(The following report by Tim Doulin appeared on the Columbus Dispatch website on May 3. Tim Hanely is Chairman of the Ohio State Legislative Board.)
COLUMBUS, Ohio — A derailment at a Columbus rail yard last week set in motion a heated debate between railroad management and workers over remote-control technology.
The union that represents workers at a Far West Side rail yard has asked the Federal Railroad Administration to investigate the April 22 derailment at Buckeye Yard off Roberts Road.
Workers at the yard engaged last fall in what Norfolk Southern called an intentional work slowdown to protest the introduction of automated technology.
No one was hurt when seven empty cars crashed into others after having been shunted onto the wrong track by a yardmaster guiding the engine by remote control. A spokesman for Norfolk Southern said the use of remote-control locomotives was not to blame.
“What happened that caused the derailment had nothing to do with the fact that these engines were being operated on a remote-control basis,” said Rudy Husband, a railroad spokesman. “It could have happened if there was an engineer in the cab.”
In a letter to the FRA, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen questioned whether it’s safe to use the remote-control system.
“The company claims it was a misaligned switch which lined the trains into the same track,” union spokesman Timothy Hanely said. “That is a contributing factor, but the root cause of it is (that) nobody was on the leading ends of the trains to see they were going to impact.”
Remote-control locomotives eliminate the need for an engineer on the train and two switchmen on the ground. Instead, a computer on the locomotive responds to a transmitter used by a switchman on the ground or in a tower.
Although there was no engineer on the train April 22, there were two employees adjacent to the train on either end, Husband said.
“They were right there,” he said.
Hanely contended that there was only one worker assigned to each train while a yardmaster controlled the locomotive from a tower.
The union says remote control is a dangerous cost-saving measure. Proponents say the union doesn’t like the technology because it costs them jobs.
Norfolk Southern filed a lawsuit accusing workers of a work slowdown last fall. The matter was settled in February when two unions agreed to discourage workers from participating in a work slowdown.
CSX has been using remote-control locomotives at Parsons Yards on the South Side for about four years.
In a report to Congress last year, the Federal Railroad Administration concluded that remote-control locomotives were as safe, or in some cases safer, than conventional switching.
Of the complaints involving remote-control locomotives, the “vast majority have been without merit,” said Warren Flatau, an FRA spokesman.
The administration neither encourages nor discourages the use of the technology, but “we find no basis to prevent or prohibit the use of the technology,” Flatau said.
Hanely, however, contends that the report to Congress shows a higher accident rate with remote-control locomotives — 25 percent between December 2003 and December 2004.
But the Association of American Railroads said the report also indicates that at the three major railroads that conducted 85 percent of switching operations in the country, derailment and crashes were slightly lower using remote-control technology.
And the employee-injury rate was 20 percent lower using remote-control technology.
“Overall, we believe remote control improves the safety of yard operations,” said Tom White, a spokesman for the association.