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I also live in Ames, Iowa, where the author resides. I live less than a mile from the track segment he is talking about, owned and operated by Union Pacific. Wh

I also live in Ames, Iowa, where the author resides. I live less than a mile from the track segment he is talking about, owned and operated by Union Pacific. While I'm pretty skeptical of this author's individual concerns given the twice-removed nature of the statements from their "source", trains have unmistakably gotten longer during my 15 years near these tracks, and they are moving faster. A hazmat situation impacting only a one-mile radius around the tracks could effect up to 30 to 40 thousand people here. I interned for Union Pacific while in college, and yes, the company will state that safety is their number one priority, but it was very clear that their business was to profit by optimizing every single little part of their business for maximum efficiency. The company has an open distain for regulations, especially safety-related regulations, and did not shy away from sharing those views internally. I would not be at all surprised if crews are being abused, and safety sidelined, for the sake of maximizing profit.

curiousllama 4y ago
That’s super interesting to me. It’ll take a disaster to fix it. I worked in oil and gas for a while, and they were pathologically obsessed with safety. Like, “you’ll be fired for not using the handrail in the HQ stairwell” pathological. It was good! There was never a question about how to value a trade off. Open disdain for safety regulations seems like a recipe for disaster.
- taurath 4y ago
  In the modern world, it’ll take a disaster for anyone to pay any attention at all, but all they have to do is wait a few weeks for everyone to pay attention to something else.
- ohyoutravel 4y ago
  Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.
  - ChefboyOG 4y ago
    That's so odd. I worked on a project involving some Chevron employees once, and we had a strange number of conversations about employer liability should someone injure themselves in the office. It's been years, but your comment reminded me. I thought it was just a quirk of that team, like one of them was just puzzlingly obsessed with it. Maybe the oil industry is just inexplicably plagued by slip-and-fall lawsuits?
    - seanp2k2 4y ago
      Oil is slippery, and humans walking upright fall easily on slippery surfaces :) Check out e.g. HexArmor Rig Lizard gloves for the kinds of specialized safety gear they use to get a good cut-resistant grip on stuff.
    - rfrey 4y ago
      It's not just slip-and-fall. Northern Alberta SAGD sites have 20km/h speed limits on premise - if you're a contractor you WILL be fired individually for going over (yes, they measure), and if you're a contracting firm two violations by your people will get your whole company kicked off site. Oil and gas is safety obsessed.
      - azinman2 4y ago
        > Oil and gas is safety obsessed. And yet…
        squigg 4y ago
        And yet they work on some of the most complex, hostile environments and typically operate safely.
        throwaway0a5e 4y ago
        People crash trucks (the rate at which they crash trucks is kinda impressive tbh), injure hands and backs moving heavy things around, get nasty stuff in their face all the time. But those incidents cannot easily be characterized, quantifies and evaluated but a bunch of clipboard warrior paper pushers so instead you get a zero tolerance speed limit policy and everyone pats themselves on the back.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  Was this before or after Deepwater Horizon? From what I understand, there was open disdain for proper processes.
- jagger27 4y ago
  > It’ll take a disaster to fix it. It didn't happen in the US, but it has happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
  - rapjr9 4y ago
    There have been some horrible incidents in the US: https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/news/remembering-the-graniteville-train-wreck-13-years-later/article_a7f78a0d-3e93-5301-928f-84a42f310830.html https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/news/rememberin... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_rail_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_rail_accidents
- wiredfool 4y ago
  When I was a Civil engineer with a bridge project that was over a railway, it was required that I take a safety class from BNSF about how to be near the rails, and what not to do. The first thing in the class was that they noted the e,regency exit from the room. (Iirc, the room had one door, to the outside, that we had just walked through to get in the room).
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  It makes for a nice dog and pony show for the office workers who profess to care. In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell" becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the rampant safety policy violations). Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE, equipment interlocks and guards helping them out (lord knows they're running on blow and monster energy at least one day a month). They disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to be. My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore and maple syrup land may be different.
