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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

I've heard a lot of tension & angst from workers in this industry, growingly so. One question I really don't have any idea about is what kind of headcount it takes. How big is the crew of a train? If you're picking up or dropping off some trains from a factory or warehouse or whatever, are there also on the ground people? They're part of the same union? Are they employed by the people running the train? How many might there be?

I have so little knowledge. But I imagine like 2, 3 people tops working on a huge huge train. I understand that it's completely bogus that the company just can't plan ahead, that they're so unprepared when a delay causes the crew to hit their maximum allowed hours for a stretch. But I also have so little idea how many people it takes. If it indeed is like 2-3 people, holy shit, these companies just need to employ standby people at some significant volume, and stop being total cheapasses.

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From what I can gather, the current crew for most trains is 2. There are no cabooses anymore, so it's just what crew can fit in the engine compartment, and there is no provision for crew rest or sleeping on the train. Engineers and crew are swapped out at specific points, when the train arrives at that spot.

The workers suspect that the railroads want to go down to 1-man crews on the trains, for cost savings, but they feel (and I agree) that that's probably unsafe. There are on-the-ground people at endpoints, some bridges, critical crossings, etc., and the number of fixed ground staff would go up with 1-man crews, but that doesn't help when you have a problem 60 miles into the cascades.

Standby people is a possibility, but trains are often out in rural, or even inaccessible places; it may not be possible to get a supplementary crew member to a train without a helicopter or at least a multi-hour drive.

Never mind one-person crews; why don't we have zero-person crews? In most cases the crew are just responding to signals anyway; trains accelerate slowly enough that it's very rare that train crew can see a problem in time to do anything about it anyway.

How do you find the Skytrain in Vancouver? As an occasional visitor I've found it reliable and friendly, but it is also a fully-isolated track (right?). I'm not sure how well current automation would cope with the semi-open train yards and crossing points that we have in Seattle's Interbay or SODO districts.

Skytrain is awesome. Tracks are isolated for some definition of "isolated"; skytrain doesn't have to interoperate with any other rail traffic (unless you count maintenance vehicles) but there isn't any wall separating the track from the station platform like e.g. the Las Vegas airport has (it has been discussed as a safety measure, but skytrains don't presently park accurately enough to line up the doors) and there are many places where you can hop a fence and get onto the tracks (resulting in trains being stopped and police showing up to escort you away).

That's still a significant difference from running traditional trains on unprotected track. Skytrain has no grade crossings.

The DLR in London is another example of how zero-person trains may work.

Here's why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-Mégantic_rail_disaster

RIP to all 47 victims.

Add mecsred notes, this disaster illustrates the risks of rail, especially with hazardous cargo (which could have been carried far more safely by pipeline!) but it also illustrates an over reliance on humans. A zero-human-drivers railway would have (a) had automatically locking trains rather than relying on humans to hit the breaks, and (b) more remote monitoring to detect if anything went wrong.

A zero-human-drivers railway sounds extremely vulnerable to "the train is on fire, the fire brigade shut off the generator, which it turns out the brakes depended on" which is the essence of what happened there.

That's absolutely a problem if a train designed to have a driver doesn't have one (which is what happened here). If trains were designed to not need drivers, this wouldn't have happened, because (a) enough mechanical brakes would have been applied automatically, (b) the engine fire would have been detected and reported automatically, and (c) if the brakes failed there would have been an immediate alarm when the train started moving.

That was an interesting read, thanks for posting that.

However, in the write-up the TSB cites several sources of human error and a _lack_ of automation such as rail circuits as key factors.

The article notably specifically cites oil as an hazardous & risky thing to carry. Let us not find fault with the whole idea for but one aspect which we ought not implement (carrying oil).

> Let us not find fault with the whole idea for but one aspect which we ought not implement (carrying oil).

We can't find fault with that; oil's got to move somehow. It can move by truck, by rail, by ship, by air, or by pipeline.[1] How much worse is rail?

[1] Technically, I guess we could also pour it into the ocean somewhere and hope it naturally floats to somewhere more useful.

Does anyone have any up-to-date info regarding fully autonomous freight trains? Self-driving cars and semi-trucks seem to grab all the headlines, but someone's got to be working on automating freight trains. It seems like a much easier problem to solve. Or is it?

The incentive is also much lower, given the ratio between driver comp and freight volume.

My buddy is a freight conductor. It’s generally him and an engineer on the train.

It’s a shit job that breaks marriages and encourages bad behaviors. You’re basically on call for 24 shifts, and can get called or not anytime from hour 1 to hour 24. You have to chase work, so many guys get “dead headed” having to take jobs hours away. It’s common for guys to have crash apartments or pooled cars to drive 4-5 hours home.

Sounds about right. Can you imagine if they actually gave him a scheduled time to arrive at work, and paid him regardless of if the train was ready? That's what they should do.

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