(The Springfield News Leader posted the following article by Mike Penprase on its website on June 27.)
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Working in his Commercial Street barbershop, appropriately called the Whistle Stop, provides Bob Pfister a prime spot to watch Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight trains roll through the north Springfield freight yard complex, along with a place to display his love for trains.
Photos of locomotives, trains and railroad memorabilia cover the walls.
Pfister needs little prompting to flick a switch that gets a model of an old-time Ten Wheeler steam locomotive rolling along a track that circles the barbershop. The model’s so detailed it has an engineer visible in the cab.
“This is Little Springfield up here,” Pfister says of a row of buildings he built for the display.
Three miles west of the Whistle Stop, Gary Burr jokes that he tells a young grandson he plays with trains for a living.
But unlike Bob Pfister’s model locomotive, Burr’s real things don’t have an engineer in the cab.
That’s because Burr is among a growing number of BNSF employees using locomotive remote control in the Springfield freight yard that stretches from U.S. 65 to Nichols Junction west of West Bypass by the railroads’ definition. The number of employees that operate locomotives by remote control could eventually hit 100, railroad representatives say.
Burr controls locomotives weighing 250,000 pounds with a yellow box sprouting buttons, knobs and a stubby antenna that sends radio signals to and from locomotives carrying remote-control equipment.
The railroad this week put on a demonstration of what it calls Positive Locomotive Control Technology. Burr talks by radio with fellow yard-worker Gary Rogers and moves a line of freight cars headed by a SW-15 switch engine coupled to a SD-40 engine known as a “slug” because it has no engineer’s cab.
With 39 1/2 years of railroading experience, Burr used to release brake pressure, disconnect brake lines and check a manifest to make sure freight cars rolling down the yard’s modest “hump” moved onto the correct track to be part of a train that later would leave the yard, relying on a locomotive engineer to follow his signals.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe officials said having people like Burr and not an engineer operate the locomotive saves on labor costs and is safer.
Railroad town
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers has been vociferous in opposing BNSF’s decision to have non-engineers use the new technology, but the issue is more complicated.
It not only involves competition between unions — Burr and others trained to use remote control belong to the United Transportation Union — but also the Brotherhood’s move toward allying with the Teamsters, possibly by mid-July.
And the arrival of remote control is yet another sign of how the role of railroads in Springfield’s life has changed.
The railroad might be hiring new employees and putting more coal and intermodal freights through Springfield than ever before, but the railroad that claims the Frisco as a predecessor doesn’t have as much impact on the community as it once did, Southwest Missouri State University history professor Stephen McIntyre said.
“I don’t know when I would put the high-water mark, but certainly in the late 19th and early 20th century, Springfield was a railroad town first and foremost,” said the professor, who includes labor history among his areas of interest. “The north side, it’s amazing. The census has railroad worker after railroad worker in these neighborhoods. It’s certainly not true anymore.”
Although the 1980 merger of the Frisco with the then-Burlington Northern and the closure of the Springfield diesel repair shop in 1996 signalled dramatic changes for railroading in Springfield, they were part of an ongoing trend, McIntyre said.
“I think as the city has grown after World War II, even though the railroad was here, it was not a railroad town. Even in the ’70s and ’80s this was not a railroad town like it was in the early 20th Century.”
For most Springfield residents unfamiliar with PLCT — it’s more commonly known as locomotive remote control, remote control locomotive units or just remote control — the first sign of its appearance in Springfield took the form of glaring yellow signs going up where BNSF yard tracks cross city streets such as Broadway Street.
Developed in Canada, remote control for locomotives is gaining steam in the United States after a false start in the early 1990s.
Now, it’s spreading into rail yards across the United States.
“This is nothing more than yet another step in what has been a very long and systematic effort to make the railroads safer,” BNSF spokesman Steve Forsberg says.
He backs up those claims by saying the railroad has seen a 40 percent drop in yard accidents with the advent of PLCT in about 36 BNSF freight yards and other railroads’ freight yards in nearly 100 communities.
If railroaders mourned the passing of the caboose over one decade ago — ironically, a few are in service as “shove cars” acting as bumpers between switch engines and other cars — they’re now talking about how remote control could change not only the industry, but the future of locomotive engineers.
Railroaders speak out
So far, seven yard engineers have taken jobs on road locomotives because of the railroad’s decision to offer engineers transfers rather than cut jobs, Forsberg said.
While Forsberg said that’s a step up from running a switch engine back and forth all day, some engineers take a different view.
With 30 years as a railroader, Rick Gibbons said he was a “mileage hog” who enthusiastically took main-line assignments because the pay was good.
But some engineers prefer switch-yard jobs because they get to go home at night and be with their families, aren’t obliged to carry cell phones to wait for assignments or be constantly on the lookout for vehicles crossing in front of their trains, he said.
Gibbons isn’t working as an engineer now; he’s a general chairman of the BLE representing BNSF employees in the Midwest, including Springfield.
As such, he’s free to voice his opinions about remote control, something many engineers are reluctant to do, saying they fear speaking out will be held against them during job reviews.
