There are several viewpoints for every issue. The implementation of Remotely Controlled Locomotives in yard service by the Class I railroads in the United States is a case in point. A Remotely Controlled Locomotive (RCL) is one where the operator (a locomotive engineer with a federally mandated license or in the case of the Class 1 carriers, possibly a clueless trainman with two weeks total training) controlling the movement of the locomotive and the cars to which it is coupled is removed from the locomotive's operating cab. An employee on the ground operates a radio transmitter strapped to a belt (belt pack or "Belly Pack") sending signals to a receiver in the locomotive that controls the movement of the locomotive and coupled train. This allows the operator to not only directly control the movement of a draft of cars but to also throw switches and couple and uncouple the cars as required.

Viewpoint number one: The railroad companies and the RCL manufacturers.
The obvious benefit for the railroad is the elimination of the engineer for use elsewhere and increased productivity of the ground personnel. Productivity vs. cost is an issue that any manager can appreciate since one of the primary functions of management is getting more out of the employees for less. Simply lay your hands on the monitor in front of you and you can feel the warm, fuzzy snugness of managers everywhere sharing their contentment at the very thought.

The manufacturers of the RCL technology have spend million of dollars in R&D and stand to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profits when they sell their product to the railroads and the railroad's huge investment in RCL technology demands that the technology be "proven effective and safe". Its the RCL manufacturer's and railroad companies' overwhelming self interest that make any statistics proclaiming the safety of RCL technology highly suspect. Those of us who work within the railroad reporting system whether BLE or UTU know and understand that safety is important to railroad management only if it doesn't cost money or delay trains. Railroad provided safety statistics are meaningless as a method of determining the actual safety record of the company or equipment involved. The RCL manufacturers will not contradict their veracity.

Viewpoint number two, the safety of the personnel performing the work.
At first blush, removing the engineer, usually the highest paid employee on the crew, and as a result enhancing the corporation's the bottom line, seems a worthy goal but there may be clouds of consequences looming on the horizon. While the engineer may be the highest paid employee on the crew the engineer is also the most highly trained, the most highly skilled, and the one crew member who's vision from high up in the cab can spot a myriad of problems before they turn to tragedy such as: crewmen between cars, grade crossing protection not working properly and other safety concerns that may not be discerned by an employee who is trying to read his switch list, carry a lantern, checking car numbers on a draft of identical looking freight cars, checking switch points to see if the tracks are properly lined, watching for conflicting moves, and many other important issues essential to safely performing switching tasks in a busy yard.

In an effort to complete the work under the constant intimidating gaze of a harried yardmaster, the employee working the "Belly Pack" may fail to ensure he always knows where the leading end of the move is when shoving or pulling cars. Drilling a large draft of cars is a time consuming and arduous task and the opportunity for ground personnel to take short cuts are manifest as are the consequences. The railroad yard is above all a dangerous environment and ground personnel, in their rush to fulfill the lofty goals of their managers could, and have, inadvertently stepped into the path of another train on an adjoining track or be caught between or under cars whose movement they are controlling.

Loss of employees by any means has serious consequences for the company and it's managers of which lawsuits by surviving family members, increased scrutiny by federal regulators, lowered morale, and the inevitable poor annual review are just a few.

Viewpoint number three: advantages to the shipper.
There is another important viewpoint not often taken into consideration when railroads make decisions relevant to RCL operations: how these decisions will affect the shipper. Will Remote Control Technology decrease transit times? Will Remote Control Technology insure less damage to lading? Will Remote Control Technology lower the cost of transporting freight across the railroad system leading to lowered tariffs for those using the railroad's services?

All together now: Yeah, right!

Transit times of shipments cannot substantially decrease because of the constraints of the system. With Remote Control Technology, ground personnel cannot simply give a signal to the engineer, climb on the hind end of the draft and ride out to the switch. Safety concerns, if not Federal regulations, normally require the person controlling the switching move to be on the leading end to observe as the train proceeds in each direction, a time consuming activity under good conditions. Foul weather, frigid or sweltering temperatures only add to difficulties experienced by crewmen with an inevitable increase in the time for task completion (These same safety regulations with which compliance is required out on the road have been voided by both the railroads and the Federal Government in the name of expediting a remotely controlled move within a yard without substantially increasing productivity yet increasing the probability of an accident resulting in injury or death to the employee and release of hazardous materials into the yard and surrounding communities.).

