I worked in this industry for many years. The railroads were always hyper-focused on increasing throughput. I left the industry about ten years ago, but back then derailments were considered the most significant risk to average network speed. At the time, average network speed was roughly correlated with profit. The rule of thumb was a 1 mph increase in average network speed was worth about $100MM in profit. That was 15 years ago.
There were a lot of systems in place to monitor rolling stock:
- Wheel Impact Detectors
- Hotbox detectors
- Acoustic bearing detectors
- Truck performance detectors
To name just a few. There were also efforts to monitor the railway infrastructure. The things I remember:
- Rail stress management (rails need to be under the right amount of stress, which of course varies with temperature)
- Top of rail friction management
- Rail profile management (the name eludes me, but the idea is you want the interface between the rail and wheel to meet certain parameters)
I worked on the rolling stock side measuring wheel impacts, overloads, imbalances, and a handful of more esoteric metrics. One of the outputs of these measurements was a train consist. For each of our locations we were able to build up the consist of the entire train (which was a fun CS problem in itself).
I stared at a lot of consists over the years. In North America I never saw anything longer than about 100 cars and 2-4 locos. However, in Northwest Australia they routinely ran 300 car trains meeting the description in this article. But, the reason they could get away with that is they were running a straight shot from the heart of the Pilbara to one of the port towns on the north west shoulder (Karratha and Port Hedland).
I need to check in with my old colleagues and see if things have changed. It wouldn't surprise me if train lengths have gotten longer, but I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit.
As someone mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there are a lot of single track corridors. It's bad enough when one train has to sidetrack. It's really bad when a train takes out the whole corridor. These aren't packet switched networks. It's not easy to reroute. And it's really expensive and difficult to lay new rail.
They have and it is slowing them down, but they're using different metrics to define and track productivity. If you're interested in hearing about it this guy has a pretty good perspective on the overall issues:
> I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit.
That would be true in a non-monopolistic situation, but it's well known from the investor side that what the railroads are doing around rates is driven by collusion and lack of regulation.
CSX stock was at $8 in 2016 and is at ~$33.50 now. There is no amount of throughput increase that could drive those financial results. You could lever up your cap structure with tons of debt (even 6-7x) and not even get close to this kind of return on equity.
Throughput doesn't matter when you have pricing power; in fact, abrupt drops in throughput make people even more desperate so that they can raise the freight rates even more.
I also live in Ames, Iowa, where the author resides. I live less than a mile from the track segment he is talking about, owned and operated by Union Pacific. While I'm pretty skeptical of this author's individual concerns given the twice-removed nature of the statements from their "source", trains have unmistakably gotten longer during my 15 years near these tracks, and they are moving faster.
A hazmat situation impacting only a one-mile radius around the tracks could effect up to 30 to 40 thousand people here. I interned for Union Pacific while in college, and yes, the company will state that safety is their number one priority, but it was very clear that their business was to profit by optimizing every single little part of their business for maximum efficiency. The company has an open distain for regulations, especially safety-related regulations, and did not shy away from sharing those views internally. I would not be at all surprised if crews are being abused, and safety sidelined, for the sake of maximizing profit.
That’s super interesting to me. It’ll take a disaster to fix it.
I worked in oil and gas for a while, and they were pathologically obsessed with safety. Like, “you’ll be fired for not using the handrail in the HQ stairwell” pathological. It was good! There was never a question about how to value a trade off.
Open disdain for safety regulations seems like a recipe for disaster.
Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.
It makes for a nice dog and pony show for the office workers who profess to care.
In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell" becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the rampant safety policy violations).
Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE, equipment interlocks and guards helping them out (lord knows they're running on blow and monster energy at least one day a month). They disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to be.
My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore and maple syrup land may be different.
When I was a Civil engineer with a bridge project that was over a railway, it was required that I take a safety class from BNSF about how to be near the rails, and what not to do. The first thing in the class was that they noted the e,regency exit from the room. (Iirc, the room had one door, to the outside, that we had just walked through to get in the room).
My sister was in oil & gas for about 15 years, up until a couple years ago.
The majors varied pretty dramatically in regards to safety. XOM, COP, and Shell were excellent. Chevron pretty good. BP was terrible - all safety theater without a whole lot of safety.
My sister was working at a competitor around the time Deepwater Horizon went down, and had previously worked at BP. She was not at all surprised that it happened to BP, and had complained to us around 2005 that BP was a disaster waiting to happen.
In the modern world, it’ll take a disaster for anyone to pay any attention at all, but all they have to do is wait a few weeks for everyone to pay attention to something else.
I've been to some customer hq/office sites in oil/chemical industries and experienced similar.
One place had indoor escalator that you weren't allowed to walk on and must always hold the handrail as well. When it was broken, you couldn't use it as stairs and instead had to take this terrifying (though likely very safe) elevator.
Another rule I liked was to not allow strangers on the boat when you're rowing across the river. What river? What boats? What year was this written?
The pathological obsession with safety in the industry is a smoke-screen used to shield them from liability when accidents inevitably occur.
They will find ways to blame employee error instead of taking responsibility when their own policies contribute to accidents, especially if there are fatalities. The dead guy probably did it to himself. It couldn't possibly be related to lack of sleep, lack of maintenance of important tools in use at the time, etc.
It is definitely one industry where HR has the company's back and you are fucked if you raise any issues with them. I had a situation where I violated a company policy on location one time and this violation caused my crew and therefore the company, to be kicked off the location and replaced by a competitor's crew with a competing tool. This resulted in a nice meeting with my Field Service Manager (my direct boss), my Regional Service Manager (his direct boss), and a person whom I discovered after the meeting was a company lawyer who was present only to document my clear failure so that they could justify termination.
Questions were asked by my bosses and I responded with truthful answers and long-winded descriptions of the thought processes behind those actions. When they ran out of questions and thought they had clearly documented that I broke the company's rules about what I could tell clients about their tool's performance and that termination was justified, the lawyer introduced himself to me. I had had no idea who he was up to then, he was just a suit with a notepad who spent his time there taking notes.
He thanked me for my thoughtful replies and turned to my bosses and told them that they could not fire me since the client had specifically asked me to answer his question based on my own personal experiences and that when I answered I was careful to base my answer only on my own personal experience - for better or worse. Additionally, since they knew that the experiences that I used in answering the client's questions were true and not embellished (they both had direct knowledge of the problems I had encountered and later described), there were no grounds to terminate.
