(The following article was published by Amarillo television station KAMR.)
AMARILLO, Tex. — A controversial way of moving trains through Amarillo’s switchyards is under fire again. Burlington Northern Santa Fe has only been using Remote Control Operations for just a couple of months, but there’s already been two accidents involving RCO.
Several BNSF employees say one of those is a direct result of using RCO. It happened February 9th, around 8:00 in the morning, and engineers say the problem was that there was no engineer on the train.
There are two different ways to use RCO.
First, there is a guy on the steps of the engine, driving the train with a belt pack remote control unit, and there’s a guy near the extra cars, ready to use his belt pack to take over driving the train once it gets to the new tracks.
The second way of doing this is called “pitch-and-catch.” There’s a guy with a belt back at the beginning of the tracks, who pitches control to a second guy on the new set of tracks.
They communicate using radios, and there is no one on the train.
BNSF employee and member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Bryan Young says operators were using the pitch-and-catch method when the February 9th accident took place. “We had some cars roll out of a track and sideswipe one of our RCO units.”
The day this accident happened, a BNSF railway terminal manager said human error was to blame, but Young says that’s not the whole truth. “The human error side is this person wasn’t allowed to make a decision that he’s experienced to make,” said Young.
A traditional train engineer gets a minimum of 26 weeks of training before operating a train, but an RCO trainman only gets a week or two. Young says an engineer would have made a big difference in this accident.
“He would have been able to see the cars that were coming at hime from his vantage point in the seat, he would have been able to act quicker, and maybe get the engines out of the way so that this wouldn’t have happened,” said Young.
No one was seriously injured in this accident, but Young says it could have been worse. “They were switching with tank cars, this could’ve been hazardous material they crashed into one another, there’s a lot of things like that that can go wrong,” said Young.
Furthermore, he believes it’s just a matter of time before someone gets hurt or killed. “I’m afraid that’s what it’ll end up taking before drastic measures through the FRA are taken,” said Young. Right now, the Federal Railroad Administration does not limit the use of RCO.
We did speak with Bob Gomez, an amarillo manager for BNSF. He was on vacation, and unable to interview with us on camera, but he talked with us over the phone. He says there have been no accidents in Amarillo directly related to RCO and that if there had been engineers on the jobs that had recent accidents, they would have been seriously injured.
Gomez went on to say that in the last 18 months, 19 BNSF locations have been using RCO. In those 18 months, there have only been 20 or 22 accidents on RCO units, and all of those were because of human error.
The Federal Railroad Administration says the majority of train accidents every year happen in switching yards.