charlie hebdo BaltACD CP has a SERIOUS safety culture problem and it starts at the Board Room. Can you show any empirical evidence?
BaltACD CP has a SERIOUS safety culture problem and it starts at the Board Room.
Can you show any empirical evidence?
Euclid's videos! Such 'training' doesn't develop from the field up the chain - it comes from the top of the chain down as a means to cut costs - safety be damned.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
BaltACD charlie hebdo BaltACD CP has a SERIOUS safety culture problem and it starts at the Board Room. Can you show any empirical evidence? Euclid's videos! Such 'training' doesn't develop from the field up the chain - it comes from the top of the chain down as a means to cut costs - safety be damned.
SIMULATOR PANACEA
Mr. Creel’s rather defensive posture and arrogant bragging about how simulators are a big timesaver says a lot about his style and what is going on at CP. It sounds like the sales pitch for simulators that he must have heard a thousand times.
Regarding his specific statement:
A unique operating hazard that may only occur every five years has nothing to do with the fact that the simulator is able to model and display that same hazard five times in ten hours. Those two facts have no logical connection. It is a clever sounding sales pitch for shallow minded people.
The real point is that a dangerous situation that can occur only every five years, might be overlooked in training; not that it takes a long time to train for. If it is overlooked in training, it will probably not be demonstrated by the simulator. Also, it is those rare dangers that are the most important to watch out for.
Rolling down the road is fine for providing a real world experience of how the rules come into play, but if the rules have not been vigorously taught in detailed methodology, rolling down the road can be just a joy ride.
Considering this runaway wreck:
The rules call for making an emergency application if the brakes are not holding the train at or below the maximum speed limit. The engineer did that. But what is supposed to happen next? It seems to me that there should be sufficient inspection to find out why the brakes were not holding the speed as they should have. How can a crew continue if they don’t know what the problem was? If you don’t know what the problem was, you do know that you have not fixed the problem. The only possible constructive outcome is that you may have given the problem enough time to fix itself.
It seems obvious to me that once the emergency application had safely stopped the train, the overwhelming management obsession was to get that train moving again. So not only did the crew not properly secure the train for recharging the trainline, but they also never looked hard enough to find the problem.
If they actually had found the problem of leaking brake cylinders, there was no way that train should have continued. The nature of the defect would have required sending out crews and locomotives to move the entire train to a place of safety where all the cars could be inspected and repaired to roadworthy standards.
I wonder how many times in ten hours, Mr. Creel’s simulators can show the engineer trainees and riding managers how a massive quantity of ill-maintained car brake cylinders can fail simultaneously when the temperature falls.
BaltACD the train IS NOT developing sufficient braking power - PERIOD.
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Those are dramatic all right but episodic. Historical (10 year) safety statistics are what are needed to draw any empirical conclusions about the "culture" [ugh, a horribly over/misused word, IMO].
I had to laugh my rear end off when I saw the CEO saying that a Simulator was the best way to train a new employee. Why I thought back to my own simulator training when I was in highschool in drivers education. Remember those people the ones were even if you smashed headlong into the wall nothing happened. Heck even the new ones are not much better. There are 3 OTR carriers that love simulators in their own training programs you can tell who they are by the number of crunched fairings on their trucks. Swift England and Werner all use simulators as part of their training programs to teach their new drivers how to back up. A simulator is great for teaching the basics but nothing beats how something feels in the seat of the pants going down the track or road.
Shadow the Cats owner I had to laugh my rear end off when I saw the CEO saying that a Simulator was the best way to train a new employee. Why I thought back to my own simulator training when I was in highschool in drivers education. Remember those people the ones were even if you smashed headlong into the wall nothing happened. Heck even the new ones are not much better. There are 3 OTR carriers that love simulators in their own training programs you can tell who they are by the number of crunched fairings on their trucks. Swift England and Werner all use simulators as part of their training programs to teach their new drivers how to back up. A simulator is great for teaching the basics but nothing beats how something feels in the seat of the pants going down the track or road.
Johnny
Down the street from where my house is there is a plant for Vactor trucks. Their only truck receving dock is on my street for van trailers. Where my house is has a 6 ton weight limit after the plant so they have to blindside into the dock. There used to be a fire hydrant across the street from the plant notice how I said USED to be one. Well Swift used to also have the contract to deliver to Vactor here in town. After they took out the hydrant 5 times in 4 months including 3 times in the middle of winter plus twice ripping down the only power line next to it that feeds the township office across the street they lost the contract. We got it instead. As the plant VP put it when he called us up to offer it to us the costs of having us deliver it where cheaper than the repairs that they where dishing out to utility companies for damage Swift was doing to the infastructure around town. They moved the Hydrant to my side of the road and behind a set of steel bars. Why Yellow and Fed Ex drivers are not much better than Swift when it comes to backing up sometimes. They have hit the concrete wall that marks the edge of the factory property backing up. We send our local driver that his normal job is putting a 53 foot trailer into a hole designed for a 40 footer in a dock with 63 feet total distance to work with and he does it with one shot all day long. Our 1st street warehouse is that tight there is a creek in front of the property that we can not bridge.
I don’t know when the final report will come out, but we seem to have enough information at this point to understand what caused this disaster. The TSB has informed us that the train was composed of cars mostly having defective brakes. They were defective enough to make it impossible to control the train in normal running operation. However stopping with an emergency application of brakes was still possible despite the brake defects, so the train was stopped with an emergency application.
That was lucky because just prior to that emergency stop, the train was beginning a loss of braking process that may have resulted in the train running away on the descending grade. Fortunately the problem was realized and reacted to by making an emergency application which was able to stop the train. So, at that moment, disaster was averted. They were lucky.
Then at that point, they had a chance (and a duty) to diagnose the obvious problem and correct it. But they did not do that. Instead, they handed the train off to a new crew and made it their problem. In so doing, they set back into motion, the very disaster that they were so lucky to avert. The second crew was not so lucky. I wonder if somebody will be prosecuted for criminal negligence resulting in the deaths of three people.
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