Railworks America

So I was looking at a four part YouTube video series on reading Canadian railroad signals to compare them to the Union Pacific signal rules I'm used to. I believe the conductor narrating the video works for the CN railroad. After watching the videos, I got the impression that at least on the surface, CN's signal rules seem more complicated than UP's, but I've never done a deep dive on it.

He said on the test in Canada, you have to answer the signal questions word-for-word VERBATIM as the rule appears in the book. If it's not exact, it's a fail. Is this true in the US class 1 railroads...... to the letter?

Then I look at UP Vs. BNSF signals rules and they have different rules. Like the Advance Approach aspect and rule is different between the two railroads. That means crews of these railroads must learn the rules of both if their train runs on the other via trackage rights. And then other railroads have their own rules too.


My main question here is....

Has there been any discussion EVER in the North American rail industry to make universal signal rules across all railroads here?

It would seem to be from a time, cost and safety point of view.... having all North American engineers and conductors follow the same signal rules makes sense. Yes... there would be a transition period with some short term costs involved. But.... long term it would be best for all involved. Because having a momentary brain fart as to which railroad's signal rules you are operating under at the end of a long shift could end badly.

Ve must haf more Government control because these idiot citizens don't know how to run things themselves!

buzz456 wrote:Ve must haf more Government control because these idiot citizens don't know how to run things themselves!

Nope. I'm not asking for the government to do anything. The computer industry has private standards bodies on things like USB, HDMI, DisplayPort, NVMe, etc. They come up with industry standards so that everything just works between computers made by different manufacturers. That's why I don't understand why the industry hasn't made a committee to determine which signaling rules are best and get all railroads to voluntarily implement them. That way it doesn't matter which railroad you work for or which railroad's tracks you are running on. Makes it that much easier if you want get a job with a different railroad cuz you would already know the signal rules. Universal railroad equipment like couplers are standard, universal signal rules should be too.

It's just one of those things that dates back to the start of American railroads and is now stuck in high cost and tradition.

For most companies it's not a big deal because a crew will have a well defined "territory" on company owned tracks that they work and will have gone through extensive training to know every mile of it.

It does become a problem for people like Amtrak though where you might start off on a NS line and finish the day on a CSX line, or short lines that have to interchange with most or multiple large rail companies.

Definitely an inconvenience.

You have to remember that it took years just for them to agree on interoperability of i-ETMS. It would likely never work out for them to agree on a signal rule set.

Yeah. What made me think about this is because a friend of mine who worked 30 years for UP, started his engineer career over Cajon Pass in the early 90's before the merger. He said it was weird popping between UP and Santa Fe's signal rules when he first started.

After the UP-SP merger, he transferred to the Yuma sub which was Southern Pacific's main route out of southern California. He had long runs and short runs. Long runs went from the Port of Long Beach all the way to Yuma, Arizona and were intermodal. Short runs went from the West Colton yard to Yuma. It's still a pretty long run, but short in comparison to the runs out of Long Beach.

He's an interesting guy that's quiet most of the time. He is one of the few fortunate engineers in this world to have survived a head-on collision in a train.

It happened around 2002-2003 and occurred near the Salton Sea. I asked him how much time he had from the moment he realized they were on same track until the collision......he said 4 seconds. He saw the other train's headlight and ran out the back door. He made it half way down the length of the lead locomotive and they hit. Both trains were going around 30MPH...meaning 60MPH combined.

He survived, along with the conductors of both trains. The engineer of the other train died instantly. My friend was conscious and very injured, but said it took 24-48 hours before the pain actually arrived. He had a broken back and other breaks, but said he totally felt like he was okay and could get up until a rescuer had to tell him not to move. Clearly he was in shock.

I think he said it took 6 months of surgery, recovery and rehab for him to get back to the job. He said UP tried to cover it up right off the bat and not report it to the feds until his lawyer pressured them to. According to him, they never really figured out what went wrong. Gotta see if I can find a report on it.

I don't really talk to him about it much because it's a sensitive subject. He knew the other engineer personally because they were both in the same crew pool. He's also had several suicides by train happen to him. The railroad offers psychological help in these cases. He took them up on it at first, but refused in subsequent incidents.

A month before he retired, he was ultimately rewarded by being assigned to run the DPU on the Big Boy train from West Colton yard to Yuma. He said his boss dropped the news on him about a day before. He's also a huge lifelong railfan, so it was like winning the lottery to participate in a little part of #4014 Big Boy's historic journey.

