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The day we took the safety test at the tourist line (by "we" I mean "we" brakeman trainees), we got an extremely interesting talk from an FRA inspector who spoke on the primary causes of railroad fatalities. He told us a perfectly horrifying tale of a conductor on a UP train who was killed when he was aligning a coupler and his engineer heard over the radio, "OK - bring it back" or some similar phrase, and the engineer initiated a shove. The cause was that the message the engineer heard was from a different crew (possibly on a different railroad in the same Midwestern town; I won't say where or when or speculate on the other railroad because I don't recall for sure and don't want to stir-up any specific memories unnecessarily). The voice sounded like the engineer's conductor who he'd known and worked with for many years, and the investigation was sufficiently meticulous to identify the cause without much room for uncertainty. The FRA inspector urged us all (even though on our railroad, train crews only used the radio to communicate with the station master) to use first names or locomotive numbers or some unique identification word to label each message such that, for example, instead of, "OK - bring it back" it would be, "OK - bring it back Jim" or "OK - bring it back ten-eighty-nine.", etc. Have railroads adopted such policies for intra-crew radio dialogue?
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