Up to that point I had no idea that they were trying to terminate me. Basically, the company policy was to parrot the marketing bullshit and lie to the client about tool performance characteristics under adverse conditions.
When the lawyer had delivered the bad news to them he stood up and extended his hand, thanked me for my time and told me to keep up the good work.
I was fortunate that I had been able to send resumes several weeks before while I was recuperating from job-related knee surgery. One of those resumes ended up giving my life back to me and allowing me to expand my career and eventually become a consultant to the industry. Though its been thirty years now I can still say - Fuck Scumbagger.
That same UP line goes east into Illinois. They aren't running 3-mile long trains out here at the edge of the Chicago metro. I wonder where they draw the line.
I actually thought that this article was going to be about the inability to hire train crews. The commuter rail in Chicago is run in partnership with the freight lines. The one I use is operated by UP. I've overheard that the reason they haven't added more trains is that they can't hire more train crews. On my line, there are 21 trains in and 21 out on weekdays - a fraction of the pre-pandemic service levels. They are getting to the point where many trains a so crowded that people have to stand in the aisles and really need to add more service.
Part of the problem with train crews is the Department of Transportation's antiquated laws on cannabis. You can't hire anyone who's used it in the last 90 days, that's a pretty huge fraction of the country. Actually you can't even hire them with the understanding that they need to stop immediately and be clean in 90 days, they have to have been clean for 90 days before applying on the DOT form or their application will bounce immediately.
Instead of reforming that law, or telling railroads to deal with it and pay more/reduce capacity, they're just gonna bend the safety laws instead.
Same problem applies to government and clearance jobs. FBI has said they can't find anyone to hire because everyone smokes pot now and that it's a problem for their hiring pipeline.
I live along the UP west line and saw, for the first time in my life a week or so ago a mid-train locomotive. I think they are running longer trains than you imagine.
> For myself: I believe it is Wall Street greed and investor demands. 16,450-foot trains weighing more than 42 million pounds are gratifying someone with power. Someone who wants it all and more. I believe it is those few, who live nowhere near here, who own their own private islands and jets. This is far removed from laissez faire economics, or the neo liberal model, coming out of the 1980s.
This was an incredibly common economic outlook coming from the Midwest and South. It's both tickling and sad to hear. I do love the way this was written, and those PSR trains sound like a nightmare. When I worked the network engineering desk for a Class I railroad we took derails seriously to the extent of pulling anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers themselves. That wasn't that long ago either but it sounds like a lot has changed.
Help me understand why Wall Street greed would prefer trains that derail to ones that don’t? (The machismo argument, sure, I get, though it’s unsubstantiated; one could just as easily try to pin it on urban environmentalists.)
But if the derailments are <X% of the trains, and the rest of the trains are more cost-effective enough to make up for those, especially if the costs of the derailment to the environment, communities, and employees and such are externalized away from the MBA making these decisions, then they may decide it is worthwhile.
This is one of the reasons so many people have varying levels of distaste aimed at "MBAs"... it's not that hard to train people to push numbers around in any number of industries. It's easy to equip somebody with an MBA capable of doing that. Heck, based on what I've seen of MBA training, it's trivial compared to an engineering degree, no offense particularly intended, but it really isn't that hard to tell whether this number is bigger than that number, even with some statistics thrown in. The problem is that there is no way to scale up understanding all the details that are not and perhaps even can not be in the numbers, and that's where the MBAs can go trampling over companies.
I'm sure the numbers on these jumbo trains look great, even accounting for the derailments. I'm sure of that because the fact they're running them is pretty much proof of that. If the numbers weren't good, they never would have become popular enough to be worth writing about in the first place. The question is, what about the things not in the numbers? That I can't speak to and must defer to people with experience in the industry. So must the MBAs, but they are trained, deliberately or otherwise, not to.
They don't prefer trains that derail. The just hate the measures which prevent the derailment. I assume the reasons are many, but here's some reasonable guesses, based on things I've heard in similar scenarios:
* The people that live along the tracks should be grateful that the trains are crashing and spilling stuff on their land because they "create jobs" (hundreds of miles away not affecting anyone associated with the normal land use).
* The religion of "regulation is always bad". Usually associated with blame that the existing regulations are really the problem - the increase in accidents after loosening the regs is just coincidence.
* The cost of derailments is less than the extra profit of running unsafely. Anyone complaining about their dead overworked family members can be pointed at a different exhuasted worker making a mistake, so it's not like they have any culpability.
* Maintenance costs too much and would hurt our bottom line! (also look over here instead: record profits!)
> Help me understand why Wall Street greed would prefer trains that derail to ones that don’t?
I don't know if it is true that they _prefer_ trains that derail vs ones that do not. I can try to understand their _incentives_ though.
I would assume that they are incentivized to make money _this quarter_ or _this year_. I would also assume that they aren't really _caring_ about consequences that are not _fiscal_.
Given these two incentives, if someone asked me "Should we ship this train that might derail?" I wouldn't say "no". I would ask "what are the fiscal consequences if it does?" and "How much does it cost to not?"
Famous Fight Club quote about recalls and such. Same thing with companies breaking the rules in exchange for some sort of fine. It's not that they _want to break the rules_ it's that it's they are _incentivized_ to make the choice that _increases their odds of fiscal growth_.
Well, part of what the article alludes to is an erosion of decency and safety culture. I don't remember the specific rules, but I do remember that trains had to be cautious making a ton of noise in cities, so they'd have entire areas where they can't use their horn, or where they can only use their horn, they have automated speed and brake checks, they have limits on the length of trains for certain tracks, etc...
When he's saying he's backing a 3-mile train into a depot, that's nothing to shake a stick at. That means nearby residents have to endure rail noise for the entire time the train overshoots the entrance and while it backs in, it means signals within a given radius must be down, even though a train may not be inbound, it means that the heavier a train gets the more unstable it's load can become on certain track and when it derails can cause catastrophic devestation to the environment (he mentioned carrying hazmat).
These all used to be pretty blueprint safety evaluations from what I knew. If things have changed then our perspective or priorities have changed, and I think that's what the author is getting at.
There are two main source of profit in the modern world. The first is exclusivity of market opportunity, through monopoly (including those "partial" monopolies provided by network effects), copyright, patent, regulatory capture, etc. The second place that profit comes from is in taking on liabilities that either you will not be required to pay, or not be able to pay. Uninsured borrowing doesn't really evoke the kind of evil that is really at play here, but it's an appropriate term.