Claims for shipments damaged during switching under remote control technology will inevitably increase. One of the advantages of having an engineer in the cab of the locomotive is that riding on the locomotive there is a sense of weight and momentum of the train that is not available to on-ground personnel. Lack of this sense of weight and momentum result in hard couplings and resulting equipment and lading damage, run through switches and signals, sideswiping incidents with other equipment inevitable when tremendous weights are moved by remote control.

Remote Control Technology is about increasing profit. The elimination of costs associated with labor thus increasing profit is the incentive here. Lowering the tariff doesn't increase profit. Besides, how is the customer to know you cut costs? If you don't tell him it is now cheaper to move his freight he will remain blissfully unaware that you are making more money on his shipment.

Viewpoint number four: The power and control of the labor force by union self interest.
Changes in work rules involving the operating department of a railroad always create inevitable conflicts between the unions. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE) dropped the ball back in the eighties when the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Railroads started experimenting with the remote control of locomotives in their yards. Burying their heads in the sand the BLE thought that if they ignored the problem of RCL the problem would go away. It did not and now the "Brotherhood" is playing catch up in the area of which craft, engineers or conductors will operate the RCL technology.

The other union involved in the RCL technology is the United Transportation Union (UTU). When the BLE, in essence, gave up the right to bargain for their craft to operate the RCL in Canada the UTU stepped in and negotiated with the railroads and UTU conductors got the work. The UTU represents engineers as well as trainmen but in this case they gave the work to their conductors. The companies, of course, loved this because they pay conductors less than engineers so such a move would save the railroads lots of money. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who follows the rail industry because the UTU International Division has always been considered "Company Friendly", a union that works diligently wherever and whenever possible to be the railroad's "Lap Dog"; sniffing the company's crotch and wagging their collective tails in agreement with whatever the company says. The difference between the UTU International and a real lap dog is the real lap dogs don't eat their young. The UTU ID does.

How so you ask? Simple. When a senior engineer is displaced he bumps a younger engineer. Eventually the youngest engineer (most likely a post '85 hire) can no longer hold an engineer's position and bumps a conductor. The conductors continue to bump downward in seniority until the most junior man, most likely a UTU man, is bumped to the street or furloughed.

Initially both unions had it wrong. It is not who runs the RCL. It is that RCL operations are inherently unsafe.

Viewpoint number five: The government gets involved and screws it up.
Last, but not least, no discussion of the implementation of RCL technology would be complete without mention of that august bureaucracy whose prime mission is to protect us from ourselves by promulgating conflicting rules and regulations that do much to further confuse an already confused situation. I'm talking, specifically, about the Federal Railway Administration (FRA).

The FRA, in the name of railroad (read public) safety, has created copious rules regulating the licensing of locomotive engineers. To comply with these federal regulations some railroads may spend a year and a half and hundreds of thousands of dollars training a locomotive engineer. In response to the RCL technology the FRA, in an effort to promote the agenda of the railroad companies, will allow a conductor to train on the RCL technology for a couple weeks, with a federal certificate that makes federal certification a joke, then control an engine, or multiple engines moving thousands of tons worth of freight cars replacing a extensively trained and federally licensed locomotive engineer.

In other words, if the person controlling all this weight is inside the cab of the locomotive, that person needs a federally required Locomotive Engineer's License involving months of study and train handling experience to move a train but if that same person rides on the platform outside the cab of the locomotive, doing the same work, then that person requires no extensive training or experience to get certified by the FRA to move that train. Confused? Me too. Duplicity is the watchword with the FRA. The end result of the FRA's chicanery is that the railroads save many millions of dollars by NOT training engineers to operate in a safe and responsible manner.

The federal government, in the form of the Federal Railway Administration, a bureaucracy that sucks millions of dollars out of our paychecks every year has allowed the railroad companies to usurp their responsibility as guardians of safety on the railroad with dire consequences. Trains under the control of RCL technology will continue to increase in number as the companies seek and reap the benefits of reduced crew size and skill. These trains will handle thousands of tons of hazardous material and will cross public streets and operate in railroad switching yards in and around our towns and cities.

Citizens will be unknowingly exposed to the movement of trains controlled by on ground personnel who may not even be anywhere near where the train crosses paths with the public run by an individual with the least amount of training controlling technology that can fail to respond to a radio control signal.

Winners: Railroad Companies and RCL technology manufacturers.
Losers: employees, shippers, and the public.

You be the judge. What's in it for you?

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