(The following article by Stacie Hamel was postedon the Omaha World-Herald website on November 14.)
OMAHA, Neb. — Union Pacific Railroad has halted its rollout of remote-control devices in rail yards until early next year because of train-crew shortages. Employees who had been training others on the technology are needed instead to help run trains, said Robert Turner, senior vice president.
Union Pacific came up short on train crews because of layoffs early this year, more retirements than expected and demands of additional business. It plans to hire nearly 5,000 people by the end of 2004.
The Omaha-based railroad was about halfway through implementing the technology that moves locomotives and railcars by remote control. The 45 remaining yards will have remote control on schedule by the end of 2004, Turner said.
Union Pacific and five other large U.S. railroads have moved ahead with the technology – which Canadian railroads began using in the 1980s – asserting that it cuts the danger of some of railroading’s most hazardous jobs: switching operations in rail yards where workers on the ground oversee the movement of locomotives and rail cars.
Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co. – which is based in Fort Worth, Texas, but has about 4,400 employees in Nebraska and 1,100 in Iowa – is using remote control in 43 yards and expects to complete a couple of more changeovers by the end of the year, said spokesman Steve Forsberg of Kansas City, Kan. About 40 remaining yards will be done in 2004.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers hasn’t stopped fighting remote control since losing out on the job of running the devices in 2001 to the United Transportation Union, whose members handle the ground work of switching.
Safety, not jobs, is the goal of the engineers union, a Nebraska union official said. The BLE is pushing for safety regulations from the Federal Railroad Administration and procedures for gathering accident data.
Another tactic has been to create pressure on railroads and the government by urging cities and counties to ban remote control, said Randy Meek, BLE legislative chairman for Nebraska.
Nationwide, 38 such bans are in place, including in Alliance, Neb., and Clinton and Clinton County, Iowa. The Nebraska AFL-CIO approved a resolution of support at its annual meeting in September.
The bans hold no legal weight, railroad officials said.
“Courts have been real clear that this is a federal pre-emptive right – interstate commerce – states and localities cannot supersede federal law,” said Turner of Union Pacific.
When a railroad presents the industry’s side, officials said, the outcome often is different.
“Once we sit down with officials, they see it’s mostly an internal dispute, and they move on. … not only is it safer for our employees, but also for the communities,” said Forsberg of BNSF.
The Belen, N.M., City Council voted recently to rescind an ordinance passed in April after hearing a report from the city’s fire chief, who visited a BNSF yard where remote control was used.
The engineers union continues its campaign, Meek said, because members believe engineers would more safely operate remote control.
“We’re not anti-technology by any means, but we have concerns about the technology and about the amount of training they’re giving people,” Meek said. “(Railroads) base every accident on operator error, but yet they don’t want to give them any more training.”
The engineers union sued the railroads in 2001, contending that under negotiated labor agreements, only engineers can move locomotives. A federal arbitrator ruled in favor of the railroads early this year.
A lawsuit filed by railroads to block an engineers strike also was sent to arbitration and was settled in the railroads’ favor.
The railroad administration has issued a six-page safety advisory on the use of remote control, spokesman Warren Flatau said. It also has issued specific directives, such as that remote-control operators should not use the devices while hanging from the side of a moving train car.
The engineers union is “pushing for regs,” he said.
“We believe that to begin this process, this safety advisory is sufficient and the other applicable regulations are more than adequate to ensure safe operation,” he said. “Nothing has happened to date to make it a certainty or to prevent us from rule-making.”
Members of the engineers union operate remote-control devices for one railroad, the Montana Rail Link, which has no UTU representation.
As the only union, “We couldn’t say no, so we did the next best thing. We negotiated the safest implementation we could negotiate,” Meek said.
The major differences: the use of highly trained engineers using the remote controls in the switchyard, along with the use of manual devices that separate tracks to prevent runaway locomotives from entering the main track.
“The safety requirements that we negotiated on that railroad are quite a bit more stringent,” Meek said.
Turner said Union Pacific’s remote-control operators also use safety devices placed on the tracks to prevent runaways.
With remote control, either of two people can stop a locomotive, said Forsberg of BNSF, instead of just the engineer inside the cab.
“It eliminates the opportunity for miscommunication between the person on the ground directing the movement and the person in the locomotive,” he said. “Now the people on the ground who were most vulnerable to being knocked down, they wear the controls.”
If either of those two people trip or the device tilts too far for some other reason, the cars automatically stop, he said.
The railroad administration, Flatau stressed, didn’t favor or oppose the introduction of remote control but is closely monitoring its implementation.
Investigations have found that some human errors would have caused accidents regardless of the technology, Flatau said.
“If someone fails to set a hand brake or properly line a switch … it doesn’t matter whether it’s a belt pack being used or a locomotive being operated from the cab, the outcome is going to be the same.”