More subtle is when the people making decisions (ie in the c-suite, board) have payoff curves that are substantially different from the company's payoff curve. Risking train derailment strikes me as being in this category. These schemes can be deeply convoluted. The author implies that there is substantial, uninsurable risk to cities that is implicitly taken on by any freight carrier. Holding everything else equal, increasing revenue while increasing the potential damage to a city is a potential source of profit.
Presumably because cost of derailments is less than amount of profits that would not be made if everything wasn't pushed to its breaking point.
I think the point of the article is that given the hazardous nature of much of the cargo being transported, there's no room for such gambling here, and yet it's being done routinely.
Market forces can, temporarily (but temporary can be any length of time that isn't forever), lead to impossible to sustain behaviors.
Here is a just so story:
Lets say you are CEO of a train company. You need $500M in income each quarter to pay salaries and stay solvent. You are barely breaking even, and if you have to borrow money it will be at terrible terms that you realistically can't afford to pay back. Your competitor starts running trains that are 3 times longer, and therefore can undercut you on price. If you don't lower your prices you will get almost no business and you will have to lay off workers or take a loan you can't pay back to meet payroll. If you lower prices you will lose money on every shipment and will have to take a loan. You decide to just start running the longer trains as well. You may have a suspicion that this is unsafe and that long term the costs of increased insurance and repairs to tracks and lawsuits to dead workers will cost far more than what you save running longer trains, but also you aren't sure of that. It will take years to know for sure, and you don't have the capital stay in business long enough to bet that your competitor will go bankrupt.
I suspect it’s related to a lack of immediate cost to the largest companies.
Derailments are still infrequent enough that the company can be insured against the losses, so if derailments happen, there’s effectively zero cost to the company.
That would change if this class of train made incidents so frequent that insurance companies were no longer willing to sell insurance for derailments incidents involving this type of train. At that point, they’d be phased out of the fleet (as they crashed out of service) and then individually written off as a tax-deductible loss.
They don't prefer trains that derail, but (if the article is to be believed, which I can't say) they prefer to chip away at the safety margins (which cost money) until it's only the experience of the (train) engineer that keeps the train on the tracks. Of course, you could say that's always the case, but I can imagine that it gets harder and harder to do it the longer the train is.
Derailments are a red herring here. The real issue being raised by the writer is: shifts on these "monster" trains are too long and employees are burning out.
It may not be obvious that the size of the trains are causing derailments, or at least not to the "Wall Street People". Your comment assumes that everyone has perfect information and asses the available information in an unbiased purely rational way, but in reality that's often not the case.
(No opinion if this actually is the cause, or what the dynamics are here; I don't know anything about trains or the businesses surrounding them.)
If you carry an egg carton a day from the producer to the market to make 50% profit, you stand to gain much more in aggregate by increasing your throughput to two egg cartons a day, even if this introduces a 10% risk of dropping them both, losing both the profit and investment.
If there is some kind of a moral incentive not to drop eggs, it is not reflected in the profit incentive.
Why are these monster trains preferable at all? They apparently need distributed locomotives, which means that the number of cars per locomotive isn’t actually substantially larger than a group of smaller trains. So they save a couple engineers per monster train at the cost of lower utilization (due to inefficiencies of loading and unloading)? What’s the corresponding benefit?
You might as well ask why Wall Street doesn't prefer trains with 3 cars and 1 loc. Much safer - but not optimising their profits. A guy who hitches a 4th car beats everyone.
So trains are optimised for profit. Now if your trains never derail, that means you may still have safety margin. There may be profit for the taking!!!
So keep optimising till it goes wrong. Then, figure out the cost of "going wrong". Figure that into your margins. If you get 99% delivery with 110% profit, does that beat 100% delivery for 100% profit?
TL;DR: that's how free markets work in capitalism. They optimise for profit.
This part stood out to me also, but mostly for the fact that it seemed poorly substantiated.
The fact of the matter is BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific are majority owned by institutional investors (Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, Capital World Investors, etc.) Those institutions are managing these investments on behalf of large capital pools–insurance company float, pension funds, 401ks, etc. Who does all that capital belong to (or who are its beneficiaries)? Regular Americans. Very likely included? The author himself!
While I have no particular interest or knowledge of the rail industry, I am moved by the issues highlighted by the author. However, I think his call to conspiratorial instincts ("a few rich people are working us to death to fund their nth private island") is bad, dangerous logic.
It's even worse than that - a single person working you to death for his private island could be sated, could have a change of heart, could reduce the workload.
Everything is managed by managers for the same managers - there's literally nobody in charge; the bureaucracy perpetuates the bureaucracy for the sake of the bureaucracy.
> Those institutions are managing these investments on behalf of large capital pools–insurance company float, pension funds, 401ks, etc. Who does all that capital belong to (or who are its beneficiaries)? Regular Americans. Very likely included? The author himself!
The Federal Reserve survey of consumer finances shows that the majority of equity is held by a small percent of people.
Various shifts by corporations and government over the years have happened to raise the social security age, disrupt job security, unions and pensions, and shift middle class retirement funds into the stock market. None of this have had much impact other than that ownership of equity on the minority side of the equation may now be more widely distributed.
They are especially a nightmare when you get stuck at a crossing with no other way around them (no bridges). I sat at a crossing for over 15 minutes waiting for a extremely long train to pass.
It gets even worse when you live near a place that has the train come to a compelete stop so that cars can be unhitched, taken off to a side rail, then have the engine reverse to connect back to the rest of the cars, for it to finally slowly pull away. The small town I lived it was forced to build a second fire department as the only one would get stuck behind trains delaying help. They evenutally built a new access road with a bridge over the tracks.
There's an area in SE Portland where trains regularly take an hour or more to pass. Many of the streets that get blocked are one-way or really have no alternate once you are on them. It takes the cooperation and coordination of a lots of drivers and vehicles to prevent the effective shutdown of 40+ square blocks when these crossings happen a few times a day.
Yeah, tracks have little huts every so often next to the track. These huts provide an uplink and various routing equipment that connects to track side safety equipment eg: there's big microphone arrays that listen to the wheels and brakes for deformities, automated switches will generally link into these if there's a switch nearby. Any change could influence a derailment, for instance if the track didn't switch and the train was going too fast for it's new destination. Therefore, anyone with their name on a change within a radius of the crash site gets interviewed, the dispatcher is removed and interviewed immediately.
