11 ms·

The Dangers of Train Yards, Through the Eyes of Railroad Employees

111 points by ax00x 8y ago

steve_gh 8y ago
I'm involved in a rail transformation project. We're now using AR as part of the railway design process to ensure visibility of signals etc.
occamrazor 8y ago
Interesting story. In Italy trains still require two engineers, although on modern high speed ones the second engineer has to sit away from the windshield and the controls.
abduhl 8y ago
When I worked for BNSF I heard a story about a guy crushed between two cars in the knuckle because he lost line of sight with his engineer and they were using hand signals instead of a radio. They were able to keep him alive long enough to cover him with a tarp and bring his family in to say goodbye. He died immediately upon separation of the knuckle.
- lawnchair_larry 8y ago
  This is an old urban legend. Feel free to Google it, and you will see everyone who has worked near trains knows a guy who knows a guy who this exact thing happened to. Edit: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-last-kiss/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-last-kiss/
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    And excavator and backhoe workers too as well as heavy presses.
    - pixl97 8y ago
      Eh, /r/watchpeopledie has taught me that heavy equipment will murder you in a violent fashion if you don't respect it.
      - gknoy 8y ago
        I am amazed that such a subreddit exists, and yet cannot bring myself to watch it.
        RankingMember 8y ago
        Yeah, life has enough darkness without me seeking it out.
        cm2012 8y ago
        It also teaches you to never let kids near roads without hand holding or a leash.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        I got within a hair. Stupid, stupid, stupid. In a nutshell: I was working with a backhoe that was older than I was, early 60's model and a hydraulic line developed a very small puncture, enough that I could see the line start to sweat. Instead of backing off I got closer to see if the drop I saw on the line was really oil or maybe water. Fortunately before I could reach for it but after I got way too close the line exploded. Blinded me for about 15 minutes completely, the oil got infused into the fabric of my sweater so deep that even 12 years later (yes, I hate throwing stuff away) you can still clearly see where it hit. And that was just a hydraulic line bursting, we're not into accidents with buckets and blades territory.
        Noumenon72 8y ago
        A Reddit thread this week said if you put your finger over a leak in an oil line the pressure will drive it through your skin and they basically have to do surgery to scrape the pockets away from your bones.
  - pmyteh 8y ago
    That particular story is an urban legend, but fatal shunting accidents are sadly not. See https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/fatal-accident-at-grosmont-north-yorkshire https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/fatal-accident-at-grosmont-n... for a recent example (an amateur on a preserved steam line in this case; the mainline railway in the UK minimises manual shunting as much as possible)
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      No doubt exacerbated by the insistence on sticking with buffer and chain couplers despite the availability of safer alternatives for 100+ years.
  - UnderProtest 8y ago
    It's also absolutely real and has been fairly common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_syndrome It's hard to understand why Snopes has this marked as a myth. The specific anecdote structure with the wife showing up is clearly a meme but that doesn't make it a mythical type of event. We're much better at dealing with this situation in developed countries now. It's still a serious hazard. Around the turn of the 20th century it was very difficult to handle.
    - ant6n 8y ago
      This seems to involve patients being 'crushed' for an extended period of time. Like more than 15 minutes, where tissue dies and basically creates a poison, that enters the blood stream when the patients get released. That doesn't seem to describe a situation like the ggp was talking about.
      - UnderProtest 8y ago
