(The following article by Jane Roberts was posted on the Memphis Commercial Appeal website on December 4. Brother Joe Hunt is the Local Chairman and Legislative Representative of BLE Division 762 in Memphis.)
MEMPHIS — Shelby County will not push for changes in the way railroads use remote control to move unmanned locomotives, despite the protests of 20 rail workers and Teamsters picketing Wednesday in the rain at the county office building.
They are lobbying county officials to ban the technology in Shelby County.
“These things kill and maim,” said Joe Hunt, an engineer with 32 years experience at Canadian National (CN) and member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE). “Evidently the railroads don’t have conscience about that.”
Railroad officials disagree, emphasizing remote control’s safety record.
“We will do whatever we need to do, but the findings so far have not supported the claims about remote control locomotives being inherently unsafe,” said Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) spokesman Warren Flatau.
The FRA is collecting data on rail accidents linked to remote control and will issue an initial report in March.
Two Tennessee counties, Knox and Unicoi, this year passed resolutions asking the FRA for stronger regulations.
The safety record of remote control technology is exemplary, said Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) spokesman Joe Faust.
BNSF started using remote control technology here in September, moving 200-ton locomotives with a series of beeps electronically transmitted from packs workers wear around their waists to receivers on the locomotive.
The trains run through public crossings at Holmes and Tuggle. No engineer is on board.
“Sometimes the man controlling that train may be a mile and a half away,” Hunt said. “If anything goes wrong, there’s no one there to see children playing near the track or that there’s a car stalled in the crossing.”
CN, which has used remote control technology for 23 years in Canada, will start using it in Memphis in 2004, Burke said.
“In our major terminals in Toronto, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Montreal and Windsor, all of our switching operations are done using remote control,” he said. “We’ve had a 56 percent reduction in accidents in Canada as a result.”
Others report similar results, including CSX, which uses remote control in 55 terminals. Its accident rate is down 48 percent, said CSX spokesman David Halls.
Railroad officials say the real issue boils down to a fight for jobs between the BLE and the United Transportation Union.
“It isn’t a work issue; it’s a dispute between two unions,” said CN spokesman Jack Burke.
The technology has displaced hundreds of engineers, including Jerome Anderson, a licensed engineer now back on the ground switching trains at BNSF and earning $20,000 less a year.
“I’m not going to say the money is not important, but the most important issue is safety,” he said.
In 2001, UTU made a deal with the railroads, saying it would accept remote control technology if the railroads would guarantee job security. As a result, it has not lost membership.
The BLE has lost numbers.
After 80 hours of training, any railroad worker can apply for remote control jobs.
“But the people with enough seniority to bid on the jobs have 13-15 years of experience,” said Jerry Anderton, director of UTU’s legislative board in Tennessee.
Hunt disagrees. “We’re not wanting to stand in the way of progress when it’s safe,” he said. “But this is not safe when the person running the locomotive is not a federally certified engineer.”