The government data I am able to find does not seem to support the idea that there is a massive (or any) increase in derailments. And this letter never provides any data supporting the premise either.
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were 1,056 train derailments (both cargo and passenger) in the US in 2021. This was the lowest number in the dataset going back to 1975.
Ten years ago, it was 1,470 derailments. In the year 2000, it was over 2,000 derailments.
In reality, the data suggest we are on a strong downward trend in derailments per year.
Is this government data wrong? Or is this writer trying out a career in fiction?
Isn’t there a third option that both your interpretation of the data and the letter are wrong? The letter specifically mentions the derailment of monster trains. These trains have more cargo and so one derailment can lead to a more severe delay in shipping times.
I hope the third option is a bit more of just trying to take the situation in. This is someone sharing their experience, the executives running the show have their perspective as well. I'm not sure why we have to jump so quickly to "I found data that refutes this, is this person lying or is the data wrong?". Just seems to leave out so much nuance. Feels like a very tech industry "see the data and make a decision". This situation is so human, it's about fear and whether those fears are being considered.
I think the other important piece of data you would need to find is average train length over that same period of time. Fewer derailments could have just as much or a larger impact if the train length is growing.
I did find a GAO study that said that trains increased in length by 25% since 2008.
But the number of derailments dropped by more than 25% during that time, so the probability of a given car being involved in a derailed train still decreased.
There's been other coverage of the ironically named "precision scheduling" in the rail industry causing a lot of labor problems, because it makes for nightmarishly unpredictable schedules for workers. They never know when a train is going to leave until it is full, so after working a shift, workers stay in a hotel waiting for a return trip that they won't know about until 90-120 minutes ahead of departure. I am guessing that the claims around increased derailment may actually be about frustration with the work environment.
The average length isn’t enough because the likelihood of derailment might be a function of train length. It’s possible shorter trains have gotten safer and monster trains have gotten more dangerous due to their increasing length.
> According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were 1,056 train derailments (both cargo and passenger) in the US in 2021
The key word here might be "US". The letter writer is specifically talking about Iowa; are state-by-state statistics available?
If you've never spent time in the Midwest, you probably have never seen a train that's a mile or longer. Endless cars of agricultural products, often high fructose corn syrup. I saw this often growing up in Iowa, never in California. In the Bay Area, freight sometimes moves along the same tracks as Caltrain at night, but the trains are tiny in comparison to those of Iowa.
For a while, I think trains in Iowa were limited by how long a train was allowed to block a roadway (IIRC 10 minutes). I think trains were sized so at least in theory they could comply with the law when at speed. The law might have changed since, and/or maybe there aren't as many at-grade crossings anymore. (A painful intersection in my home town recently got grade separation.)
Other than a few years in L.A., I've lived my whole life within a mile of a rail line. It’s only in the last month that I have ever seen a mid-train locomotive. Something is definitely changing.
Out here in the west, I have seen longer trains in the past few years, but I've been seeing mile-long trains for years. I never saw trains with more than 150 cars before the last few years, though.
I think the author was trying to explain the risks they are taking and saying that it's only a matter of time until we start to see disasters similar to the one in 2004 but 100 times worse.
Derailments could be getting worse even with fewer of them. The author of the letter is talking about the trend towards monster trains which suggests fewer trains being run. Is the number of derailments per train going up? Is the impact of the larger trains derailing leading to more overall impact because each individual derailment is larger even though there are few of them?
If I run half as many twice as large trains I'd expect fewer total derailments even if these monster trains derail more often than the more normal trains of yesteryear.
The gross number of derailments isn't very meaningful, what you need is the derailments per train-miles-traveled, analogous to the collisions per vehicle-miles-traveled that is used for road safety. If we're running fewer trains, obviously we should expect fewer derailments.
As some other commenters have noted, it might be even more useful to get the total weight of derailed cargo, per (mass times distance), I suppose.
Is there comparable data on other countries? What is this a proxy for? (Track upkeep problems? Trains are too fast for the load? Signaling issues? Mechanical issues?)
Rail safety seems a lot less complex and pretty much as regulated as aviation safety, how come there aren't just ~1-2 per year? Is it just because fatalities are luckily fewer (due to the nature of these derailments) so no one really gives a shit?
It's just the forces of the trains. When it's not a derailment it's breaking them. They're doubling the running room for slack action^, for one. That's the least of the concern, but there's more potential for breakage because there's more potential for greater differences in velocity from one end of the train to the other. Topology also matters, previously consists here average 135 cars, but range from 115 to 150, they're 53' each. Usually they'll have 4-5 motors at 74' each. Suffice it to say, depending on the territory there can be huge force differentials generated which can break trains or rail, think cresting a grade on undulating hills. And you can "stringline" trains too, literally pull cars off the tracks, and it's exactly those forces that'd do it.
And then there's the human element. Nobody knows when they're going to work, how long it's going to take, what kind of bullshit they're going to run into. You can get stuck for long periods of time away from home terminal, and the Class 1 doesn't care. And there's things like rules on how to walk. The environment that's been constructed isn't meant for human consumption and it's taking a toll on the workforce. There's reams of other shit to whinge about.
And the derailments always matter, it's a total clusterfuck. They're not easy to fix, you've got to "bad order" and set out the car, at least by regulation. This involves rerailing, finding a set-out track, and making all the moves to get everything back in order. You've also got to wait for carmen (who are understaffed) and management, which depending on the route, could be a long sit. If it's bad enough it'll shut down traffic for a couple of days, requiring significant diversions around it while the Class 1 pays out the ass for a third party to come clean it all up and rerail shit.
None of the current infrastructure is built to deal with these train lengths, either, so everything moves slower. The fact the Surface Transportation Board had a hearing with the Class 1's, I think, is a pretty good indicator they're about as interested in moving goods as GE is in manufacturing.
^: Each coal car has two draw bars with +/- 2-3" about the same for shipping container cars (from eyeing it) of run built in. This varies with car, auto racks have way more run out. Opposing forces in the trainline will pull it apart, the more run to build the faster the opponent acceleration... This typically results in broken knuckles. But it is possible to just push cars off the rail with these forces, which is exacerbated by the doubled length.
I don't know if there's comparable data, but I can tell you the mining companies in north west Australia would routinely run 300+ car trains without incident. But these were very much a straight line from the mine to the port without much civilization in between.