        Note that I'm addressing the Snopes conclusion more than the comments of the HN poster, except insofar as he/she used Snopes as a source. The key elements of the Snopes article are these: -Victim was crushed by machinery. -Victim is still alive. -Victim is not in much pain. -If the machinery is removed the victim will probably die quickly. -There's time to have them communicate with loved ones, a priest, whoever. There are literally videos of this situation on liveleak. It happens with trains, with elevators, with forklifts and freight, and most commonly with car accidents. The reason you don't remove the person at first is that they'll bleed out. The crushing material is an effective tourniquet so the person just sits there, alive and moving. By the time that emergency responders get there to address the blood loss crush syndrome is a definite possibility. The person is generally going to faint the moment the equipment is removed because of the sudden loss of blood pressure. If they don't die of blood loss then they may have kidney failure and die on the way to treatment. Everything about this is shockingly common except bringing the victim's family down to say goodbye or bringing in a priest. To suggest that this has not happened in any of the hundreds or thousands of crushing cases since the industrial revolution occurred is ludicrous. It used to be that companies provided housing for workers near the factory/trainyard/loading dock. It would often have been the case that the victim's family could get there before an emergency responder. The sense in which this is a "legend" is that people claim it happened to a friend-of-a-friend or whatever, and it's true that's an urban legend channel, but the actual events are documented except for the dramatic last kiss. I wouldn't even be sure that isn't documented. I just haven't seen it.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Do you get joy from just making up stories and pretending you were there? I've heard this story perhaps as frequently as I hear about people who go cow tipping. But then I ask and it back tracks 'Oh, did I say I went cow tipping? I meant I sat in the car while some friends went cow tipping. And no, I guess I didn't see any cows. And we were parked in a taco bell parking lot.'
  - pixl97 8y ago
    /r/watchpeopledie tells me that yes, some people are out experiencing those stories.
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
      I don't doubt that it could happen. I doubt that it happened in close relation to OP. Hence the cow tipping analogy.
lbriner 8y ago
Because of signal sighting rules in the UK, we experienced a lot of trouble upgrading lines to higher speed. All of a sudden, that signal that you could see for 10 seconds could now only be seen for 8 due to a bridge or whatever. Muchos dollars relocating signals and in some places not being able to increase the line speed at all. Boring but very real reasons why we "can't just update things"
- red_admiral 8y ago
  And of course there's the whole discussion in the UK about having a second safety-critical person on the train (e.g. "guard", "train manager" etc.) versus driver-only operation.
- TylerE 8y ago
  Dunno why they don't just go ahead and bite the bullet and go to 100% in-cab signaling. The technology has worked for decades and has been deployed on many lines, including a few in the UK.
  - kposehn 8y ago
    Cab signaling requires a different set of standards in order to provide the necessary level of safety. Cab signals are (usually) transmitted through the rail and picked up by a special receiver on the leading axle of the locomotive. Each locomotive has to be equipped and the rails themselves have to be checked and blocked. This also means the rails have a higher maintenance requirement as opposed to lineside signals which can be more easily maintained. However, some countries (Brazil predominantly) have embraced a GPS based cab signal system where lineside signals are almost totally eliminated. However, this was done with federal subsidies to cover the expense iirc. Another example is the US Northeast Corridor where cab signals are used along with lineside signals to provide a level of redundancy at speed. Unfortunately there’s no easy solution, but I lean towards the Brazilian GPS based systems from Wabtec.
    - ComradeTaco 8y ago
      As a random piece of trivia, in cab signaling was pioneered in the 1920's and implemented commercially by Pennsylvania Railroad the 1930's while upgrading their main line between New York City and Washington D.C. You can see in this photo that the engineer had one indicator that would light up for each signal aspect: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/31/85/83/3185833fba11b79498ff9c658e730fc4.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/31/85/83/3185833fba11b79498ff...