  - brnaftr361 4y ago
    Absolutely perfectly well put. It's always seemed to me to be a way to derive a narrative of plausible deniability, and nothing more.
  - curiousllama 4y ago
    This is a good point. Of course, I only ever had exposure to the white collar folks. Those white collar folks could never make the work safe. But they could sure as hell f_ck it up. At least from what I saw, the safety theater was tremendously effective at telling the white collar folks not to demand stupid sh_t: once the guy on the ground says the magic words ("that's not safe"), conversation over. YOU, project manager/junior exec, didn't plan well enough. The guy on the ground is just doing his job.
- falsenapkin 4y ago
  I've been to some customer hq/office sites in oil/chemical industries and experienced similar. One place had indoor escalator that you weren't allowed to walk on and must always hold the handrail as well. When it was broken, you couldn't use it as stairs and instead had to take this terrifying (though likely very safe) elevator. Another rule I liked was to not allow strangers on the boat when you're rowing across the river. What river? What boats? What year was this written?
- nostrademons 4y ago
  My sister was in oil & gas for about 15 years, up until a couple years ago. The majors varied pretty dramatically in regards to safety. XOM, COP, and Shell were excellent. Chevron pretty good. BP was terrible - all safety theater without a whole lot of safety. My sister was working at a competitor around the time Deepwater Horizon went down, and had previously worked at BP. She was not at all surprised that it happened to BP, and had complained to us around 2005 that BP was a disaster waiting to happen.
- doodlebugging 4y ago
  The pathological obsession with safety in the industry is a smoke-screen used to shield them from liability when accidents inevitably occur. They will find ways to blame employee error instead of taking responsibility when their own policies contribute to accidents, especially if there are fatalities. The dead guy probably did it to himself. It couldn't possibly be related to lack of sleep, lack of maintenance of important tools in use at the time, etc. It is definitely one industry where HR has the company's back and you are fucked if you raise any issues with them. I had a situation where I violated a company policy on location one time and this violation caused my crew and therefore the company, to be kicked off the location and replaced by a competitor's crew with a competing tool. This resulted in a nice meeting with my Field Service Manager (my direct boss), my Regional Service Manager (his direct boss), and a person whom I discovered after the meeting was a company lawyer who was present only to document my clear failure so that they could justify termination. Questions were asked by my bosses and I responded with truthful answers and long-winded descriptions of the thought processes behind those actions. When they ran out of questions and thought they had clearly documented that I broke the company's rules about what I could tell clients about their tool's performance and that termination was justified, the lawyer introduced himself to me. I had had no idea who he was up to then, he was just a suit with a notepad who spent his time there taking notes. He thanked me for my thoughtful replies and turned to my bosses and told them that they could not fire me since the client had specifically asked me to answer his question based on my own personal experiences and that when I answered I was careful to base my answer only on my own personal experience - for better or worse. Additionally, since they knew that the experiences that I used in answering the client's questions were true and not embellished (they both had direct knowledge of the problems I had encountered and later described), there were no grounds to terminate. Up to that point I had no idea that they were trying to terminate me. Basically, the company policy was to parrot the marketing bullshit and lie to the client about tool performance characteristics under adverse conditions. When the lawyer had delivered the bad news to them he stood up and extended his hand, thanked me for my time and told me to keep up the good work. I was fortunate that I had been able to send resumes several weeks before while I was recuperating from job-related knee surgery. One of those resumes ended up giving my life back to me and allowing me to expand my career and eventually become a consultant to the industry. Though its been thirty years now I can still say - Fuck Scumbagger.
