There is only one right way to deal with safety concerns and that is to address them as soon as possible with those involved. It seems however in some instantiates that people complane behind peoples back to higher ups instead of addressing the person directly "to not be confrontational". I have personally had to take action and inform volunteers of safety concerns and explained why what they were doing was not the safest method of doing the task. Now the person knows what they did wrong and why it was wrong. Then you inform higher ups so if there is a repeat of the incident proper action can be taken.
There is also the chance of misunderstanding here is a made up example. Tom sees Joe, a new volunteer, wondering around at the other side of the yard then suddenly climbing on top of a locomotive that was just put away. Now Tom can ether send an e-mail to a higher up stating he saw Joe wondering around the yard and climbing on equipment and should be kept away from the yard." Or Tom can approach Joe and tell him he should not climb on the equipment only to be told by Joe that Paul who Tom couldn't see from his vantage point had asked him to climb up on the locomotive to make sure the stack cover was on. Thus avoiding confusion and Joe getting in trouble without doing anything wrong.
So how do you deal with safety concerns?

With organizations that have both employees and/or volunteers, it is a tough nut to crack. With my experience, developing a positive “Safety Culture” in the tourist railroad/museum industry is a must. It takes commitment from museum board and/or railroad management with the development and implementation of a simple safety program or “System Safety Plan”. This would include a basic set of safety and operating rules with proper training and an expectation for compliance. Now, that is easy for me to say, but actually doing it is a different story. Most volunteers and even some employees do not want to get into this safety stuff as it takes away from the other fun railroad things that they are doing. The idea that “we have always done it this way and have never had a problem, no one has been hurt, etc.” is the usual response. If there is a commitment to develop a working safety program, the positive safety culture will eventually develop. This will get the employees/volunteers to look at each task from a simple “how can I do this safely and within the rules” before they perform the task. It will also enable others, as per your example, to approach someone about safety concerns and explain why what they were doing was not the safest method of doing the task without any misunderstanding.

I am pretty passionate about safety in the tourist railroad industry as I have lost two good friends in the industry to accidents over the years. I would like to see more of a focus on safety and safety programs in this unique industry as well. Safety should be pro-active, not re-active as it almost always is.

Anyway, that is my 2 cents worth.

M.D. Ramsey

As a senior NCO in the Army Reserve, I was taught that the best way to handle most situations would be to make an "immediate on the spot correction". (At least that is the term I remember from NCO school, 20 years ago). Definitely say something right away if there is a safety issue; safety knows no rank or 'pecking order'.

Lets say it turns out to be a case where someone was told to put a stack cover on and you weren't aware that person was instructed to do so. You can always say something like, "I wasn't aware that Paul asked you to do that; I'm just trying to keep you safe".

Teamwork and communication (and common sense-), can't have safety without them.

Yes by thinking what could go wrong. I came up with a new idea for operating equipment in a safer manner. The idea I had was when approaching the platform at the museum end of the line when operating the trolley to throw it into reverse. This makes shure that the trolley controller is off since the reverser will only move with the controller in the off position. This prevents someone from acdentely not shutting off all the way and wondering why the breaks aren't being effective. When following my procedure if they didn't shut off all the way they will releise it when they can't move the reverser. Also if for some reason the breaks don't work all they have to do is notch up the controller to buck the motors. The higher ups at the museums liked my idea so much they incorprated it into the rule book.

I have to ask, is this safety first or safety last ?

I have to wonder, with the car's controller in reverse, and you decide to "notch up" aren't you the least worried about backing up? And what ever consequences that brings? Seems like you are purposefully asking for trouble.

You could put the reverser in "neutral" and get the desired effect of being sure the cars controller is "off", but I still have a hard time with that. Good training should be the foremost of all this.

Cheers

Karl j.

It is not so much for making sure the controller is off as it is for a way to stop the car in the extremely unlikely chance the breaks fail. The car won't instantly go in reverse because it has momentum and there is really no need to touch the controller when heading towards the museum because we are on a slight downhill. Once the trolley is stopped the reverser is imeadetely removed so we can change ends and so nobody can mess with the controller.

THAT... has absolutely nothing to do with safety.

Humans have a prurient tendency toward a deadly sin: gossip. It is "Fun" to unite with your fellowman by putting down some third fellow man. When that gossip is malicious, doubly so.

And when is it ever not malicious?

Every one of us thinks "if you have a problem with me, take it up with me."
If yu hve a problem with Joe, then take it up with Joe. The "not to be confrontational" bit is just a rationalization for that. If you have a problem with Joe, Joe will be the first to say take ot Every person reasonably expects that if you have a problem with them, you take it up with them.



There must be allowance for the fact that this is usually a railfan dealing with a railfan. In a perfect world the junior is manageable, and the senior is a competent manager. But that is not our world. And when this goes wrong, it can go wrong in a way that is
disastrous
for volunteer recruitment and retention.


That turns on whether Tom likes Joe or wills to treat him with respect. And who the hell is this guy to be telling Joe anything? Where's that "I'm in charge of Joe" attitude coming from?

