Engineers Now Solo on Coastal Amtrak

For more than two months now, Amtrak has been operating its passenger trains between Los Angeles and San Diego with only one engineer in the locomotive cab, after having eliminated a second person for economic reasons.

The move worries the just-retired Santa Fe supervisor of Amtrak engine operations, who says the cutback will lower safety margins on the line, where 14 daily passenger trains--expected to increase to 16 this spring--share a single-track right-of-way with several freight trains.

“We’re going to have the same (accident) here one day by lowering the safety margin,” said engineer A.C. Henderson, who spent more than a quarter-century with the railway before retiring last month. Henderson was referring to the high-speed Amtrak passenger train collision with a Conrail freight engine in Maryland last week which killed 15 people and injured more than 100.

“I feel very strongly that you need two persons up in that locomotive to run things properly,” said Henderson, who supervised all Amtrak engine operations for the last 11 years.

“It (the cutback) gives the human error element a little more room to operate,” Henderson said. The Los Angeles-San Diego line is Amtrak’s second busiest, after the Northeast corridor, carrying more than 100,000 people a month. “When you have 400 men, women and children behind you (on a single train), you want to operate as safely as you can because God help you when something happens,” Henderson said.

As of Nov. 5, Amtrak took over control of operating personnel on the line from the Santa Fe Railway, which owns the 125-mile track between the two cities and had previously supplied two-person crews under contract with the government-subsidized rail passenger company.

Amtrak officials deny that their move has affected safety in any way, saying that the line’s modern signal and train control technology has eliminated the need for two persons in the locomotive cab.

“I note the fact that there have been more collisions (in the United States) involving freight trains, which have two men in the cab,” said Arthur Lloyd, corporate communications manager for Amtrak in San Francisco. “That tells me that the second man doesn’t make any difference.”

Santa Fe operations managers raised the issue of safety when Amtrak first announced its crew cuts, but Amtrak pointed to its single-engineer operations in the Northeast corridor between Boston and Washington and to one-person control cabs on rail commuter lines in urban areas as justification, a Santa Fe spokesman said. While Amtrak owns the Northeast corridor trackage, it leases rights to the Southern California line from Santa Fe.

Santa Fe uses two persons in all of its freight engines and has no plans to change that rule, spokesman Michael Martin said.

The issue of safety on rail lines nationwide has surfaced as a result of the Maryland accident, where the Conrail freight engine either ran through a caution signal or was dispatched through a faulty signal, and entered the main track just in front of the Amtrak train approaching at 110 m.p.h.

The Conrail engine was equipped with devices to warn an operator when the train passed restrictive train signals, but preliminary evidence gathered by government investigators indicates that the warning mechanisms were either not working properly or had been tampered with.

Santa Fe officials, in discussing safety along the Los Angeles-San Diego line, point with confidence to the centralized control system and emergency stop devices alongside its tracks. And they say the physical track is basically good, despite emergency maintenance ordered on Friday by the Federal Railroad Administration following a two-day inspection by a new rail maintenance car equipped with the latest sensing devices. Slow speed orders on 75 miles of the route will be in effect until repairs are completed Thursday.

Santa Fe said it will standardize its own maintenance criteria with those of the FRA to make certain that the track is at maximum safety.

The route’s timing of trains--which can run at a maximum 90 miles per hour--is determined by signals that flash green, yellow and red to engineers who are under control of the line’s dispatcher at Santa Fe’s division headquarters in San Bernardino.

That dispatcher sits in front of an electronic board with a schematic of the line, on which the locations of all trains flash mile-by-mile in yellow, the position of all signals flash as red or green, and the status of all switches into the passing sidings flash as open or closed. The system permits high-speed train operations by allowing a single dispatcher to control all trains and switches to set up “meets,” (passing of one train by another) where sidings exist on the largely single-track line.

The system prevents dispatchers from making inadvertent mistakes, such as a green signal for a northbound train if a southbound already has a green light. In addition, the system prevents vandals from altering switches and signals along the track, even if electric control boxes along the track are broken into.