Kon-Peki 4y ago
That same UP line goes east into Illinois. They aren't running 3-mile long trains out here at the edge of the Chicago metro. I wonder where they draw the line. I actually thought that this article was going to be about the inability to hire train crews. The commuter rail in Chicago is run in partnership with the freight lines. The one I use is operated by UP. I've overheard that the reason they haven't added more trains is that they can't hire more train crews. On my line, there are 21 trains in and 21 out on weekdays - a fraction of the pre-pandemic service levels. They are getting to the point where many trains a so crowded that people have to stand in the aisles and really need to add more service.
- paulmd 4y ago
  Part of the problem with train crews is the Department of Transportation's antiquated laws on cannabis. You can't hire anyone who's used it in the last 90 days, that's a pretty huge fraction of the country. Actually you can't even hire them with the understanding that they need to stop immediately and be clean in 90 days, they have to have been clean for 90 days before applying on the DOT form or their application will bounce immediately. Instead of reforming that law, or telling railroads to deal with it and pay more/reduce capacity, they're just gonna bend the safety laws instead. Same problem applies to government and clearance jobs. FBI has said they can't find anyone to hire because everyone smokes pot now and that it's a problem for their hiring pipeline.
  - maccolgan 4y ago
    Are you sure a significant percentage of the target demographic they are wanting to hire regularly consumes cannabis and will gladly miss an opportunity for … cannabis ?
    - paulmd 4y ago
      The question isn't "would you prefer a job or cannabis", it's "what fraction of the population is ineligible for consideration during the period when they're job-seeking". We have an extremely tight job-market right now and you're talking about adding a massive frictional force to employment in that job-market. What is the average time a high-skilled professional (or even blue-collar) worker is unemployed between-jobs these days? Probably a lot less than 90 days, I'd think. And 2 years might as well be forever in this job market. CDC numbers put the number of people who used cannabis at least once in 2019 at 18%, and it's probably only gotten higher over time. It's probably more like 25% nowadays - and sure that's "once a year" but the real number is likely also higher than a voluntary survey would find. In market terms, reducing your supply by 25% or 30% is a lot and would significantly push your prices upwards. And if you don't let prices swing upwards enough, you'll get shortages. On top of that it's just a generally undesirable job. Lots of time away from home, and extreme responsibility and stress, even in the best-case scenario, and they're making it even more unpleasant (the ever-popular "dead-sea effect") as they run out of people to do it. We're already seeing that showing up in similar jobs like nursing. And then on top of that you've got the DOT requirements that exclude another big chunk of the population from consideration. So they're competing for an even smaller fraction of the job market, and they just aren't paying salaries to keep up with it all.

curiousllama 4y ago

That’s super interesting to me. It’ll take a disaster to fix it. I worked in oil and gas for a while, and they were pathologically obsessed with safety. Like, “you’ll be fired for not using the handrail in the HQ stairwell” pathological. It was good! There was never a question about how to value a trade off. Open disdain for safety regulations seems like a recipe for disaster.

taurath 4y ago
In the modern world, it’ll take a disaster for anyone to pay any attention at all, but all they have to do is wait a few weeks for everyone to pay attention to something else.
ohyoutravel 4y ago
Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.
- ChefboyOG 4y ago
  That's so odd. I worked on a project involving some Chevron employees once, and we had a strange number of conversations about employer liability should someone injure themselves in the office. It's been years, but your comment reminded me. I thought it was just a quirk of that team, like one of them was just puzzlingly obsessed with it. Maybe the oil industry is just inexplicably plagued by slip-and-fall lawsuits?
  - seanp2k2 4y ago
    Oil is slippery, and humans walking upright fall easily on slippery surfaces :) Check out e.g. HexArmor Rig Lizard gloves for the kinds of specialized safety gear they use to get a good cut-resistant grip on stuff.
  - rfrey 4y ago
    It's not just slip-and-fall. Northern Alberta SAGD sites have 20km/h speed limits on premise - if you're a contractor you WILL be fired individually for going over (yes, they measure), and if you're a contracting firm two violations by your people will get your whole company kicked off site. Oil and gas is safety obsessed.