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I got a chance to drive a couple of different engines at the Plumas rail museum. And one of the things that does is help you internalize the amazing amount of mass and momentum a train carries around all the time. The engineer who was with us spoke of freight trains that were a hundred cars of iron ore that, even though they were travelling at only 5mph would take nearly 1000' to bring to an "emergency" stop. While I don't know how true that is, just driving around the engine gave me some insight into how far ahead in time the engineer has to be thinking if they are operating a full train.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  My experience is largely with bicycles (you're very aware of the energy input/output), automobiles, and boats, but thinking of moving vehicles as momentum systems, to which energy can be added or removed, is useful. On a bike, you maintain a steady speed by matching drag losses with the energy you're putting into the pedals. Braking and other actions cost you energy you've put in. For automobiles and trucks, added mass has a significant change to momentum, and I feel that. Boats, from a row or sailboat to a 30m+ power vessel, have their momentum, drag, and interaction with water, waves, currents, and wind. Trains are a whole 'nother ballgame.
  - kqr 8y ago
    > On a bike, you maintain a steady speed by matching drag losses with the energy you're putting into the pedals. Braking and other actions cost you energy you've put in. As does the frequent mistake of putting weight on the rear pedal. Realising this made me understand how little energy it really takes to keep a bicycle going, given the correct gear.
    - HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
      As does the frequent mistake of putting weight on the rear pedal. I don't follow. What do you mean here?
      - 8y ago
raverbashing 8y ago
Reminds me of this https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xqg0q/whats_the_quickest_youve_noped_out_of_a_job/duafir1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xqg0q/whats_the...
lucb1e 8y ago
Historical, not current ones. I was talking to some friends about it just yesterday and was looking forward to the driver's point of view. Also, cookie wall. So the TLDR is that in the past, more people needed to be employed on a train. The diesel came and they could redesign the locomotives so no big boiler was in front which blocks visibility. Problem solved for the railroads, but people unemployed. Apparently there are some historical pictures that they took on rail yards to prove the visibility issue.
dmckeon 8y ago
Not to make light of railyard hazards, but: > the union had more than 30 railroad employees take photos of their workplace in an effort to demonstrate the hazards firemen could help navigate around. suggests that the presumably union workers may have tended to choose to take photos of the more (or most) dangerous locations. For a company perspective from the 1940s, see ""Why Risk Your Life?" -- 1940s Railroad Safety Film" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqpayZ2JqlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqpayZ2JqlU
- mturmon 8y ago
  ...choose to take photos of the more (or most) dangerous locations... That would be where the accidents happen, right? Thus the photos are taken there.
  - giarc 8y ago
    I think OP is just commenting on how union workers would be a biased source on just how common unsafe designs are.
- kposehn 8y ago
  Yep. Modern yards today are pretty efficient affairs and are designed for safety from the ground up. Compare those photos to Union Pacific’s Global III yard in Illinois: https://www.hanson-inc.com/portfolio/Union-Pacific-Railroad-Global-III-Facility-planning-design/portfolio-details?id=101 https://www.hanson-inc.com/portfolio/Union-Pacific-Railroad-... Fundamentally different designs then and now as they aren’t trying to load boxcars and instead transload containers.
- hexane360 8y ago
  I loved those videos too, but it was pointed out to me how much blame they put on the employee for unsafe working conditions. Safety isn't just about telling your employees to be safe and punishing them when they aren't.
regularfry 8y ago
Just as interesting, linked from that page: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-japan-trains https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j... Now I'm wondering about the cross-over between that and rubber-duck debugging.
- eponeponepon 8y ago
  The two are one and the same thing, I'd wager. The act of translating abstract thought processes into physical action (whether that's speaking or just pointing) forces you to examine it in a different way, just in order to make it concrete enough to express.
