Where I drove the next morning wasn’t the yard office. It was the federal hearing room downtown, where the railroad safety board was taking testimony on the new operations director’s plan to run longer trains with smaller crews. The union had asked me to speak, and thirty-five years without a mark buys you a chair at that table.
Here’s what the man with the clipboard never understood: automation doesn’t know the Altoona grade. It doesn’t feel the slack run in on a two-mile train coming down the mountain in the rain, doesn’t hear the flat wheel before it fails, doesn’t know which curve you brake early for because the rail’s been worn since before he was born. I did. I’d learned it from my father, who ran the same throttle, and I’d taught it to half the engineers on that division.
His cut-to-the-bone plan had already caused two near-misses on that mountain — I’d read the reports. When the board asked whether longer trains with fewer trained hands were safe on that grade, I laid it out plain, curve by curve, in front of the regulators who could stop it.
They did. The board froze the crew reductions on the mountain division pending a full safety review and required experienced engineers on those consists. The shareholders’ shortcut ran straight into the one thing a spreadsheet can’t argue with: the law that says the man in the seat has to know the road.
I told the director the only thing thirty-five years had taught me: the railroad forgives a lot of things, but never the crew that didn’t know the mountain.
They brought me back to train the new engineers on that grade, at full pay. He got reassigned east. And every train still comes home safe over the Altoona line.