(The following article by Eric Dexheimer was posted on Austin American-Statesman website on May 28.)
AUSTIN, Texas — Just past midnight on Dec. 7, 2003, Jody Herstine, a 37-year-old switchman at the Union Pacific rail yard in San Antonio, was moving two attached locomotives when something went horribly wrong. Stepping onto a track he thought was clear, the five-year veteran of the nation’s largest railroad was struck by a train with no one aboard.
Unable to raise Herstine by radio, the yardmaster went looking for him. “As I was walking up (to the locomotives), I glanced in the cabs and couldn’t see nothing,” he recalled. “So I started looking toward the wheels. And that’s when I saw him.”
From late 2003 through 2004, Union Pacific’s San Antonio operation was an unusually deadly place, with five rail-related fatalities. But Herstine’s death was particularly meaningful.
He was using a controversial new technology to operate the trains. Instead of the locomotives being driven by an engineer sitting inside the cab and being directed by yard men, Herstine was standing alone on the ground maneuvering the giant machines with an accordion-sized transmitter strapped around his waist — like a tabletop model train set, but with far higher stakes.
U.S. railroads have been using such remote control locomotive technology, or RCL, in limited areas for nearly a decade. The major railroads operating in Texas — Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe, primarily — began using it about three years ago to move trains inside their yards, where freight cars are sorted like letters in a post office in preparation for mainline travel. The closest to Austin is Union Pacific’s San Antonio yard.
Yet questions about the role the technology should play in rail’s future continue to divide the industry, pitting rail companies looking to increase efficiency against trainmen struggling to keep their jobs in a rapidly changing business.
The debate comes as high fuel prices and soaring demand for coal have pushed railroad companies’ profits sky-high. Yet the heavy use of the nation’s rail system has clogged the tracks, resulting in slow trains and long delivery delays. “We’ve never had this kind of demand in our 144-year history,” Union Pacific spokesman Joe Arbona said. “And we need to marshal all our resources to meet it.”
One way of doing so is using technology to move more freight with fewer people. In 1980, before the industry was deregulated, railroads employed about 500,000 workers, said Frank Wilner, national spokesman for the United Transportation Union. Today, that number is around 200,000. During the same time, rail cargo moved per mile has tripled, according to the Association of American Railroads.
Fort Worth-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe is experimenting with the next generation of technology, using Global Positioning Systems and advanced electronics to identify everything from a train’s progress to an upcoming curve or a broken rail, company spokesman Joe Faust said. Carriers hope that, in some cases, they can eventually winnow train crews down to a single person.
The battleground now, however, is remote control. In locomotive cabs, nostalgia and tradition are every bit as powerful as diesel fuel, and piloting a train is considered as much art as skill. The specter of riderless locomotives has divided railroads’ unions, separating workers who accept the change from those who fear lost jobs and compromised safety.
“Remote control trains? No engineer in the cab? Stop the madness!” blared one billboard the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen posted outside a Virginia rail yard. The brotherhood and the United Transportation Union, which represents conductors and switchmen, regularly trade insults on their Web sites, each accusing the other of selling out.
“Operating a 6,000-horse- power locomotive with 140-ton railcars in strings of 100 or more, that takes skill,” said Mark Dixon, a Texas rail safety administrator. “I don’t equate it to sitting in front of my TV operating a joystick.”
C.M. “Connie” English, state legislative director for the United Transportation Union in Texas, responds that rail workers must accept remote control or go the way of the steam engine. “We fought walkie-talkies; we fought fax machines; we always fought technology,” he said. “But it has always come regardless, and we have to work with it.”
Change rolls through
Railroad tracks run through English’s family like a double helix of steel DNA. In 1936, his father used family connections to secure his own first train job in Lafayette, La. He never retired. A half-century later, while preparing to board a train for his shift as a conductor in Del Rio, he fell over dead of a heart attack.
English signed on as a yard worker in 1972. Ten years later he became a conductor. “But then the railroads started doing away with cabooses,” he recalled.
By the time Connie English’s son carried on the family railroad tradition, 10 years ago, the onboard train crew looked far different from when his father first stepped aboard a locomotive. In the 1970s, it took five men to operate a train: an engineer, a fireman, two brakemen and a conductor.
Union roots run deep on the railroad, and labor has accepted change only grudgingly.
“Five men is too many for bridge, never mind to run a train,” said Anthony Hatch, an industry analyst based in New York.