- macintux 8y ago
  Much discussion on that article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011793
- Noumenon72 8y ago
  Patrick McKenzie says this is the procedure Japanese programmers use for making changes in production! Now I know it came from the culture. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1009235280530829313 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1009235280530829313
  - regularfry 8y ago
    Culture is just "what people do". It's interesting that train drivers have to be coached through it feeling uncomfortable but necessary for safe operation. If there's a "national character" element to it, I'd say it's the acceptance of the uncomfortable but necessary.
  - patio11 8y ago
    This is what some engineering shops have as standard practice in Japan, which is a distinction with a difference.
CamTin 8y ago
The fireman debate, where management argues that a position is no longer necessary due to technological improvements, while the people actually doing the work think or understand differently, should be familiar to almost anyone in any field of work. We're currently fighting a whole genre of fire at work that boils down to the fact that a particular system, with many many finicky integrations both inside the company and with rickety old 3rd-party systems, was designed with the assumption that there was a so-called "junior QA" team who would be manually looking for trends in error logs and failed task logs. This position was eliminated with a corporate reorganization, and the many many moving pieces are slowly getting rewritten with different assumptions about monitoring, alerting, and logging, but in the meantime there is not anybody covering this function. This means that we typically only have a chance to fix things after they've started to be an actual nuisance to someone and they complain, whereas with the old team in place we had a better shot at identifying problems before they became a major nuisance and fixing them before anyone complained.
tmoertel 8y ago
There are some fascinating railroad photographs from an earlier era in the Pennsylvania Railroad Photographs collection: https://historicpittsburgh.org/collection/pennsylvania-railroad-photographs https://historicpittsburgh.org/collection/pennsylvania-railr... Many of the photographs feature gnarled old railroad bridges because of the hills and rivers in the region. Because of the region's steel industry, many photograph also feature smoke stacks and dirty skies. Here is how the collection is described: """The Pennsylvania Railroad collection, held by the Archives Service Center, includes 345 (nearly all of which are 8x10 in size) gelatin dry plate images of railroad infrastructure dating from 1907-1917. Many of the images depict construction and repair projects to the company's lines, both within the city of Pittsburgh, as well as across the Midwest. Featured prominently in the collection is the renovation and construction of the second track for the Ohio Connecting Railway Bridge, located just north of downtown Pittsburgh. The collection also includes numerous views of track re-grading operations which occurred in Pittsburgh, as well as other major cities including Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Detroit."""
nickhalfasleep 8y ago
In North America, there is no longer a "Fireman" position on diesels. You have the Engineer and the Conductor in the lead engine, and a "FRED" Flashing Rear End Device on the rear to control the air brakes, report speed and acceleration back to the head end. More often these days, trains have extra engines on the end (and middle) that are controlled from the front in Distributed Power Units (DPU's). By spreading power out, you have more control, less stress on the couplers, can run a longer train, and the air brakes respond faster (closer to each engine for pressure changes and recharges).
giarc 8y ago
The title (Dangers of Train Yards) reminds me of a story told by an acquaintance who worked in a yard many years ago. He said they would fuel the engines by inserting a hose and letting it run. It would take a long time to fill the tanks and so they would walk off to complete other tasks. They would return and more often than not, the tank would just be overflowing diesel into the ground. He didn't think they would ever be able to remediate rail yards because of the contamination.
- Kluny 8y ago
  The pumps at gas stations for cars have automatic backflow cutoff valves. I wonder why this technology isn't available for trains?

