[quote="scotty269"]Wow, I'm really surprised at you, Noel. I've been around the forums for awhile and I have never seen an outburst like that from you... Take a step back and figure out what the guy is trying to accomplish by making the topic, don't just start "yelling" at him because he asked a question about carrying his rules...
quote]
Too bad, what I am seeing in my opinion are the remarks of a couple of "cry babies" on here. Railroading has never been a
piece of cake and it has never been easy. I worked on different railroads too and had to carry different rulebooks and
employee timetables and in my spare board days I never knew when a job to GCT might end up in Penn Station or vice
versa. I carried them all. We also had many different varieties of motive power and equipment and the engineer had
better know what to do when the bell rings. This applied to the fireman too and even in my days as a fireman, I carried
a bunch of operating manuals so that if I got stumped on something, maybe I could get some help. I wasn't afraid to get
dirty on the job either, it goes with the territory. I never complained about the stuff I had to carry, it helped me to do my
job and that was what I was getting paid to do.
I have said many times on many different forums that the railroads of this country should get together and have one book
of rules for the entire industry. We thought we might see that when Penn Central came on the scene, they made one book
for the former New York Central, Pennsylvania and the New Haven and when Conrail came on the scene it was expanded
to a lot of other properties too.
I think your complaints should be to the industry itself for not having one set of rules like they do in Canada and if the
railroads are not willing to do this, maybe the FRA should do it for them.
Until and unless this happens, you should simply do the job that you are being paid to do and if carrying all of the
necessary gear is too much for you, just stop trying to work all over the place.
Reading some of this stuff is like it often was when I went to union meetings and I went to many of them during my
career, a room full of people making good money and sitting around complaining.
Metro-North makes timetable changes you get a new folder or folders, with Penn Central and before that the Pennsylvania
made timetable changes we used to have to lick and stick the new stuff in the timetable and sometimes it could take a
long time to get the job done and we had to do it on our own time for the most part too.
Finally this entry has a number of spelling errors, I am having a problem with my computer and if and when I can correct
it, I will try to correct the errors in this entry, sorry about that.
Noel Weaver