(The following article by Jack Money was posted on the Daily Oklahoman website on February 15.)
TULSA — That train rumbling along just north of downtown might be remote-controlled. Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway is using remote-control technology to direct some trains in its Tulsa and Oklahoma City switching yards.
These trains have no engineer. Instead, an operator straps on a vest containing a radio transmitter equipped with buttons and a joystick used to communicate with a locomotive’s computer. The trains go no faster than 10 mph, under the railroad’s regulations, and two people are involved with trains moved remotely so one person can hand over control to the other, if necessary.
Sam Sexhus, Burlington Northern Santa Fe superintendent, said two factors drove his company’s decision to use the new equipment: safety and cost.
“Since the technology has been in place,” Sexhus said, “the facts have borne out that conventional operations are not as safe as remote-control operations, both in terms of accident rates and severity, and also employee injury rates.
“We have not had one incident attributable to failure of the technology.”
Still, the technology is controversial. A labor group that represents engineers is the technology’s biggest critic.
John Bentley, a spokesman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, said training is an issue because remote-control operators get significantly less instruction than do locomotive engineers.
“These persons are operating trains with only two weeks of training,” Bentley said. “An engineer has anywhere from eight months to a year of training.”
The railroad cuts costs using remote-control locomotives by reducing the size of its switching crews from three men to two. These switching crews handle picking up and leaving behind railcars.
The railroad and its workers take safety precautions whenever such operations are under way, railway spokesman Joe Faust said. People responsible for a remote-controlled locomotive’s actions in Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s yards must be certified. They must be on the ground within a short distance of the train or actually riding on board. Signs designed to alert motorists of remote-control operations also are posted at all railroad intersections and on remote-controlled locomotives.
These are visible only to motorists in Tulsa. Motorists do not drive through the company’s Oklahoma City yard, which is near the General Motors plant.
The Federal Railroad Administration authorized use of remote-control technology for railroads in 2002.
While the union is critical of the system’s training, Federal Railroad Administration officials said training was developed the same as for engineers, though they agree it is not as extensive.
Federal Railroad Administration officials also said every incident involving a remote-controlled locomotive must be reported, regardless of property damage.
The union is working to raise public awareness about remote-control operations and its problems with those operations, with some success.
Numerous towns and counties throughout the nation subsequently have passed nonbinding resolutions indicating their opposition to the practice. The resolutions mean nothing because federal law supersedes them.
The Federal Railroad Administration is assessing the program’s risks and benefits. The agency’s first priority is to make sure such operations pose no threats to railroad workers or the public, spokesman Warren Flatau said.
The Federal Railroad Administration also is looking at how remote-controlled locomotives affect the safety of railroad intersections and the transport of hazardous materials.
“It is important to stress two things. The agency is neither in favor of, nor against the continued deployment of the technology,” Flatau said.
“Our primary focus is to insure that where remote control locomotives are used, they are operated safely. Nothing has occurred to date that either assures or precludes its future use and the extent of that use,” Flatau said.