The fireman’s position was eliminated only 20 years ago, though shoveling coal into a firebox had long since disappeared from all locomotives except those pulling nostalgic tourist lines. A couple of years later, one of the brakeman jobs was eliminated; the caboose disappeared about the same time. By 1991, most crews were slimmed down to two: the engineer running the train and a conductor overseeing administrative operations and helping with repairs.
Carriers began dabbling in remote control technology almost a decade ago but have accelerated its use in recent years. When it came time to negotiate new union contracts in 2000, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen took a stand against the technology, declaring that locomotives required certified engineers, firmly planted inside the cab, where they’d always been.
The United Transportation Union took a more survivalist approach. “Instead of standing outside the door with a bullhorn, for the livelihood of our union we felt we had to sit down with the carriers,” English explained. When the new contracts were signed, that union’s members were handed the remote controls, with the engineers stranded outside.
The Brotherhood continues to insist that RCL is dangerous and undertested, a complaint it has taken to local politicians. At the union’s urging, the City of Houston and Harris and El Paso counties each adopted resolutions condemning remote control. In all, 62 cities and counties in the U.S. have passed similar statements, although they have no teeth because the railroads operate on private property and the industry is regulated by federal agencies. The Texas branch of the union also tried unsuccessfully to get a state law passed limiting RCL use.
The Brotherhood’s Web site displays each new accident in which RCL is used. Dramatic photos of derailed trains and broken and twisted railroad equipment accompany many of the reports. The union has documented 88 such incidents in the past five years. Eight of those occurred in Texas rail yards, the latest on March 21 in Longview.
The union says it takes no satisfaction in the accidents; it wants only to highlight what it says is the safety nightmare of a moving train without an engineer in it. Terry Briggs, an engineer for 30 years before he began working for the Brotherhood, pointed out that in his day a railroad worker had to toil for years before ascending to the lofty perch of engineer. Today, he said, a new hire can be responsible for moving giant locomotives by remote control within weeks.
Last month, the Federal Railroad Administration released a long-awaited report assessing the safety of the technology. “RCL and conventional train accident rates were virtually identical,” the agency concluded.
It also noted, however, that even using remote control, human error was to blame in four of 10 mishaps, observing, “If the promise of RCL were being realized, human-factor train accidents would have fallen significantly over the last several years.” During the study, two workers each were killed during conventional and remote control operations, including Herstine in San Antonio. In all, rail workers using RCL have suffered three fatal accidents.
Remote use grows
Although still used primarily inside train yards, RCL is creeping outside of the terminals. Briggs said every major switching yard in the state has stretches of mainline track that run between train yards and industrial areas on which remote control is used to move locomotives and cars. Mike Mitchell, director of operating practices for Union Pacific’s southern region, said less than 10 percent of the company’s RCL operations occur outside yards.
The railroads insist they assign at least two workers to move trains with RCL to prevent accidents. Yet they also admit that, on occasion, the person working the remote control is the only man on duty. That was the case the chilly night Herstine went to work 2 1/2 years ago.
A large, muscular man, Herstine had been an eager convert when Union Pacific introduced RCL, his co-workers said. He was one of the first yard workers to be trained on it; later, he trained others.
On Dec. 7, the switchman assigned to work with Herstine in San Antonio’s East Yard never showed. Nevertheless, Herstine was told he needed to move 44 cars, and the second-shift workers handed him the remote control unit. According to depositions later taken by National Transportation Safety Board investigators, operating an RCL unit solo was a regular, if infrequent, occurrence in the San Antonio yard.
Just after midnight, Herstine began moving two locomotives onto a parallel track using a series of back-and-forth maneuvers. The yardmaster went looking for him a half-hour later. Records show that an ambulance was called just after 1 a.m.
His widow, Sara, sued the railroad, blaming a faulty switch and contending that her husband shouldn’t have been working alone. Her Houston attorney, Steve Young, said the case settled for enough money “that Sara will be in pretty good shape.” The safety board, meanwhile, has taken an unusually long time investigating the accident. The agency is expected to issue its final report in early June.
That’s unlikely to end the debate, however.
“We will continue to point out the safety shortcomings we see,” Briggs said. A couple of weeks ago, he was planning a trip to Saginaw, north of Fort Worth, where he’d heard that Burlington Northern had changed another conventional switching operation to remote control.