(The Newport News Daily Press posted the following article by Peter Dujardin on its website on March 11.)
NEWPORT NEWS, Va.–It may be an old-time industry steeped in the romance of America’s past, but the railroad business has always adapted to technological change.
In the mid-1960s, for example, many rail yard workers who directed trains in the rail yards by waving red handkerchiefs by day and lanterns by night were fired. That’s because the two-way radio proved a more efficient way of telling engineers when to move forward, when to back up and when to stop.
Now the radio system is passe, too.
The nation’s railroads including CSX at its Newport News rail terminal are increasingly moving toward new remote-controlled devices to shift trains at the rail terminals. About the size of a car battery, they’re worn on a trainman’s waist and are operated by men on the ground.
The train drivers will still be needed, of course, to move cargo around from city to city. But the new system eliminates the need for engineers at the terminal yards, where trains are shifted about and sent to different locations.
And the new remote control usage isn’t sitting right with everybody particularly the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. The national engineers’ union predicts that going with the remote control technology will eliminate about 4,000 of the country’s 40,000 train engineer jobs over the next few years or about as many engineers who work in the yards at present.
The jobs working in the terminals are highly sought because the engineers don’t have to be away from their families for long stretches and are generally less stressful. For years, only engineers with the highest seniority won those positions.
“But now they’re going to have to go back on the road where sometimes they go to work in Virginia and end up that night in Florida,” said John Bentley, a spokesman with the engineers’ union. “And they have to deal again with cars trying to cross the railroad tracks in front of them.”
CSX, now based in Jacksonville, Fla., acknowledged that some engineers will see their jobs changed. But the company was adamant that no CSX engineer has lost their job or will lose their job as a result of remote control.
Instead, the company said, the number of engineers at CSX will fall through attrition.
All engineers who worked at the Newport News CSX yard have been offered jobs with the company, generally on short routes that allow them to come back in one day. And, in Newport News at least, a team of two trainmen operate the remote-control devices to move a train, replacing a team of one engineer and one trainmen.
Though there’s some modest cost savings from the plan, CSX said, it’s safety that’s the driving force for the remote control. On the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which has used remote-control technology since 1994, the rate of yard accidents has been a third of that of conventional operations, the company said
“This is much safer because it puts control of the movement directly into the hands of the person who’s asking for that movement,” said Bob Sullivan, a spokesman for CSX. “It eliminates miscommunication.”
The box has other safety features, including sensors that can detect when a worker has fallen down while the trains are moving into position, Sullivan said.
But the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers says the remote-control operations actually make things more dangerous by putting less qualified people the switchmen, brakemen and conductors rather than the engineers in charge of moving the trains around the terminals. Those trainmen need only two weeks of training, compared to six months for engineers.
“It’s not something that you just pick up over two weeks of training,” said John Bentley, a spokesman for the union. “The brakes and the momentum, a lot of it is operated by feel.”
Bentley cited a recent accident at a rail yard in Syracuse, N.Y., in which a CSX worker who was using a remote-control device was killed. Sullivan said that accident is still under investigation, but he said it was unrelated to the use of the remote-control system.
Although the engineers’ union is opposed to the change, the United Transportation Union, which represents the switchmen, brakemen and conductors, has agreed to the plan at its national level.
Even still, union dissension exists. Howard Knight, who represents 35 CSX workers in Newport News as one of four chairman of United Transportation Union Local 662, said he’s against the plan.
“I have problems, theoretically, with all technology, because it does away with manpower,” Knight said.
When asked how he liked the new remote-control boxes, one trainman at the Newport News terminal said something last week that surprised CSX management officials who were on hand to demonstrate the new system. “It’s costing a man his job,” the worker said.