Well in the UK there were 11 derailments total in 2020-21. The UK has roughly ~10,000 miles of railway and the USA ~150,000. Probably not a good comparison tbh. EU wide would probably be more appropriate but I couldn't find anything.
Perhaps there are different definitions of “derailed”.
After all one of the communication problems in this pandemic was that even technical, medical professionals could not agree on the definition of “airborne” as it relates to the public’s best interest.
it's easier to have less total derailments, but higher numbers of cars derailed.
Put every train car in the country on one train and derail it. Now 100% of the capacity was derailed, but it's an incredible success, because the number of train derailments shrank from 1056 to 1!
a few other people have made a few suggestions about interpreting the data, but i would also like to add that the writer is specifically citing "Monster Trains" and that may or may not affect the interpretation of data.
During the first covid summer, with a friend, we studied two interesting points for the future: oil consumption relative to GDP (irrelevant here), and what is sometime called demographic dividend, or how infrastructure spending during time of growth will allow an aging population an easier life in the future. Since we thought western countries to be all the same, we studied France and its infrastructure cost, then China, then the other Brics, plus Turkey and some ex-colonial nation that got f*cked off their own demographic dividend by the west.
What we are sure off: maintenance is immensly cheaper than construction, three to five order of magnitude in most cases, and improvement upon existing infrastructure is one to two order of magnitude cheaper. From this, we also concluded that subsidizing an almost empty line on the west coast during more than twenty year actually was a net positive operation for the French government, and killing small train tracks is in 99% of case a mistake.
My really friendly advice to americans, whatever their political leaning: do not kill your rail, improve on it even. This will be a net positive for your country, even if atm it seems like it is loosing you money. You can't afford to not maintain your infrastructure, or to forget about it.
Speaking with railroader friends changed my mind on train unions.
To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable, but speaking with people in the trenches has made me a believer in these unions, for whatever that is worth.
Us Americans have been brainwashed against unions. We have TV shows portraying "the lazy union worker". We have an entire political party dedicated to talking about how unions raise costs, are corrupt, and have burdensome dues. Any shop in the US that starts talk about unions will hire union busting PR firms and shove anti-union propaganda and fear mongering down employee's throats.
Americans hate unions because big business here has been effective at demonizing them.
This is an American board so we’re supposed to gasp in disbelief and/or be intrigued when someone says that a particular kind of union is not inherently evil.
Could you give examples of any kind? At the end you say "for whatever that is worth", but its worthiness is low given there are no specifics and I don't know you.
The first involved an engineer friend who literally "went off the rails" with one of these big trains. The union went to bat for him for six months or a year or something to try and protect his job. Ultimately they determined that he was at fault, but without the union he would have had no representation or recourse against the train company at all.
A number of others involve injury: the unions make it difficult to terminate employees who are injured on the job; we don't really hear about how dangerous train work is. The article mentions that the conductor is "two" or "three miles" down the track at the end of train.
That is a big deal, because the engineer doesn't necessarily have immediate feedback on when to stop. I've seen with my own eyes guys on the ground trying to guide one of these super-long trains into the yard to connect to other cars and that is some scary stuff.
Finally, furloughs. I've had friends who were furloughed from their jobs at the train companies for years and had to go get a job at a grocery store stocking shelves. The train industry seems so have some regulation games going on at the governmental level and the union level. I'm not sure these guys would ever get their jobs back, with seniority, without union bargaining and playing interference with government.
Okay but Lac Megantic had nothing to do with "monster trains" iirc. Understaffing maybe, but not monster trains.
AFAIK, the Lac Megantic disaster happened like this: A train was parked at the top of a hill, the locomotive that was powering the pneumatic brake was failing and smoking, and the conductor did not manually set enough of the manual back-up hand-brakes to keep the train in place if the failing locomotive was shut off and brake-pressure was lost, and he failed to properly test the hand brakes before leaving for the night. The brakes failed and so it went down hill while trying to break, which naturally led to sparks, fire, derailment, and ultimately explosion.
More manpower or supervision could've prevented the disaster, or better maintenance on the locomotive. Or better automation on brakes.
But it was not a matter of length, which seems to be the main thrust of this article.
This calls for (not really) malicious compliance. There is a phone number at all train crossings (at least in my state) to call and let them know if there are issues or if a train made you wait too long. The amount of time you can be made to wait at a crossing varies by state. Find out that time, and call the number posted at the crossing or look it up in advance and complain every time your wait violates the law/rules. You will get train size reduced. Get everyone you know to call in and enforce the rules. I call every time I have to wait longer than the rule.
Definitions matter for laws. Switching in this context is not yard switching, as that is limited to the yard. It is only for actual trains switching tracks. The railroad often abuses the yard switching with stopped trains blocking intersections for long periods of time. That violates both the definition of switching (because yard switching is only done within a yard by definition and definition is what matters for legal statutes) and normal switching only applies "when the train is in motion" for the Idaho statute. Either way, call the number and complain. Malicious compliance has power.
Readit News
There were a lot of systems in place to monitor rolling stock:
- Wheel Impact Detectors
- Hotbox detectors
- Acoustic bearing detectors
- Truck performance detectors
To name just a few. There were also efforts to monitor the railway infrastructure. The things I remember:
- Rail stress management (rails need to be under the right amount of stress, which of course varies with temperature)
- Top of rail friction management
- Rail profile management (the name eludes me, but the idea is you want the interface between the rail and wheel to meet certain parameters)
I worked on the rolling stock side measuring wheel impacts, overloads, imbalances, and a handful of more esoteric metrics. One of the outputs of these measurements was a train consist. For each of our locations we were able to build up the consist of the entire train (which was a fun CS problem in itself).
I stared at a lot of consists over the years. In North America I never saw anything longer than about 100 cars and 2-4 locos. However, in Northwest Australia they routinely ran 300 car trains meeting the description in this article. But, the reason they could get away with that is they were running a straight shot from the heart of the Pilbara to one of the port towns on the north west shoulder (Karratha and Port Hedland).
I need to check in with my old colleagues and see if things have changed. It wouldn't surprise me if train lengths have gotten longer, but I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit.
