Railway Age Piece on the Contributors to the House Transportation Bill 2020

Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum

Help Support Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Looks like it was written by someone from the short line lobby. Lots of special pleading for policies that I suppose affect their bottom line. Looks like they got some stuff they wanted, and other stuff they didn't. In particular, they seem to be totally oblivious to the history of the Lac Megantic disaster in their continued opposition to mandatory 2-man crews. I suppose they're hoping that the Senate version of the bill (assuming the Senate gets its act together and actually passes a bill) and the final version out of conference are more to their liking.
 
Personally I think that a two man crew is a total waste of resources when operating under PTC, and the rest of the world appears to agree with me. But hey what do I know. Not much really. 🤪

Without a strong PTC system backing the crew up there is at least a cogent argument to be made in favor of a two man crew.
 
Last edited:
While a two person crew might not be necessary on a freight train under certain condition, how about Amtrak? There is a big difference between a 14 car passenger train and a 150 car freight train yet the Amtrak train crew consists of an engineer, an assistant engineer on some trains, a conductor and assistant conductor.

With the elimination of onboard ticket collecting and reporting, I would think Amtrak would be better served by eliminating the ATC and replacing him with and an board crew chief that would be responsible for assisting with on board services and, most importantly, insuring proper training of the OBS staff to improve service consistency. In an emergency he would be authorized to assist the conductor and would need to be qualified on the book of rules. This would be more like VIA service where I believe the train crew has limited if any customer interaction. There would be no reduction in crew size but a better use of the crew to improve passenger satisfaction.
 
Back
Top