111 points by ax00x 8y ago

I'm involved in a rail transformation project. We're now using AR as part of the railway design process to ensure visibility of signals etc.

occamrazor 8y ago

Interesting story. In Italy trains still require two engineers, although on modern high speed ones the second engineer has to sit away from the windshield and the controls.

abduhl 8y ago

When I worked for BNSF I heard a story about a guy crushed between two cars in the knuckle because he lost line of sight with his engineer and they were using hand signals instead of a radio. They were able to keep him alive long enough to cover him with a tarp and bring his family in to say goodbye. He died immediately upon separation of the knuckle.

lawnchair_larry 8y ago
This is an old urban legend. Feel free to Google it, and you will see everyone who has worked near trains knows a guy who knows a guy who this exact thing happened to. Edit: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-last-kiss/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-last-kiss/
- jacquesm 8y ago
  And excavator and backhoe workers too as well as heavy presses.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    Eh, /r/watchpeopledie has taught me that heavy equipment will murder you in a violent fashion if you don't respect it.
    - gknoy 8y ago
      I am amazed that such a subreddit exists, and yet cannot bring myself to watch it.
      - RankingMember 8y ago
        Yeah, life has enough darkness without me seeking it out.
      - cm2012 8y ago
        It also teaches you to never let kids near roads without hand holding or a leash.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      I got within a hair. Stupid, stupid, stupid. In a nutshell: I was working with a backhoe that was older than I was, early 60's model and a hydraulic line developed a very small puncture, enough that I could see the line start to sweat. Instead of backing off I got closer to see if the drop I saw on the line was really oil or maybe water. Fortunately before I could reach for it but after I got way too close the line exploded. Blinded me for about 15 minutes completely, the oil got infused into the fabric of my sweater so deep that even 12 years later (yes, I hate throwing stuff away) you can still clearly see where it hit. And that was just a hydraulic line bursting, we're not into accidents with buckets and blades territory.
      - Noumenon72 8y ago
        A Reddit thread this week said if you put your finger over a leak in an oil line the pressure will drive it through your skin and they basically have to do surgery to scrape the pockets away from your bones.
- pmyteh 8y ago
  That particular story is an urban legend, but fatal shunting accidents are sadly not. See https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/fatal-accident-at-grosmont-north-yorkshire https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/fatal-accident-at-grosmont-n... for a recent example (an amateur on a preserved steam line in this case; the mainline railway in the UK minimises manual shunting as much as possible)
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    No doubt exacerbated by the insistence on sticking with buffer and chain couplers despite the availability of safer alternatives for 100+ years.
- UnderProtest 8y ago
  It's also absolutely real and has been fairly common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_syndrome It's hard to understand why Snopes has this marked as a myth. The specific anecdote structure with the wife showing up is clearly a meme but that doesn't make it a mythical type of event. We're much better at dealing with this situation in developed countries now. It's still a serious hazard. Around the turn of the 20th century it was very difficult to handle.
  - ant6n 8y ago
    This seems to involve patients being 'crushed' for an extended period of time. Like more than 15 minutes, where tissue dies and basically creates a poison, that enters the blood stream when the patients get released. That doesn't seem to describe a situation like the ggp was talking about.
    - UnderProtest 8y ago
      Note that I'm addressing the Snopes conclusion more than the comments of the HN poster, except insofar as he/she used Snopes as a source. The key elements of the Snopes article are these: -Victim was crushed by machinery. -Victim is still alive. -Victim is not in much pain. -If the machinery is removed the victim will probably die quickly. -There's time to have them communicate with loved ones, a priest, whoever. There are literally videos of this situation on liveleak. It happens with trains, with elevators, with forklifts and freight, and most commonly with car accidents. The reason you don't remove the person at first is that they'll bleed out. The crushing material is an effective tourniquet so the person just sits there, alive and moving. By the time that emergency responders get there to address the blood loss crush syndrome is a definite possibility. The person is generally going to faint the moment the equipment is removed because of the sudden loss of blood pressure. If they don't die of blood loss then they may have kidney failure and die on the way to treatment. Everything about this is shockingly common except bringing the victim's family down to say goodbye or bringing in a priest. To suggest that this has not happened in any of the hundreds or thousands of crushing cases since the industrial revolution occurred is ludicrous. It used to be that companies provided housing for workers near the factory/trainyard/loading dock. It would often have been the case that the victim's family could get there before an emergency responder. The sense in which this is a "legend" is that people claim it happened to a friend-of-a-friend or whatever, and it's true that's an urban legend channel, but the actual events are documented except for the dramatic last kiss. I wouldn't even be sure that isn't documented. I just haven't seen it.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Do you get joy from just making up stories and pretending you were there? I've heard this story perhaps as frequently as I hear about people who go cow tipping. But then I ask and it back tracks 'Oh, did I say I went cow tipping? I meant I sat in the car while some friends went cow tipping. And no, I guess I didn't see any cows. And we were parked in a taco bell parking lot.'
- pixl97 8y ago
  /r/watchpeopledie tells me that yes, some people are out experiencing those stories.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    I don't doubt that it could happen. I doubt that it happened in close relation to OP. Hence the cow tipping analogy.

lbriner 8y ago

Because of signal sighting rules in the UK, we experienced a lot of trouble upgrading lines to higher speed. All of a sudden, that signal that you could see for 10 seconds could now only be seen for 8 due to a bridge or whatever. Muchos dollars relocating signals and in some places not being able to increase the line speed at all. Boring but very real reasons why we "can't just update things"