As someone mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there are a lot of single track corridors. It's bad enough when one train has to sidetrack. It's really bad when a train takes out the whole corridor. These aren't packet switched networks. It's not easy to reroute. And it's really expensive and difficult to lay new rail.
https://youtu.be/Q0rk5tnrFqA?t=9300
That would be true in a non-monopolistic situation, but it's well known from the investor side that what the railroads are doing around rates is driven by collusion and lack of regulation.
CSX stock was at $8 in 2016 and is at ~$33.50 now. There is no amount of throughput increase that could drive those financial results. You could lever up your cap structure with tons of debt (even 6-7x) and not even get close to this kind of return on equity.
Throughput doesn't matter when you have pricing power; in fact, abrupt drops in throughput make people even more desperate so that they can raise the freight rates even more.
Throughput optimization destroying latency- sounds like bufferbloat!
A hazmat situation impacting only a one-mile radius around the tracks could effect up to 30 to 40 thousand people here. I interned for Union Pacific while in college, and yes, the company will state that safety is their number one priority, but it was very clear that their business was to profit by optimizing every single little part of their business for maximum efficiency. The company has an open distain for regulations, especially safety-related regulations, and did not shy away from sharing those views internally. I would not be at all surprised if crews are being abused, and safety sidelined, for the sake of maximizing profit.
I worked in oil and gas for a while, and they were pathologically obsessed with safety. Like, “you’ll be fired for not using the handrail in the HQ stairwell” pathological. It was good! There was never a question about how to value a trade off.
Open disdain for safety regulations seems like a recipe for disaster.
In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell" becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the rampant safety policy violations).
Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE, equipment interlocks and guards helping them out (lord knows they're running on blow and monster energy at least one day a month). They disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to be.
My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore and maple syrup land may be different.
The majors varied pretty dramatically in regards to safety. XOM, COP, and Shell were excellent. Chevron pretty good. BP was terrible - all safety theater without a whole lot of safety.
My sister was working at a competitor around the time Deepwater Horizon went down, and had previously worked at BP. She was not at all surprised that it happened to BP, and had complained to us around 2005 that BP was a disaster waiting to happen.
One place had indoor escalator that you weren't allowed to walk on and must always hold the handrail as well. When it was broken, you couldn't use it as stairs and instead had to take this terrifying (though likely very safe) elevator.
Another rule I liked was to not allow strangers on the boat when you're rowing across the river. What river? What boats? What year was this written?
It didn't happen in the US, but it has happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
They will find ways to blame employee error instead of taking responsibility when their own policies contribute to accidents, especially if there are fatalities. The dead guy probably did it to himself. It couldn't possibly be related to lack of sleep, lack of maintenance of important tools in use at the time, etc.
It is definitely one industry where HR has the company's back and you are fucked if you raise any issues with them. I had a situation where I violated a company policy on location one time and this violation caused my crew and therefore the company, to be kicked off the location and replaced by a competitor's crew with a competing tool. This resulted in a nice meeting with my Field Service Manager (my direct boss), my Regional Service Manager (his direct boss), and a person whom I discovered after the meeting was a company lawyer who was present only to document my clear failure so that they could justify termination.
Questions were asked by my bosses and I responded with truthful answers and long-winded descriptions of the thought processes behind those actions. When they ran out of questions and thought they had clearly documented that I broke the company's rules about what I could tell clients about their tool's performance and that termination was justified, the lawyer introduced himself to me. I had had no idea who he was up to then, he was just a suit with a notepad who spent his time there taking notes.
He thanked me for my thoughtful replies and turned to my bosses and told them that they could not fire me since the client had specifically asked me to answer his question based on my own personal experiences and that when I answered I was careful to base my answer only on my own personal experience - for better or worse. Additionally, since they knew that the experiences that I used in answering the client's questions were true and not embellished (they both had direct knowledge of the problems I had encountered and later described), there were no grounds to terminate.
Up to that point I had no idea that they were trying to terminate me. Basically, the company policy was to parrot the marketing bullshit and lie to the client about tool performance characteristics under adverse conditions.
When the lawyer had delivered the bad news to them he stood up and extended his hand, thanked me for my time and told me to keep up the good work.
I was fortunate that I had been able to send resumes several weeks before while I was recuperating from job-related knee surgery. One of those resumes ended up giving my life back to me and allowing me to expand my career and eventually become a consultant to the industry. Though its been thirty years now I can still say - Fuck Scumbagger.
I actually thought that this article was going to be about the inability to hire train crews. The commuter rail in Chicago is run in partnership with the freight lines. The one I use is operated by UP. I've overheard that the reason they haven't added more trains is that they can't hire more train crews. On my line, there are 21 trains in and 21 out on weekdays - a fraction of the pre-pandemic service levels. They are getting to the point where many trains a so crowded that people have to stand in the aisles and really need to add more service.
Instead of reforming that law, or telling railroads to deal with it and pay more/reduce capacity, they're just gonna bend the safety laws instead.
Same problem applies to government and clearance jobs. FBI has said they can't find anyone to hire because everyone smokes pot now and that it's a problem for their hiring pipeline.
This was an incredibly common economic outlook coming from the Midwest and South. It's both tickling and sad to hear. I do love the way this was written, and those PSR trains sound like a nightmare. When I worked the network engineering desk for a Class I railroad we took derails seriously to the extent of pulling anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers themselves. That wasn't that long ago either but it sounds like a lot has changed.
But if the derailments are <X% of the trains, and the rest of the trains are more cost-effective enough to make up for those, especially if the costs of the derailment to the environment, communities, and employees and such are externalized away from the MBA making these decisions, then they may decide it is worthwhile.
This is one of the reasons so many people have varying levels of distaste aimed at "MBAs"... it's not that hard to train people to push numbers around in any number of industries. It's easy to equip somebody with an MBA capable of doing that. Heck, based on what I've seen of MBA training, it's trivial compared to an engineering degree, no offense particularly intended, but it really isn't that hard to tell whether this number is bigger than that number, even with some statistics thrown in. The problem is that there is no way to scale up understanding all the details that are not and perhaps even can not be in the numbers, and that's where the MBAs can go trampling over companies.
I'm sure the numbers on these jumbo trains look great, even accounting for the derailments. I'm sure of that because the fact they're running them is pretty much proof of that. If the numbers weren't good, they never would have become popular enough to be worth writing about in the first place. The question is, what about the things not in the numbers? That I can't speak to and must defer to people with experience in the industry. So must the MBAs, but they are trained, deliberately or otherwise, not to.
