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If you weren't applying to be a Trainmaster you'd get answers on your questions. Good luck telling someone how to do their job without doing it yourself. Yeah, I think that's amazing. They hire people off the street that know sh** from shinola about railroading, but they can tell ME how to do a job...

Deadhead crews is one other use. Some days there is an imbalance of crews at one end of the road. In these cases, we sometimes take the vans. These services have several advantages for the railroad. First, the drivers are supposedly trained to be safe around the railroad. The drivers are low paid, ...

Bloody idiotic and perhaps the end of the enterprise as we know it. Any other company would fight this tooth and nail. Suddenly Amtrak rolls over? If this were a real safety concern, this might be worth the gamble. But it's not. We lose less people to possibly PTC-preventable accidents in a year th...

I think the point here is that the signals were all dark because of the cutover to PTC. There are well-established procedures for operating when signals are out; it's beginning to look like somebody reported a switch properly lined and locked when it wasn't, and the train was given authority to pro...

I don't know what's involved with installing PTC, but if it required work on the signals themselves, when us "old heads" were around. I am reluctant to get involved in "facebook factfinding", or media speculation, but my first thought when I heard of this wreck was, "UH-OH, ...

"The same was true if a train is setting off cars and fouling the main. When the train occupied the block the signal went RED behind him in the block, and the previous block before that would go to "Approach". This provided "blocked in" protection, prevented headlight meets,...

In the old days of timetable and train order, a work crew would have been assigned to that location. The order would've read, "Order # 405 (Four Naught Five) to Yard, Yardmaster, All Starting. Period. ). Approach Milepost 615 (Six One Five), prepared to stop short of signal and do not proceed u...

Each situation is different. I grew up in a family turmoil; not strife, but moving very often and traveling a lot. I really didn't have roots, or a connection to a place I called home. And I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do. I rattled around in college for a while, half-heartedly, and mostly t...

According to an NS press release interchange will not be accepted after 7:00 am (EST I presume) and all operations (Freight) will stop after 3:00 pm on the 24th ( includes road trains, yard switchers, and local trains servicing customers.) Interchange and operations will resume at 10:00 pm on Monda...

It just seems to ME that, as I always assumed engineers had to qualify in order to run a Division, that there's a serious lack of safety indoctrination on today's railroads. My observations as simply a former (retired) NS/Southern employee come from knowing WE had to qualify on any job we did if it ...

I've noticed that a number of recent Amtrak wrecks were due either to distractions or excessive speed--perhaps a combination of both. Yet as an old retiree I see it as a matter of hurried, or not enough, training on the Division upon which these wrecks have occurred. Qualifying, we called it. And it...

NS reported yesterday that profits were up significantly, not just because of cost-cutting, but because of HIGHER TRAFFIC VOLUME. I have no idea how much is due to customers fleeing CSX, though. http://www.nscorp.com/content/dam/QuarterlyEventFiles/3q-2017/3q2017_earnings_release.pdf" onclick=...

I guess I was "lucky" if you could call it that. At the age of 10 or so, I used to hang out at the huge passenger station in Salisbury, NC. Like you, I was excited when a Southern engineer allowed me to climb aboard the cab and ride a few feet. I faintly remember those massive, Green FP7s ...

Logic doesn't apply to anything anymore since the concept of personal responsibility went out the window. When they started giving out participation trophies to the teams that lost in little league, and pretending everyone is right when they're wrong so as not to hurt their feelings, it was all ove...

Is CSX saving money by cutting down on DERAILS? Seriously, leaving cuts of cars on a main line is asking for all kinds of trouble, not to mention runaways