(The Deseret Morning News published the following story by Alan Edwards on its website on August 20.)
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Progress is chipping away one more piece of railroad Americana.
First, they take away the puffing and steaming of steam locomotives, replacing them with boring old diesel and electric. Then they get rid of the caboose, replacing its function with a bunch of electronic doohickeys. Firemen have gone to that great rail yard in the sky, and boxcar-riding hobos are a thing of the past.
And now, as if that isn’t enough, Union Pacific and the other major railroads want to get rid of engineers.
“It’s nostalgic, yeah, but technology has improved,” Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said.
Now, lest you think you’ll have to drive the train yourself on your next cross-country trip, we hasten to add that engineers are becoming superfluous only in rail yards, where locomotives constantly have to be moved around. Instead of an engineer in the cab and two ground guys guiding him around by radio and hand signals, the ground guys are now being equipped with belt packs that basically look like a glamorized version of a remote-control toy car joystick — the primary difference in this case being that it’s a very large car.
With these belt packs, the ground crew can move the locomotive, steer it, speed it up, put on the brakes, even honk the horn, reducing the engineer to a bunch of radio waves flying between the remote and on-board computer.
Not surprisingly, engineers aren’t keen on this new development because it makes them expendable in the rail yards and forces them to do less-desirable jobs to earn their living — that is, operate locomotives on what railroad folks term over-the-road trips, from Point A to Point B.
“They certainly don’t fly airplanes with no pilot,” Union Pacific engineer Chris Gallagher pointed out.
Union Pacific is now changing over its rail yards from Ogden to Provo to the new technology, and Gallagher is doing something about it. He went to the Ogden City Council Tuesday night to protest the change and to ask the council to, if not outright ban the new technology, recommend against it or at least pass a resolution urging the Federal railroad Administration to tighten up its regulations.
“What you have is no enforceable regulations for remote control,” said John Bentley, a spokesman for the engineer union Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. “There’s no way to penalize the railroad company. Basically, it’s unregulated.”
Mary Hall, chairwoman of the Ogden City Council, said the council took no action Tuesday night, except to direct staff to determine whether there are any safety concerns.
She said it’s hard to tell if it’s simply an internal labor issue or a safety issue.
“We will also look at what other cities are doing on the issue,” she said.
Then, if it’s appropriate, the council may pass a resolution. However, Hall said normally the council rarely passes a resolution in such cases.
While 24 cities and 10 counties have made resolutions regarding the technology, it’s questionable what, if anything, local entities can do because railroads are under the jurisdiction of the federal government.
U.S. railroads began adopting the remote-control technology about 18 months ago, and Union Pacific hopes to have all 124 of its rail yards switched over by the end of the year. While the engineers union refused to sign off on the plan, the United Transportation Union, encompassing the switchmen and conductors and other ground personnel, who are the ones actually operating the equipment, signed on.
Bentley noted that the ground workers receive 88 hours of training on driving the locomotives remotely, compared with the two to six months an engineer receives.
“The way this thing has been implemented has caused us heartburn,” he said.