red_admiral 8y ago
And of course there's the whole discussion in the UK about having a second safety-critical person on the train (e.g. "guard", "train manager" etc.) versus driver-only operation.
TylerE 8y ago
Dunno why they don't just go ahead and bite the bullet and go to 100% in-cab signaling. The technology has worked for decades and has been deployed on many lines, including a few in the UK.
- kposehn 8y ago
  Cab signaling requires a different set of standards in order to provide the necessary level of safety. Cab signals are (usually) transmitted through the rail and picked up by a special receiver on the leading axle of the locomotive. Each locomotive has to be equipped and the rails themselves have to be checked and blocked. This also means the rails have a higher maintenance requirement as opposed to lineside signals which can be more easily maintained. However, some countries (Brazil predominantly) have embraced a GPS based cab signal system where lineside signals are almost totally eliminated. However, this was done with federal subsidies to cover the expense iirc. Another example is the US Northeast Corridor where cab signals are used along with lineside signals to provide a level of redundancy at speed. Unfortunately there’s no easy solution, but I lean towards the Brazilian GPS based systems from Wabtec.
  - ComradeTaco 8y ago
    As a random piece of trivia, in cab signaling was pioneered in the 1920's and implemented commercially by Pennsylvania Railroad the 1930's while upgrading their main line between New York City and Washington D.C. You can see in this photo that the engineer had one indicator that would light up for each signal aspect: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/31/85/83/3185833fba11b79498ff9c658e730fc4.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/31/85/83/3185833fba11b79498ff...

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I got a chance to drive a couple of different engines at the Plumas rail museum. And one of the things that does is help you internalize the amazing amount of mass and momentum a train carries around all the time. The engineer who was with us spoke of freight trains that were a hundred cars of iron ore that, even though they were travelling at only 5mph would take nearly 1000' to bring to an "emergency" stop. While I don't know how true that is, just driving around the engine gave me some insight into how far ahead in time the engineer has to be thinking if they are operating a full train.

dredmorbius 8y ago
My experience is largely with bicycles (you're very aware of the energy input/output), automobiles, and boats, but thinking of moving vehicles as momentum systems, to which energy can be added or removed, is useful. On a bike, you maintain a steady speed by matching drag losses with the energy you're putting into the pedals. Braking and other actions cost you energy you've put in. For automobiles and trucks, added mass has a significant change to momentum, and I feel that. Boats, from a row or sailboat to a 30m+ power vessel, have their momentum, drag, and interaction with water, waves, currents, and wind. Trains are a whole 'nother ballgame.
- kqr 8y ago
  > On a bike, you maintain a steady speed by matching drag losses with the energy you're putting into the pedals. Braking and other actions cost you energy you've put in. As does the frequent mistake of putting weight on the rear pedal. Realising this made me understand how little energy it really takes to keep a bicycle going, given the correct gear.
  - HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
    As does the frequent mistake of putting weight on the rear pedal. I don't follow. What do you mean here?
    - 8y ago

raverbashing 8y ago

Reminds me of this https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xqg0q/whats_the_quickest_youve_noped_out_of_a_job/duafir1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xqg0q/whats_the...

lucb1e 8y ago

Historical, not current ones. I was talking to some friends about it just yesterday and was looking forward to the driver's point of view. Also, cookie wall. So the TLDR is that in the past, more people needed to be employed on a train. The diesel came and they could redesign the locomotives so no big boiler was in front which blocks visibility. Problem solved for the railroads, but people unemployed. Apparently there are some historical pictures that they took on rail yards to prove the visibility issue.

dmckeon 8y ago

Not to make light of railyard hazards, but: > the union had more than 30 railroad employees take photos of their workplace in an effort to demonstrate the hazards firemen could help navigate around. suggests that the presumably union workers may have tended to choose to take photos of the more (or most) dangerous locations. For a company perspective from the 1940s, see ""Why Risk Your Life?" -- 1940s Railroad Safety Film" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqpayZ2JqlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqpayZ2JqlU

mturmon 8y ago
...choose to take photos of the more (or most) dangerous locations... That would be where the accidents happen, right? Thus the photos are taken there.
- giarc 8y ago
  I think OP is just commenting on how union workers would be a biased source on just how common unsafe designs are.
kposehn 8y ago
Yep. Modern yards today are pretty efficient affairs and are designed for safety from the ground up. Compare those photos to Union Pacific’s Global III yard in Illinois: https://www.hanson-inc.com/portfolio/Union-Pacific-Railroad-Global-III-Facility-planning-design/portfolio-details?id=101 https://www.hanson-inc.com/portfolio/Union-Pacific-Railroad-... Fundamentally different designs then and now as they aren’t trying to load boxcars and instead transload containers.
hexane360 8y ago
I loved those videos too, but it was pointed out to me how much blame they put on the employee for unsafe working conditions. Safety isn't just about telling your employees to be safe and punishing them when they aren't.