    - azinman2 4y ago
      > Oil and gas is safety obsessed. And yet…
      - squigg 4y ago
        And yet they work on some of the most complex, hostile environments and typically operate safely.
        throwaway0a5e 4y ago
        People crash trucks (the rate at which they crash trucks is kinda impressive tbh), injure hands and backs moving heavy things around, get nasty stuff in their face all the time. But those incidents cannot easily be characterized, quantifies and evaluated but a bunch of clipboard warrior paper pushers so instead you get a zero tolerance speed limit policy and everyone pats themselves on the back.
nebula8804 4y ago
Was this before or after Deepwater Horizon? From what I understand, there was open disdain for proper processes.
jagger27 4y ago
> It’ll take a disaster to fix it. It didn't happen in the US, but it has happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
- rapjr9 4y ago
  There have been some horrible incidents in the US: https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/news/remembering-the-graniteville-train-wreck-13-years-later/article_a7f78a0d-3e93-5301-928f-84a42f310830.html https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/news/rememberin... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_rail_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_rail_accidents
wiredfool 4y ago
When I was a Civil engineer with a bridge project that was over a railway, it was required that I take a safety class from BNSF about how to be near the rails, and what not to do. The first thing in the class was that they noted the e,regency exit from the room. (Iirc, the room had one door, to the outside, that we had just walked through to get in the room).
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
It makes for a nice dog and pony show for the office workers who profess to care. In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell" becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the rampant safety policy violations). Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE, equipment interlocks and guards helping them out (lord knows they're running on blow and monster energy at least one day a month). They disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to be. My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore and maple syrup land may be different.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  Absolutely perfectly well put. It's always seemed to me to be a way to derive a narrative of plausible deniability, and nothing more.
- curiousllama 4y ago
  This is a good point. Of course, I only ever had exposure to the white collar folks. Those white collar folks could never make the work safe. But they could sure as hell f_ck it up. At least from what I saw, the safety theater was tremendously effective at telling the white collar folks not to demand stupid sh_t: once the guy on the ground says the magic words ("that's not safe"), conversation over. YOU, project manager/junior exec, didn't plan well enough. The guy on the ground is just doing his job.
falsenapkin 4y ago
I've been to some customer hq/office sites in oil/chemical industries and experienced similar. One place had indoor escalator that you weren't allowed to walk on and must always hold the handrail as well. When it was broken, you couldn't use it as stairs and instead had to take this terrifying (though likely very safe) elevator. Another rule I liked was to not allow strangers on the boat when you're rowing across the river. What river? What boats? What year was this written?
nostrademons 4y ago
My sister was in oil & gas for about 15 years, up until a couple years ago. The majors varied pretty dramatically in regards to safety. XOM, COP, and Shell were excellent. Chevron pretty good. BP was terrible - all safety theater without a whole lot of safety. My sister was working at a competitor around the time Deepwater Horizon went down, and had previously worked at BP. She was not at all surprised that it happened to BP, and had complained to us around 2005 that BP was a disaster waiting to happen.
