blaketyner

Yeah, you run into train hoppers. Having done it myself as a teen, I looked the other way. Some would ask us where our train was headed, and I'd tell them, knowing full well they'd catch out. If we had a DPU locomotive in the middle or the end of the train, I'd 'mention' that it had heat/AC and a seat that reclined.

Mainly, you just try not to communicate about anything other than the job. It's like not liking any coworker, really.

Well, each day is different, so it doesn't get boring in that sense. Being on duty for 11 and a half hours on a slow-moving train can get to be a drag, but there are always slow orders to observe, crossings to go through, kids to wave at...

If a crew member falls asleep, the train will go into emergency braking and stop. We have alerters in the cab that sound an alarm every so often (more often when going faster.) If you don't press a button within 30 seconds or so, the train will stop.

Yes, I've been on board for trespasser and grade crossing incidents. One teenager, it looked to us, was a suicide.

It affects different people in different ways. The railroad has people you can talk to, and when I was a railroader, you could take 3 days leave after a fatality. Seeing what a train can do do a human body is never fun.

But at the end of the day, when you get hired you're told that it's not a matter of if, but when you'll have a fatality, and most people handle it pretty well. I've been on crews where we simply got the local fire department to hose off the locomotive and we went on and finished our tour.

Yes. Some resulted in fatalities, while others didn't. It's a terrible feeling.

Well, one thing to bear in mind is that in 99% of cases, the tracks were there before the streets and neighborhoods were.

Railroad lines are broken into a series of blocks, each of which is governed by signals. Some signals, called "absolute" signals, are controlled by a dispatcher at a remote location. A train coming to a red light an an absolute signal must stop before passing it. Sometimes, it's just a matter of another train crossing the track ahead; other times, it's because of a stalled train, a derailment, or a logjam up the line. The engineer doesn't get to move until the dispatcher says so and clears that signal. Sometimes, that means blocking crossings.

Now, why not break the train at the crossing to allow people to get through? If the train is particularly long, breaking it in half means that when we recouple, it will take a while, sometimes up to an hour, for the air compressors on the locomotives to recharge the brakes on every car back up to 90PSI. So doing that would actually result in the crossing being blocked for a longer time.

The blocks were divided up when the lines were built, often in the 19th century.

If it becomes a problem of access, it's on the city/county/state to build an overpass or underpass, and in this environment, folks don't care much for tax increases to pay for those.