW fires set during the dry season EVERY YEAR, catching forests and wheat fields on fire. One such incident resulted in a farmer being overtaken by the flames and perishing in the inferno, and all because BNSF and the others didn't think having personnel at the rear of the train is important. Oh well, BNSF's insurance will pay for the deceased and the area losses that resulted, right? I'll say it again, I do not wi***o see the caboose make a return. However, for this particulare transportation mode in which the trainsets are a mile or more long, it may have been a misstep to take out the crewman watching the backend. How to address this? Well, with DPU's it is now possible to have at least one crewmember riding the pusher, and that person would be invaluable to reporting such in-consist anamolies in an expedient manner, rather than waiting until the 6'oclock evening news to find out you just set four counties on fire during your run.
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