doodlebugging 4y ago
The pathological obsession with safety in the industry is a smoke-screen used to shield them from liability when accidents inevitably occur. They will find ways to blame employee error instead of taking responsibility when their own policies contribute to accidents, especially if there are fatalities. The dead guy probably did it to himself. It couldn't possibly be related to lack of sleep, lack of maintenance of important tools in use at the time, etc. It is definitely one industry where HR has the company's back and you are fucked if you raise any issues with them. I had a situation where I violated a company policy on location one time and this violation caused my crew and therefore the company, to be kicked off the location and replaced by a competitor's crew with a competing tool. This resulted in a nice meeting with my Field Service Manager (my direct boss), my Regional Service Manager (his direct boss), and a person whom I discovered after the meeting was a company lawyer who was present only to document my clear failure so that they could justify termination. Questions were asked by my bosses and I responded with truthful answers and long-winded descriptions of the thought processes behind those actions. When they ran out of questions and thought they had clearly documented that I broke the company's rules about what I could tell clients about their tool's performance and that termination was justified, the lawyer introduced himself to me. I had had no idea who he was up to then, he was just a suit with a notepad who spent his time there taking notes. He thanked me for my thoughtful replies and turned to my bosses and told them that they could not fire me since the client had specifically asked me to answer his question based on my own personal experiences and that when I answered I was careful to base my answer only on my own personal experience - for better or worse. Additionally, since they knew that the experiences that I used in answering the client's questions were true and not embellished (they both had direct knowledge of the problems I had encountered and later described), there were no grounds to terminate. Up to that point I had no idea that they were trying to terminate me. Basically, the company policy was to parrot the marketing bullshit and lie to the client about tool performance characteristics under adverse conditions. When the lawyer had delivered the bad news to them he stood up and extended his hand, thanked me for my time and told me to keep up the good work. I was fortunate that I had been able to send resumes several weeks before while I was recuperating from job-related knee surgery. One of those resumes ended up giving my life back to me and allowing me to expand my career and eventually become a consultant to the industry. Though its been thirty years now I can still say - Fuck Scumbagger.

Kon-Peki 4y ago

That same UP line goes east into Illinois. They aren't running 3-mile long trains out here at the edge of the Chicago metro. I wonder where they draw the line. I actually thought that this article was going to be about the inability to hire train crews. The commuter rail in Chicago is run in partnership with the freight lines. The one I use is operated by UP. I've overheard that the reason they haven't added more trains is that they can't hire more train crews. On my line, there are 21 trains in and 21 out on weekdays - a fraction of the pre-pandemic service levels. They are getting to the point where many trains a so crowded that people have to stand in the aisles and really need to add more service.

paulmd 4y ago
Part of the problem with train crews is the Department of Transportation's antiquated laws on cannabis. You can't hire anyone who's used it in the last 90 days, that's a pretty huge fraction of the country. Actually you can't even hire them with the understanding that they need to stop immediately and be clean in 90 days, they have to have been clean for 90 days before applying on the DOT form or their application will bounce immediately. Instead of reforming that law, or telling railroads to deal with it and pay more/reduce capacity, they're just gonna bend the safety laws instead. Same problem applies to government and clearance jobs. FBI has said they can't find anyone to hire because everyone smokes pot now and that it's a problem for their hiring pipeline.
- maccolgan 4y ago
  Are you sure a significant percentage of the target demographic they are wanting to hire regularly consumes cannabis and will gladly miss an opportunity for … cannabis ?
  - paulmd 4y ago
    The question isn't "would you prefer a job or cannabis", it's "what fraction of the population is ineligible for consideration during the period when they're job-seeking". We have an extremely tight job-market right now and you're talking about adding a massive frictional force to employment in that job-market. What is the average time a high-skilled professional (or even blue-collar) worker is unemployed between-jobs these days? Probably a lot less than 90 days, I'd think. And 2 years might as well be forever in this job market. CDC numbers put the number of people who used cannabis at least once in 2019 at 18%, and it's probably only gotten higher over time. It's probably more like 25% nowadays - and sure that's "once a year" but the real number is likely also higher than a voluntary survey would find. In market terms, reducing your supply by 25% or 30% is a lot and would significantly push your prices upwards. And if you don't let prices swing upwards enough, you'll get shortages. On top of that it's just a generally undesirable job. Lots of time away from home, and extreme responsibility and stress, even in the best-case scenario, and they're making it even more unpleasant (the ever-popular "dead-sea effect") as they run out of people to do it. We're already seeing that showing up in similar jobs like nursing. And then on top of that you've got the DOT requirements that exclude another big chunk of the population from consideration. So they're competing for an even smaller fraction of the job market, and they just aren't paying salaries to keep up with it all.