* The people that live along the tracks should be grateful that the trains are crashing and spilling stuff on their land because they "create jobs" (hundreds of miles away not affecting anyone associated with the normal land use).
* The religion of "regulation is always bad". Usually associated with blame that the existing regulations are really the problem - the increase in accidents after loosening the regs is just coincidence.
* The cost of derailments is less than the extra profit of running unsafely. Anyone complaining about their dead overworked family members can be pointed at a different exhuasted worker making a mistake, so it's not like they have any culpability.
* Maintenance costs too much and would hurt our bottom line! (also look over here instead: record profits!)
I don't know if it is true that they _prefer_ trains that derail vs ones that do not. I can try to understand their _incentives_ though.
I would assume that they are incentivized to make money _this quarter_ or _this year_. I would also assume that they aren't really _caring_ about consequences that are not _fiscal_.
Given these two incentives, if someone asked me "Should we ship this train that might derail?" I wouldn't say "no". I would ask "what are the fiscal consequences if it does?" and "How much does it cost to not?"
Famous Fight Club quote about recalls and such. Same thing with companies breaking the rules in exchange for some sort of fine. It's not that they _want to break the rules_ it's that it's they are _incentivized_ to make the choice that _increases their odds of fiscal growth_.
When he's saying he's backing a 3-mile train into a depot, that's nothing to shake a stick at. That means nearby residents have to endure rail noise for the entire time the train overshoots the entrance and while it backs in, it means signals within a given radius must be down, even though a train may not be inbound, it means that the heavier a train gets the more unstable it's load can become on certain track and when it derails can cause catastrophic devestation to the environment (he mentioned carrying hazmat).
These all used to be pretty blueprint safety evaluations from what I knew. If things have changed then our perspective or priorities have changed, and I think that's what the author is getting at.
More subtle is when the people making decisions (ie in the c-suite, board) have payoff curves that are substantially different from the company's payoff curve. Risking train derailment strikes me as being in this category. These schemes can be deeply convoluted. The author implies that there is substantial, uninsurable risk to cities that is implicitly taken on by any freight carrier. Holding everything else equal, increasing revenue while increasing the potential damage to a city is a potential source of profit.
I think the point of the article is that given the hazardous nature of much of the cargo being transported, there's no room for such gambling here, and yet it's being done routinely.
Here is a just so story:
Lets say you are CEO of a train company. You need $500M in income each quarter to pay salaries and stay solvent. You are barely breaking even, and if you have to borrow money it will be at terrible terms that you realistically can't afford to pay back. Your competitor starts running trains that are 3 times longer, and therefore can undercut you on price. If you don't lower your prices you will get almost no business and you will have to lay off workers or take a loan you can't pay back to meet payroll. If you lower prices you will lose money on every shipment and will have to take a loan. You decide to just start running the longer trains as well. You may have a suspicion that this is unsafe and that long term the costs of increased insurance and repairs to tracks and lawsuits to dead workers will cost far more than what you save running longer trains, but also you aren't sure of that. It will take years to know for sure, and you don't have the capital stay in business long enough to bet that your competitor will go bankrupt.
They calculated that the cost of lawsuits from people hurt by the car defects will be lower than the cost of fixing the defect itself.
Simply put: if they can externalize costs on society, they will.
Derailments are still infrequent enough that the company can be insured against the losses, so if derailments happen, there’s effectively zero cost to the company.
That would change if this class of train made incidents so frequent that insurance companies were no longer willing to sell insurance for derailments incidents involving this type of train. At that point, they’d be phased out of the fleet (as they crashed out of service) and then individually written off as a tax-deductible loss.
A railroad engineer is going to value longevity/consistency, and lives to minimize (rather than capitalize) risk.
The two are not going to make good bed fellows.
Because they can offload most of the costs of the derailments as externalities while pocketing the money from larger trains.
(No opinion if this actually is the cause, or what the dynamics are here; I don't know anything about trains or the businesses surrounding them.)
Deleted Comment
If there is some kind of a moral incentive not to drop eggs, it is not reflected in the profit incentive.
So trains are optimised for profit. Now if your trains never derail, that means you may still have safety margin. There may be profit for the taking!!!
So keep optimising till it goes wrong. Then, figure out the cost of "going wrong". Figure that into your margins. If you get 99% delivery with 110% profit, does that beat 100% delivery for 100% profit?
TL;DR: that's how free markets work in capitalism. They optimise for profit.
The fact of the matter is BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific are majority owned by institutional investors (Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, Capital World Investors, etc.) Those institutions are managing these investments on behalf of large capital pools–insurance company float, pension funds, 401ks, etc. Who does all that capital belong to (or who are its beneficiaries)? Regular Americans. Very likely included? The author himself!
While I have no particular interest or knowledge of the rail industry, I am moved by the issues highlighted by the author. However, I think his call to conspiratorial instincts ("a few rich people are working us to death to fund their nth private island") is bad, dangerous logic.
Everything is managed by managers for the same managers - there's literally nobody in charge; the bureaucracy perpetuates the bureaucracy for the sake of the bureaucracy.
http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/n...
The Federal Reserve survey of consumer finances shows that the majority of equity is held by a small percent of people.
Various shifts by corporations and government over the years have happened to raise the social security age, disrupt job security, unions and pensions, and shift middle class retirement funds into the stock market. None of this have had much impact other than that ownership of equity on the minority side of the equation may now be more widely distributed.
They are especially a nightmare when you get stuck at a crossing with no other way around them (no bridges). I sat at a crossing for over 15 minutes waiting for a extremely long train to pass.
It gets even worse when you live near a place that has the train come to a compelete stop so that cars can be unhitched, taken off to a side rail, then have the engine reverse to connect back to the rest of the cars, for it to finally slowly pull away. The small town I lived it was forced to build a second fire department as the only one would get stuck behind trains delaying help. They evenutally built a new access road with a bridge over the tracks.
I’m not up on railway lingo, can you expand on this?
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were 1,056 train derailments (both cargo and passenger) in the US in 2021. This was the lowest number in the dataset going back to 1975.
Ten years ago, it was 1,470 derailments. In the year 2000, it was over 2,000 derailments.
In reality, the data suggest we are on a strong downward trend in derailments per year.
Is this government data wrong? Or is this writer trying out a career in fiction?
Data: https://www.bts.gov/content/train-fatalities-injuries-and-ac...
