Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Trains Well
Trained
Long, long ago my great-uncle of happy memory, who shall
remain nameless, drove high-speed freight trains for one of America’s great railroads,
which will also remain nameless although it was long ago absorbed by a series
of other railroads and investment companies.
Uncle Nameless wore Coke-bottle glasses at home and was
far too old and visually-impaired to be driving a Studebaker Hawk much less a
high-speed freight. But every year he
passed his physical exam because he had memorized the official company eye
chart. And in all his years with the railroad he never had a wreck.
Once upon a time railroads bore real names, not simply strings
of consonants, and each promoted its own romance of the rails through its flagship
passenger trains: the Santa Fe Chiefs and Super Chiefs, the New York Central 20th
Century Limited, the Milwaukee Road Hiawatha, The Missouri-Kansas Texas
Southern Belle, the Illinois Central City of New Orleans, the Southern Pacific
Arcadian, the several Missouri Pacific Eagles, the CB&Q Zephyr, and on and
on.
But beginning in the 1950s with the development of
commercial air travel through vast government subsidies, a failure of
government to encourage the improvement of rail infrastructure, and possibly a
failure of the corporate alligator-shoe boys to update service and marketing, the
vestigial passenger rail service is now mostly a subsidized government-travel perk
for the northeast and the California coast through the indifferent Amtrak
scheme.
The remaining freight services have been bought, sold, resold,
renamed, absorbed, and degraded to little more than a confusing mix of
utilities. Possibly some of the owners live in other countries, immune from
American laws.
We are all aware of the recent wrecks of freight trains
with the loss not simply of timber or cotton or cars or machinery, but of weird
chemicals that poison the air, water, and soil.
These trains and the tracks carry the latest electronics for safety, and
yet they sometimes fail.
In Uncle Nameless’ time a train did not leave the yard
without a full crew: engineer, fireman, conductor, and the appropriate number
of brakemen. The railroads and unions were conflicted over the concept of “featherbedding,”
that is, the notion that most of the crew were expensive and pointless.
But all those crewmen were watching the train and
everything around it all the equipment, and all the signals. They keep the
train and thus everyone along the line safe.
Now the crews have been minimized and instead of a caboose
with a human observer watching the train for “hot boxes” (failing wheels) and
other threats, all there is at the tail of a freight train is a computerized box.
I’m only speculating in wondering if modern American
freight trains are adequately crewed.
I am not speculating when I assert that any train needs a
full crew, including the good old caboose and its wide-awake human observers
watching up the line of travel for equipment problems. Any locomotive needs at
least two crew in the cab at all times. This is not feather-bedding; this is
good safety practice, and good safety practices are, in the end, also good
economic practices: an observer in a caboose is much less expensive than months
of rescue, restoration, and lawsuits.
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