The union doesn’t oppose the new technology, he said.
Instead, the BLE thinks it’s being used by people who haven’t received thorough enough training.
“We don’t deny the technology,” he said. “We feel they (the railroads) have gone too far.”
There’s more to running a locomotive, even a slow-running switch engine, than twisting dials and pushing buttons, Gibbons said.
“When you sit in an engine, it’s uncanny,” he said. “It’s almost like riding a horse. You can tell what it’s doing. You can almost anticipate what it’s doing.”
Human error
In its effort to show that running a locomotive can’t be done by someone with 80 hours of classroom and on-the-job training, the BLE tallies accidents involving remote-control engines.
One incident in the BNSF yards in Kansas City won notice in the BLE president’s recent letter on remote control.
That incident involved a remote-control operator running a locomotive onto a “red flagged” track where maintenance-of-way employees were working, sending them running.
And accounts of an incident in the Springfield yard are making the rounds.
Springfield superintendent of operations Bob Baker confirmed a remote-control locomotive and one diesel unit of an outbound freight collided on May 28.
The collision caused “cosmetic” damage that derailed one set of wheels of one locomotive and bent metal, he said.
The collision was due to human error caused by a communication error, Baker said.
“The man who was supposed to be watching accepted full responsibility,” he said.
The railroad is confident the technology works, Forsberg said.
“There’s not been a single case of the technology failing,” he said. “It’s been human error.”
The BLE says blaming remote-control operators is an easy out, and the Federal Railroad Administration is investigating several accidents.
Railroads might be proceeding quickly to get remote control in place and the BLE might complain the agency is taking a lax attitude, but neither is the case, Railroad Administration spokesman Warren Flatteau said.
“The bottom-line issue for the FRA is we are neither in favor nor against the employment of RCL (remote control locomotive) technology,” he said. “Our primary concern is to assure it is used safely. To date, there is nothing that has strongly dissuaded the agency to proceed in a regulatory manner on this issue. We are conducting highly enhanced oversight of RCL operations; we know where they are being implemented. We’ve gone out in any case and looked at incidents of allegations of misuse.”
When it comes to using remote control, UTU members like Gary Burr make the distinction between the technology being safe, and whether the absence of an engineer in a locomotive cab is safe.
During the railroad’s demonstration this week, Burr described the built-in safety measures with the remote control unit, from a shut-off if it tilts more than 45 degrees to other built-in protective measures.
“If I don’t touch something on the box within 50 seconds, the locomotive stops,” he said.
Yet Burr said adding running a locomotive to his job increases stress.
“Depends on the situation and conditions,” he said of whether he feels comfortable running a locomotive. “Basically, I’d rather have the engineer.”
Sitting in the “hump tower” with his remote control as he stayed in contact with Burr and the yard’s main tower while working a switch board, 40-year veteran Gary Rogers said early in his career he considered becoming an engineer.
“I figured if I went into engineer service, they always need engineers,” he said. “But I don’t know.”
Like Burr, Rogers voiced reservations about remote control.
“For safety sake, I don’t think you can beat a man in the engine,” he said. “But the railroad and the union made the agreement. So you do the job.”
The UTU’s position is it agreed its members should operate remote control to keep its members working, Springfield-based UTU general chairman Robert Kerley said.
“We want absolutely the safest operation that can be had for our members,” he said. “If that means additional training, that’s what we’ll do. If that means conventional engineer operations need to be continued for some time, that’s what we’ll do. Our issue is not really a rush to make every yard operation remote control. Our concern is remote control is a reality and we secure the work and adequate compensation for the members we represent.”
To historian McIntyre, seeing two unions in conflict because of a railroad’s actions fits a long pattern.
Compared to the auto industry where the United Auto Workers have a relatively unified front, railroad unions split along craft lines, making them vulnerable to railroads playing them off against each other, he said.
“That tension of craft organizations does tend to undermine solidarity,” he said. “You think all railroad workers ought to stick together, but organization into craft unions undermines that effort.”
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers efforts to convince communities to enact ordinances restricting remote control might not fare well in Springfield because of union-management conflict.
Councilman leery
Councilman John Wylie had an uncle, a grandfather and a great-grandfather who were railroaders, but he said he’s leery of seeing Springfield join nearly three dozen other communities in passing ordinances or resolutions against remote control.
Wylie said he accepted an offer by BNSF to see remote control demonstrated because he was concerned it would be used to operate trains going to and from the James River Power station in his southeast Springfield zone.
“I’d never heard of anything that was here, or actually what they were going to do or what the units looked like,” he said. “What I asked was ‘Are you going to take coal cars through Zone 4.’ They assured me this kind of a mechanism would not be used there, that the people who are operating the engines, the engineers, are in the cab. And they’ve got somebody on the front and back.”
While he’s confident the council would listen to union representatives, Wylie doubts any council action would have legal authority because the Federal Railroad Administration oversees railroad operations, the councilman said.
He doesn’t want to get in the middle of a railroad-union dispute, Wylie said.
“I have had no contact with the labor unions,” he said. “That’s between the labor unions and the employers. We don’t want to get involved in that.”