Should an engineer run a red signal--which Santa Fe dispatchers say almost never happens--a light automatically registers on the dispatcher’s board. In addition, the track has an “automatic train stop” control (ATS) built into it for passenger trains.

That control is a series of electronic devices at signals that ring a bell inside the locomotive cab every time the train passes a signal with a yellow caution or red stop. If the engineer does not acknowledge the bell within six seconds by pushing a lever, which indicates he saw the signal, the devices will activate the train’s three braking systems and grind the train to a halt.

No train runs without all safety systems running properly, Santa Fe said, which includes radio contact at all times with the San Bernardino dispatcher.

But despite those systems, officials concede that no one can say categorically that an accident cannot take place.

“Is an accident possible? You bet,” said Henderson, who earned a highly regarded reputation as a stickler for safety during his 11 years as head foreman for Amtrak engines. “No machine is perfect and signals can go haywire.

“I know that 99% of the engineers want to live with the rules. But a real bad engineer--and I found a couple--could cut out the ATS and ignore other warnings. You always have bad apples and that is why I stayed on (the engineers’) backs all the time, telling them what I wanted, what the railroad wanted, and what the laws wanted.”

An extra person in the locomotive, Henderson said, is added insurance that an engineer will not deliberately or accidentally let something go wrong.

“Two sets of eyes is better than one,” Henderson said. “The second person is required to call out and confirm signal lights, note the slow orders (where a train must slow due to track maintenance), and in general is constantly talking about what is coming up with the other person. That’s the safety part of it.

“By yourself, you can get very busy in that cab and by chance maybe miss a signal . . . forget what the color was.”

Henderson said that foggy weather along the coastal line is particularly hard on engineers.

“I’ve been on that corridor at night in such bad fog where you couldn’t see the ground. They can take my (free) pass if they’re running just one man in the locomotive.”

But Amtrak’s Lloyd said that the Conrail engine had two persons but still apparently passed a warning signal at high speed, although the second person did not function as a backup to the engineer in the way Santa Fe requires on its line.

“A five-month, FRA-sponsored test on the East Coast done after one-person cabs started there concluded that it was safer with one man than two because one man doesn’t sit and talk all the way about his girlfriends, about the scores of Redskins games,” Lloyd said. “I rode in a cab once and, God, the amount of conversation that goes on is unbelievable.”

Lloyd said that the electronic safety systems eliminate the need for a second person to call out signals and to keep the chief engineer alert. And because of congressional efforts to hold down Amtrak’s costs, the company reached an agreement with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers last fall to eliminate two-man cabs on all runs under four hours, Lloyd said. (The L.A.-San Diego run is a scheduled 2 hour, 45 minutes one-way.)

“But no one can make a blanket statement that an accident is never going to happen,” Lloyd said, adding that he resents the greater attention paid to train collisions where often no one is seriously injured compared to head-on auto and truck accidents where several people are killed.

An official at the national headquarters of the locomotive engineers union said that it agreed to Amtrak’s request because “in this case we had a tremendous threat hanging over our head in terms of economics . . . Amtrak essentially could tell us, ‘Take it or leave it’ and start hiring from the outside if it wanted.”

The official, John McCown, said that elimination of one person puts tremendous responsibility on a single individual who has “thousands of decisions and reactions to make, not the least of which is when you (approach) every grade crossing.

“And all of them have to be right; it’s not like you can turn around and ask for advice (to the conductor in the back of the train) at 90 m.p.h. The mere fact there is no one to turn around to adds tremendously to the stress and responsibility the engineer already feels.”

Added McCown: “In general terms, rail passenger travel is one of the safest ways to travel and is also more survivable when an accident happens. But there is cause for concern when a passenger train is traveling long distances at high speeds and all the responsibility comes down on one individual.

“But unfortunately, that is the trend, like it or not.”