2. When other Amtrak trains past us (and sometime freight), they would radio something like "49, you look good on this side." What is that about?
It's considered a courtesy that crews passing one another will look over the other train, at least that which they can see, checking for wheels that aren't on the rails, at night maybe a glowing wheel indicating that it's too hot, dragging equipment, and most importantly what they most commonly refer to as markers. That's the red light(s) on the rear of the train that indicate the last car of the train. And on freight trains that red light is on something referred to as FRED (Flashing Rear End Detector), which is a device that not only flashing the red warning light but can also apply the brakes in an emergency.
It's more than just a professional courtesy--it's a requirement. See
section 6.29.1 in GCOR (the rulebook used by the UP, BNSF, and other railroads west of the Mississippi).
Also, the FRED on a freight also transmits the rear-end brake pressure to the engine so the engineer knows there is continuity in the brake pipe the entire way through the train. (If a valve gets closed somehow three cars behind the engine and the engineer is trying to pump up the brakes, the engineer would see that the FRED is not reporting an increase in brake pipe pressure and would know that there is a blockage.)
See Wikipedia for more info. (Yours truly wrote a bit of that article and took one of the pictures...)
3. Often I would hear long beeps (like pressing a touch tone phone button) and heard a reference once about calling someone. Is this some sort of "calling" method or what?
Many times in passenger service, the engineer upon starting up from a station will key in a code that activates the gates. This is done to avoid having the gates lowered while the train is busy discharging or boarding passengers. There are also other things that can be done with those tones, I'm not sure of all the applications though.
I've never worked in an area where activating gates at stops is a problem, so I don't know anything about what Alan was saying, but what you were hearing in your instance had nothing to do with gates and is the normal way to summon the attention of the train dispatcher.
Since train dispatchers are generally responsible for a wide area of territory which covers multiple radio towers, they can't listen to the radio traffic in all of their areas at once. Therefore, each radio tower is assigned a code (usually two digits). When the train crew needs to summon the attention of the dispatcher, they look up in their System or Division Special Instructions (aka "Employee Timetable") the area that they are currently traveling in for the proper call code and punch it in. What you'll hear is exactly what you heard: a couple of touch tones followed by a long beep. The touch tones are generated by the on-board radio, and the beep is generated by the radio tower to signal that it recognized the call tones. A light then appears on the dispatcher's control panel, and shortly thereafter, you should hear the dispatcher come on the line (unless he or she is busy elsewhere on the system), and a conversation between him/her and the train crew will commence.
For an example of call codes, see the
Alaska Railroad System Special Instructions, sections 82.24 and 82.25 (pages 42-43, or PDF pages 44-45).
4. On #3, we had a freight unit put on the front (SD70MAC 9515). Can any Amtrak engineer jump into a freight unit and drive? Or do they have to be checked out on each piece of equipment?
An Amtrak engineer must be qualified to drive any type of engine. In fact, very few Amtrak engineers can drive both a P42 and say an AEM-7. In fact, this is the reason that the regional crews still change in New Haven, as the contract was written back when they still changed to diesel service at NHV. I was talking about this crew change in another topic recently. Acela on the other hand does not have a crew change in NHV, since they were hired under a slightly altered contract.
I'm still not clear on this one. I'm very curious about this, too. I would have assumed that any freight units would be run by their respective employees, but when you confirmed for me in your trip report thread that it was the Amtrak engineer who was running that unit, I had to change my assumptions.
I think it's pretty unlikely that the Amtrak engineer called for your train just
happened to be dual-qualified on that specific type of BNSF engine (BNSF could have assigned any other type of engine--AC4400CW, Dash 8 40-BW, GP40-2, or whatever), so that leaves only two options (that I can think of): either all Amtrak engineers are dual-qualified with Amtrak locomotives as well as the locomotives of the host railroads Amtrak travels over, or the host railroads (or at least BNSF) simply have an agreement that allows all Amtrak engineers to operate any of their locomotives (at least in the case of an emergency). Honestly, most diesel engines are more alike than they are different (unlike Alan's example of the AEM-7--that's a totally different beast whatsoever, since it's electric-only), so this latter arrangement would not surprise me.
5. Does Amtrak use GPS anywhere on a train? It is hard to believe in the 21st century that the LD trains do not have anyone on the crew with a GPS device. I showed my laptop running Microsoft Streets and Maps with GPS to my car attendant. She really thought it was neat. I do not know how the attendants can do there jobs without knowing where they are at night. It would be very hard for me to get any sleep not knowing. I would have to have something like a GPS phone.
To my knowledge Amtrak has not yet implemented GPS on most of its trains. The Cascades service does have it, so that the monitors can display the train's position along the route.
As for the attendants, they pretty much know the route so well that they can just tell from what's outside the window as to what stop is coming up and how soon. Both the engineer and the conductor also know the route that well too! Returning to the attendants, they don't go to sleep during the night if they are on duty usually. Generally what happens is that most attendants trade off. So for example on a train with two sleeping cars and attendants fictionally named Mary and Sam, Sam will stay up all night going westbound working both sleepers on the Capitol Limited while Mary sleeps. On the eastbound return, Mary stays up all night while Sam sleeps.
My sleeper attendant on the CS in May, Cruz, had a GPS in his roomette. Of course, he was rarely in his room, so I'm not entirely sure what he was using it for!
Installing a GPS solely for the passengers' benefit is, for the most part, an unnecessary expense (it's nice but not something that a cash-strapped Amtrak can do). And GPSes are not (yet) in widespread "official" use (i.e. for granting track authority to trains), although that is beginning to change. Railroading has been around for a long time, and many of the operating practices are still based on the way things were done in the early 20th century. Manual methods--
manually giving the train authority between two certain points over the radio--is still common on many thousands of miles of track in this country. Even the most modern method employed by the freight railroads,
CTC, still uses a pretty basic system of detecting track occupancy: passing a small current through the rails. GPS has only been around a relatively short while, and railroads are only now beginning to devise ways to implement it. PTC, or Positive Train Control, is the next step forward in railroad traffic control, and it's still in its development stages--see
this video by BNSF on their implentation. Locomotives and even some rail cars are starting to be equipped with GPSes for tracking and inventory purposes (I don't know if Amtrak's are), too, so when that becomes more ubiquitous, perhaps Amtrak can tie an on-board display into those systems so Alan can see where he is.