I hope the third option is a bit more of just trying to take the situation in. This is someone sharing their experience, the executives running the show have their perspective as well. I'm not sure why we have to jump so quickly to "I found data that refutes this, is this person lying or is the data wrong?". Just seems to leave out so much nuance. Feels like a very tech industry "see the data and make a decision". This situation is so human, it's about fear and whether those fears are being considered.
But the number of derailments dropped by more than 25% during that time, so the probability of a given car being involved in a derailed train still decreased.
There's been other coverage of the ironically named "precision scheduling" in the rail industry causing a lot of labor problems, because it makes for nightmarishly unpredictable schedules for workers. They never know when a train is going to leave until it is full, so after working a shift, workers stay in a hotel waiting for a return trip that they won't know about until 90-120 minutes ahead of departure. I am guessing that the claims around increased derailment may actually be about frustration with the work environment.
The key word here might be "US". The letter writer is specifically talking about Iowa; are state-by-state statistics available?
If you've never spent time in the Midwest, you probably have never seen a train that's a mile or longer. Endless cars of agricultural products, often high fructose corn syrup. I saw this often growing up in Iowa, never in California. In the Bay Area, freight sometimes moves along the same tracks as Caltrain at night, but the trains are tiny in comparison to those of Iowa.
For a while, I think trains in Iowa were limited by how long a train was allowed to block a roadway (IIRC 10 minutes). I think trains were sized so at least in theory they could comply with the law when at speed. The law might have changed since, and/or maybe there aren't as many at-grade crossings anymore. (A painful intersection in my home town recently got grade separation.)
https://cen.acs.org/articles/82/i27/TRAIN-DERAILS-CHLORINE-L....
If I run half as many twice as large trains I'd expect fewer total derailments even if these monster trains derail more often than the more normal trains of yesteryear.
As some other commenters have noted, it might be even more useful to get the total weight of derailed cargo, per (mass times distance), I suppose.
Rail safety seems a lot less complex and pretty much as regulated as aviation safety, how come there aren't just ~1-2 per year? Is it just because fatalities are luckily fewer (due to the nature of these derailments) so no one really gives a shit?
And then there's the human element. Nobody knows when they're going to work, how long it's going to take, what kind of bullshit they're going to run into. You can get stuck for long periods of time away from home terminal, and the Class 1 doesn't care. And there's things like rules on how to walk. The environment that's been constructed isn't meant for human consumption and it's taking a toll on the workforce. There's reams of other shit to whinge about.
And the derailments always matter, it's a total clusterfuck. They're not easy to fix, you've got to "bad order" and set out the car, at least by regulation. This involves rerailing, finding a set-out track, and making all the moves to get everything back in order. You've also got to wait for carmen (who are understaffed) and management, which depending on the route, could be a long sit. If it's bad enough it'll shut down traffic for a couple of days, requiring significant diversions around it while the Class 1 pays out the ass for a third party to come clean it all up and rerail shit.
None of the current infrastructure is built to deal with these train lengths, either, so everything moves slower. The fact the Surface Transportation Board had a hearing with the Class 1's, I think, is a pretty good indicator they're about as interested in moving goods as GE is in manufacturing.
^: Each coal car has two draw bars with +/- 2-3" about the same for shipping container cars (from eyeing it) of run built in. This varies with car, auto racks have way more run out. Opposing forces in the trainline will pull it apart, the more run to build the faster the opponent acceleration... This typically results in broken knuckles. But it is possible to just push cars off the rail with these forces, which is exacerbated by the doubled length.
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1999/rail-safety-2020-20...
After all one of the communication problems in this pandemic was that even technical, medical professionals could not agree on the definition of “airborne” as it relates to the public’s best interest.
Put every train car in the country on one train and derail it. Now 100% of the capacity was derailed, but it's an incredible success, because the number of train derailments shrank from 1056 to 1!
So much safety!
still, awesome that you went to check the source.
Dead Comment
What we are sure off: maintenance is immensly cheaper than construction, three to five order of magnitude in most cases, and improvement upon existing infrastructure is one to two order of magnitude cheaper. From this, we also concluded that subsidizing an almost empty line on the west coast during more than twenty year actually was a net positive operation for the French government, and killing small train tracks is in 99% of case a mistake.
My really friendly advice to americans, whatever their political leaning: do not kill your rail, improve on it even. This will be a net positive for your country, even if atm it seems like it is loosing you money. You can't afford to not maintain your infrastructure, or to forget about it.
To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable, but speaking with people in the trenches has made me a believer in these unions, for whatever that is worth.
? To someone in the EU, it sounds bizarre that they would NOT have a union.
Americans hate unions because big business here has been effective at demonizing them.
The first involved an engineer friend who literally "went off the rails" with one of these big trains. The union went to bat for him for six months or a year or something to try and protect his job. Ultimately they determined that he was at fault, but without the union he would have had no representation or recourse against the train company at all.
A number of others involve injury: the unions make it difficult to terminate employees who are injured on the job; we don't really hear about how dangerous train work is. The article mentions that the conductor is "two" or "three miles" down the track at the end of train.
That is a big deal, because the engineer doesn't necessarily have immediate feedback on when to stop. I've seen with my own eyes guys on the ground trying to guide one of these super-long trains into the yard to connect to other cars and that is some scary stuff.
Finally, furloughs. I've had friends who were furloughed from their jobs at the train companies for years and had to go get a job at a grocery store stocking shelves. The train industry seems so have some regulation games going on at the governmental level and the union level. I'm not sure these guys would ever get their jobs back, with seniority, without union bargaining and playing interference with government.
Deleted Comment
I still can't get over how little view count this video got
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/891/bande-dessin...
AFAIK, the Lac Megantic disaster happened like this: A train was parked at the top of a hill, the locomotive that was powering the pneumatic brake was failing and smoking, and the conductor did not manually set enough of the manual back-up hand-brakes to keep the train in place if the failing locomotive was shut off and brake-pressure was lost, and he failed to properly test the hand brakes before leaving for the night. The brakes failed and so it went down hill while trying to break, which naturally led to sparks, fire, derailment, and ultimately explosion.
More manpower or supervision could've prevented the disaster, or better maintenance on the locomotive. Or better automation on brakes.
But it was not a matter of length, which seems to be the main thrust of this article.
They put up a 15 minute limit, but then put in "Oh, but so long as the train is doing 'SOMETHING' then that limit doesn't count".
[1] https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/title49/t...