AMTK84 wrote:Nick,
That engineer was bumped down to a conductor, and rightfully so...He should've been fired, wrecking 2 3 million dollar locos.
I dunno about firing. There should be more taken into account, like the engineers past history and experience.
We've all probably (inadvertantly) ran a red light or stop sign before, but most of us probably 'got lucky' and didn't get in a resulting accident causing injury/death or property damage.
Locomotive engineers are no different, being human after all, they will make mistakes from time to time. It's documented that running signals does happen on any railroad, but 99.99% of the time it does not result in a serious incident.
With an ATS or enforced cab signal system (which is really the only way to run passenger ops IMHO), this rare but invetable human condition is not allowed to create an unsafe condition.
OTOH, we cannot tolerate rulebreakers, and if a engineer has had a number of rule violations he/she should be demoted or fired, but I would bet every engineer has violated rules or a signal indication at least once in their career. Most have had the good fortune to not have that result in a serious incident, as I noted above.