Amtrak Special Moves and Charters Under Threat

JimBoylan · **Posted:** Sat Aug 04, 2018 3:19 pm

Kevin Gilliam wrote:

I fail to see the difference how using one or two crews to run something in New York has any effect whatsoever on lack of crew training in Washington state.

That was 1 or 2 crews that couldn't be forced to move or commute to Washington State so other crews could get more training.

softwerkslex · **Posted:** Sat Aug 04, 2018 3:39 pm

Can an Amtrak engineer quickly relocate from NYC territory to NP territory? Aren’t the signal systems still very regional?

Kevin Gilliam · **Joined:** Thu Nov 04, 2004 10:28 pm **Posts:** 292

JimBoylan wrote:

Kevin Gilliam wrote:

I fail to see the difference how using one or two crews to run something in New York has any effect whatsoever on lack of crew training in Washington state.

That was 1 or 2 crews that couldn't be forced to move or commute to Washington State so other crews could get more training.

For a company the size of Amtrak, a one day event has zero relevance to anything on the opposite side of the country. It's not like the crews were qualified on a piece of track 3000 miles away.

PaulWWoodring · **Posted:** Sun Aug 05, 2018 7:26 am

softwerkslex wrote:

Can an Amtrak engineer quickly relocate from NYC territory to NP territory? Aren’t the signal systems still very regional?

I don't believe Amtrak can force T&E crew to move cross-country, although outside of the Auto-Train contract (totally separate seniority and work rules agreement) crews may have nationwide seniority. They could probably give incentives for crew to transfer, either temporarily or permanently, to correct an imbalance. CSX was doing that on a regular basis right after the Conrail split. I worked with quite a few temporary transfer engineers from the South in the first year after the split.