I qualified under the old rulebook which, withcertain local exceptions, was pretty close to a common standard set of rules, at least in the "Lower 48." This began to break down about 40 or so years ago for a variety if reasons, a good many of them policy driven. The railroad industry, as currently constituted, will probably become more fragmented ... uhh ... specislised as things develop in the future. This will also be policy driven, done mostly through the Code of Federal Regulations. Uh

OK some quick corrections for the record...

Searched the net and couldn't find a report on the accident. Talked to the best friend of the UP engineer recently and found out that the accident actually happened on Dec 13th, 2004 and not 2002-03 as I had thought. It happened near Niland, California at 7:45am. There was a total of five locomotives and seven cars derailed. About 400 feet of track had to be relaid to get trains moving again. They were both intermodal trains.

I also found out I misheard the info on the other engineer that died. He did not die instantly. He was flown from the scene with internal and leg injuries and later died at a hospital from a broken aorta.

GSkid wrote:Searched the net and couldn't find a report on the accident.... accident actually happened on Dec 13th, 2004 and not 2002-03 as I had thought. It happened near Niland, California at 7:45am. There was a total of five locomotives and seven cars derailed. About 400 feet of track had to be relaid to get trains moving again. They were both intermodal trains.

To only have 5 locos and 7 cars on the ground from a combined speed of 60 mph... that was a stroke of luck for the UP, but unfortunately not for the engineer that lost his life in the line of duty. The accident report is out there. You just have to keep digging through the government web archives. I found a 1950's ICC accident report on a SP coast line derailment. And all I had to go on was a small B&W photo showing the lead locomotive number and signal milepost number. So I've got to believe that a report exists from a 2004 derailment in which there was a loss of life. Not sure whether the FRA or NTSB had the jurisdiction back then.

cnwfan wrote:

GSkid wrote:Searched the net and couldn't find a report on the accident.... accident actually happened on Dec 13th, 2004 and not 2002-03 as I had thought. It happened near Niland, California at 7:45am. There was a total of five locomotives and seven cars derailed. About 400 feet of track had to be relaid to get trains moving again. They were both intermodal trains.

To only have 5 locos and 7 cars on the ground from a combined speed of 60 mph... that was a stroke of luck for the UP, but unfortunately not for the engineer that lost his life in the line of duty. The accident report is out there. You just have to keep digging through the government web archives. I found a 1950's ICC accident report on a SP coast line derailment. And all I had to go on was a small B&W photo showing the lead locomotive number and signal milepost number. So I've got to believe that a report exists from a 2004 derailment in which there was a loss of life. Not sure whether the FRA or NTSB had the jurisdiction back then.

Well I have a couple theories as to why more cars didn't hit the ground. It is desert running there with large stretches of dead straight track. Add to that a generally flat landscape. Since more containers are imported than exported in the United States, I'm guessing the WB intermodal had less weight. Empties need to go back to Asia for them to be filled up and sent them back to us. So it likely added less mass to the crash.

You have a better chance of a train staying on the rails on straight track. All the energy is sent evenly through the couplers and center-lines of the cars because they are angled head on. If there is a curve, then you have a problem because the couplers and cars are angled from each other. Now instead of all the energy going down the center, it's offset. This will cause those cars to derail off the outside of the curve. On a straight track, most of the cars behind the first bunch stay on because the energy has dissipated enough by that point.

Being generally flat on this section of track, neither train likely had a significant mechanical advantage from going downhill. So likely the heavier train won this battle to a moderate extent. If they were close in weight and running at the same speed, then the combined 60mph is a wash. That would greatly reduce the chance of a larger amount of cars hitting the ground.

As for that report? Is there somewhere to search for it? I searched google and only found mention of it on Trainorders. And even then it was quoting a news article from the day after the crash. I've in the past looked up reports of head on collisions with deaths in Oklahoma, Texas and North Dakota. I did a simple google search of these and the final report came up in the search results to click on. But those were somewhat high profile crashes that apparently made a bigger splash in the news than my friend's crash and likely why there isn't a link in the search results to view it. So high profile crashes get links to the reports, low profile ones you have to find yourself. Cuz the NTSB or FRA apparently do not announce and draw attention to their final reports unless they had garnered high enough initial press coverage.