regularfry 8y ago

Just as interesting, linked from that page: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-japan-trains https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j... Now I'm wondering about the cross-over between that and rubber-duck debugging.

eponeponepon 8y ago
The two are one and the same thing, I'd wager. The act of translating abstract thought processes into physical action (whether that's speaking or just pointing) forces you to examine it in a different way, just in order to make it concrete enough to express.
macintux 8y ago
Much discussion on that article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011793
Noumenon72 8y ago
Patrick McKenzie says this is the procedure Japanese programmers use for making changes in production! Now I know it came from the culture. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1009235280530829313 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1009235280530829313
- regularfry 8y ago
  Culture is just "what people do". It's interesting that train drivers have to be coached through it feeling uncomfortable but necessary for safe operation. If there's a "national character" element to it, I'd say it's the acceptance of the uncomfortable but necessary.
- patio11 8y ago
  This is what some engineering shops have as standard practice in Japan, which is a distinction with a difference.

CamTin 8y ago

The fireman debate, where management argues that a position is no longer necessary due to technological improvements, while the people actually doing the work think or understand differently, should be familiar to almost anyone in any field of work. We're currently fighting a whole genre of fire at work that boils down to the fact that a particular system, with many many finicky integrations both inside the company and with rickety old 3rd-party systems, was designed with the assumption that there was a so-called "junior QA" team who would be manually looking for trends in error logs and failed task logs. This position was eliminated with a corporate reorganization, and the many many moving pieces are slowly getting rewritten with different assumptions about monitoring, alerting, and logging, but in the meantime there is not anybody covering this function. This means that we typically only have a chance to fix things after they've started to be an actual nuisance to someone and they complain, whereas with the old team in place we had a better shot at identifying problems before they became a major nuisance and fixing them before anyone complained.

tmoertel 8y ago

There are some fascinating railroad photographs from an earlier era in the Pennsylvania Railroad Photographs collection: https://historicpittsburgh.org/collection/pennsylvania-railroad-photographs https://historicpittsburgh.org/collection/pennsylvania-railr... Many of the photographs feature gnarled old railroad bridges because of the hills and rivers in the region. Because of the region's steel industry, many photograph also feature smoke stacks and dirty skies. Here is how the collection is described: """The Pennsylvania Railroad collection, held by the Archives Service Center, includes 345 (nearly all of which are 8x10 in size) gelatin dry plate images of railroad infrastructure dating from 1907-1917. Many of the images depict construction and repair projects to the company's lines, both within the city of Pittsburgh, as well as across the Midwest. Featured prominently in the collection is the renovation and construction of the second track for the Ohio Connecting Railway Bridge, located just north of downtown Pittsburgh. The collection also includes numerous views of track re-grading operations which occurred in Pittsburgh, as well as other major cities including Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Detroit."""

nickhalfasleep 8y ago

In North America, there is no longer a "Fireman" position on diesels. You have the Engineer and the Conductor in the lead engine, and a "FRED" Flashing Rear End Device on the rear to control the air brakes, report speed and acceleration back to the head end. More often these days, trains have extra engines on the end (and middle) that are controlled from the front in Distributed Power Units (DPU's). By spreading power out, you have more control, less stress on the couplers, can run a longer train, and the air brakes respond faster (closer to each engine for pressure changes and recharges).

giarc 8y ago

The title (Dangers of Train Yards) reminds me of a story told by an acquaintance who worked in a yard many years ago. He said they would fuel the engines by inserting a hose and letting it run. It would take a long time to fill the tanks and so they would walk off to complete other tasks. They would return and more often than not, the tank would just be overflowing diesel into the ground. He didn't think they would ever be able to remediate rail yards because of the contamination.

Kluny 8y ago
The pumps at gas stations for cars have automatic backflow cutoff valves. I wonder why this technology isn't available for trains?