Railroaders' Nostalgia > Short letter about SAL wreck in Florida 1942

See attached.

Uncle Joe,Seffner,Fl.

---

That's ugly!

I'll put the reply to your question about this here where you can find it more easily.

Cost vs safety is not a new thing.

Once upon a time, all meets that were given to a train somewhere distant were also given at the meeting point or the first station prior to the meeting point. This was called a middle order. By the late 40s, there was some contention in the industry about the need for so many operators for redundant orders. Peter Josserand, one time guru of rules and train dispatching discussed this at length in the 1945 edition of Rights of Trains. Of course, the middle order requirement had to be eliminated before operators could be. By the mid-fifties or so, middle orders had been eliminated.

Then came the requirement (on some railroads) or the practice (on others) of delivering orders to trains as close as possible to the point of restriction. That was all fine until to 70s or so,  when the desire to eliminate operators made that impractical. Train order offices would be closed and the communication department would hang a microphone on the station or on a pole so that the dispatcher could tell when trains were going by. Some places had a buzzer on the dispatcher phone circuit, wired to a track circuit at the station. See, you don't need an operator to tell you when trains were by, just a mic or a buzzer. Of course, there was no way to know if the train was complete or what train it was if there was more than one train in the area.

Track car lineups were in the same boat. They were the Maintenance of Way authority to be on the track. They had to be transmitted to an operator or directly to the guy who wanted authority. The process was tightly controlled....until they wanted to eliminate more operators. Then it was ok to send a track car lineup to a fax machine sitting where the operator used to. There was a copy machine for anybody who wanted to use the track to make a copy. Control of the process cost money, so control was eliminated.

Then there are train orders. They were even more tightly controlled. An SP operator at Lancaster CA was canned because he left the orders for the local in the waybill box on the front of the station and went home. Orders were to be delivered directly, no exceptions. Well...no exceptions until they wanted to eliminate operators. Fax machines worked fine with lineups, why not faxes and printers for train authority? The check and cross check procedures and the need for an operator  to be an intermediary between the dispatcher and the crew was not efficient. Authority started going to unattended computer terminals in yard offices. The crew came to work and started filtering through lists, query responses, messages, and all sorts of irrelevant paper looking for what they needed. When they found it, they just tore it off and went on their way. BN 197 went in the ditch at 60 on 10 mph track on MRL that way. The printer jammed. There was nothing from it for hours. Since nobody needed anything, nobody noticed. 197's crew showed up and after waiting a while, found a clerk to get the printer started. In the backup of yards of paper was the authority they were looking for. They grabbed it off and hit the road. They were gone when the second authority, containing the 10 mph restriction, came...after yards of other stuff queued ahead of it printed.

Now there are new and different procedures. We'll see how they withstand the test of economics. In Olden Tymes, standard practice was to not give trains anything that did not affect them. Among the new procedures, at least on railroads I'm familiar with, for the benefit of computer programmers, is that trains get a book that applies to a whole division or several subdivisions. The crew spends a lot of time in the locker room before doing anything else, studying the book and marking what applies to them.

Modern standard procedures require what we used to get fired for...and it's been heading that way since the 40s.

TAW

TAW Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Now there are new and different procedures. We'll see how they withstand the test of economics. In Olden Tymes, standard practice was to not give trains anything that did not affect them. Among
> the new procedures, at least on railroads I'm familiar with, for the benefit of computer programmers, is that trains get a book that applies to a whole division or several
> subdivisions. The crew spends a lot of time in the locker room before doing anything else, studying the book and marking what applies to them.

It is so annoying that they do this now. They company wants to cut costs and get things moving, yet they give you an encyclopedia of track bulletins to sort through every time you go to work. Then you are forced to comb through them all to find the hand full they are actually going to apply to your day, while the rest become a giant waste of paper. Just don't overlook that crossing order on the bottom of page 14 in your bulletins. Its after the first 10 pages of useless form C's talking about an open ditch 200 miles away, or the 5mph speed restriction on the Chico Bean spur. Safety first, yeah sure.

TAW this is a very succinct discription of the passage of time and its affects.

What has happened to the rate of employee injuries since say 1945?  It has dropped like a rock.

Bob Wilcox
Charlottesville, VA
My Flickr Shots

bobwilcox Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What has happened to the rate of employee injuries
> since say 1945?  It has dropped like a rock.

...which is irrelevant.

Rails now do a lot less physical work, and do things that are a lot less susceptible to causing injury than they did then. (Running for switches, getting on and off of moving equipment, going high to pass signs, pulling iron, hooping up, handcars, motor cars, hand bombing, track jacks and lining bars, work inside of fireboxes and smokeboxes, and on and on). New track is built by contractors and a lot of locomotive maintenance is done by contractors. Injuries in those activities, which in 1945 counted as rail injuries, don't count.

That does not affect the unsafe nature of what is being discussed. For example, working on a signal bridge or cantilever is considered unsafe without a caged ladder, handrails, platforms, and maybe even harnesses...but issuing a train crew 40 pages of irrelevant material is not?

TAW

Potentially stupid question:

We have off-the-shelf technology that sorts road hazards, weather conditions etc. for highways. If I'm making a winter trip to Sugarcreek and query the Ohio Department of Transportation website, it tells me what's wrong with US 250, not where the wrecks are in Cleveland and Cincinnati. If, for some reason, we got detoured to Lima, it would be easy enough to ask for that information. A railroad is a lot more controlled than a public highway...but their software can't handle "crew works from Mingo to Century, so give them only conditions affecting that area?" 

The he only way to get it changed is probably to point out the savings in paper...

Rebecca Morgan
Jacobsburg, OH

Yeah, it would seem to be pretty simple.  And it can all go to a conductor's iPad or similar.  We're in a time when messaging systems tell you when the other person has read (or at least brought to the top screen) your message.  Sounds like they are still in the dark ages of computerization.

filmteknik Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yeah, it would seem to be pretty simple.  And it
> can all go to a conductor's iPad or similar. 
> We're in a time when messaging systems tell you
> when the other person has read (or at least
> brought to the top screen) your message.  Sounds
> like they are still in the dark ages of
> computerization.

Actually, the opposite.  They're in the most modern age of IT and so follow very up to date management principles.  Every IT system has a 'business owner' who is reponsible for that system's "P&L", usually working in concert with a 'product owner'  who manages the technology piece itself.

If the business owner (in this case probably someone in the transportation department) wants a change in the system, they go to the product owner to put together a business case for the change.  The product owner will develop the costs and the business owner the benefits.  It then goes to an IT supervisor (or if they're REALLY modern - a whole committee of different 'stakeholders'!) for vetting of the assumptions. If it meets that year's ROI threshold (because of PTC the current ROI threshold is usually pretty high) then it gets the green light and is actually done.

My guess is that most systems can do this now, just the people who matter haven't asked and/or those who know how to do it have retired or moved on to other roles.

You wanna see automated information for those up front ? Come sit on the jump seat of a 737/A320. Makes  all that RR paperwork look like amateur hour.

NormSchultze Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You wanna see automated information for those up
> front ? Come sit on the jump seat of a 737/A320.
> Makes  all that RR paperwork look like amateur
> hour.

I just flew on a 737/A320 while sitting in "coach"....the whole operation looked benign. 
The real problem was there was no room....not an empty seat in the house. LOL

AL
Winter Springs, Fla.