Trouble is, a lot of guys out there - notably the socially maladjusted railfan types - have never been trained properly on dealing with human beings, and have no real skill, and so they fall back on what they know: getting bullied in high school, or being managed as a low level employee by someone who is only a second level. And they practice what been done to them, and it feels good and they like it, so they do it more. And that isn't managing at all.

How do you deal with safety concerns? By thinking hard about safety culture, and promoting a culture of safety rather than a culture of people waving their weewee's around authoritatively.

And where do we turn for that? Aerospace. Because it is the most unforgiving of safety environments, and our commitment to succeed there is bigger than peepees. And so we can answer questions like why Czar 52 and AF 447 and Tenerife and Flight 3701 went so badly... and Flight 232 and Flight 1549 went so well.

Precisely. We (NMSL&RHS) actually have this in place at our worksite, and we even have a Chief Safety Officer (who was the CSO at the Very Large Array near Magdalena, NM for many years until his retirement in 2006) who keeps that "culture of safety" firmly in place. Of course, our primary focus is currently restoration of ATSF 2926, but we've started to incorporate safety training for operations as we come closer to completing the restoration work, and several of our regulars at the worksite (myself included) have worked in industrial environments and are quite familiar with OSHA regulations (as well as corresponding military regulations, since about a third of us are also veterans, including yours truly). Keeping a "culture of safety" in place may seem like a RPITA sometimes, but it's essential if you want to work with Amtrak and railroads like BNSF as we intend to do.

Okey while we are talking about safety there has been something I saw that has always bothered me. This happened at an organization that shall remain nameless and I am not a part of. At the crew briefing it was stated that the FRA was stopping by. As everyone was boarding the train for the first revenue run of the day I was shocked to see the engineer bring his young son on board to ride in the cab. On the trip up the train made an unscedualed stop (lit fuse stopping test) then continued onto the next station to do the run around. Needles to say the kid road in the coach on the return trip. To put the icing on the cake this happened when Chatsworth was still fresh on everyone's mind. Am I over reacting in being bothered by this?

Tell Perez Hilton about it. It sounds like you're a novice casting about to find something to criticize, something obvious and scandalous, rather than seriously evaluate their safety environment. You don't really have a way to measure whether the kid's presence enhanced or harmed safety, and have simply knee-jerked that it must be bad simply because it is irregular.

And keep in mind that railroad museums are NOT Class I railroads, and are fundamentally different in nature and culture.

If you think the problem at Chatsworth was that the engineer sometimes had guests in the cab, I'd say you missed the point entirely.

One of the problems in railroading is that we're not evolved enough to talk about what really matters. Rather than talk about where a crewman's attention actually is at relevant times, we try to wildly guess based on vaguely related factors like cab guests or cell phones not being turned off.

Railroad people are not ready to have a dialogue about where crewman's attention is, for a couple of reasons: one is safety culture, that pilots are considered white-collar professionals like doctors, and engineers are considered blue-collar laborers like longshoremen: a noxious class-ism that does not correspond to reality. Another is we lack the technical ability to even study crew attention span, because there are not cockpit voice recorders in locomotives. And, back to safety culture, good luck installing CVRs, as there'd be a political firestorm, as this would be perceived as "anti-engineer" an "an affront against labor".

(ask any pilot if he thinks the CVR is an affront against pilots.)

So if you step outside the railroad culture and "take the view from 30,000 feet" (pun intended), you see plain as day that on the railroad, safety takes a back seat to a number of other things.

I am a frequent volunteer with Habitat for Humanity house construction. This is equally as dangerous as railroading. Sometimes we work alongside professionals sometimes it is mostly volunteers, but also guys who are professional in their field. There is a heavy emphasis on safety. What it all comes down to: Awareness, Culture, Quality Communication

I see somebody climbing a wall, it may do no good to send an email later, especially after bad things happen. It all depends on how I say it. Be nice, be safe!

I wasn't saying having the kid in the cab was unsafe just really stupid judgement. Hell I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow except for the fact that they were told the FRA was stopping by and that Chatsworth had just happened so the FRA was really cracking down.

I can tell you from personal experience that if you put two or three Class I crew members in the cab of a locomotive for 12 hours things are probably going to be said that management would not take kindly to, sometimes during long waits in sidings becoming a mini-union meeting. Questioning the parentage of certain management staff being among the milder things that might be said. NO union official worth anything is going to consent to inward facing recording devices or cameras in locomotive cabs. This is going to be a hard-fought battle against the crews if it ever comes to pass, and I for one am on the side of the crews. It's not the same environment as the cockpit of an airliner, and shouldn't be treated the same.

I think most air crashes are based on several things with operator error in among them. Look at the Airbus that crashed in NY shortly after 9/11. AA587 Extreme rudder motion by the first officer. The Air France (AF447) crash into the ocean based, they say, on the crew not properly dealing with erroneous air speed sensors.

They say the DC10 (AA191) that crashed on take off in Chicago years ago when an engine ripped away (caused by improper maintenance procedures) was a survivable incident had the crew done things exactly right. (No one blames them--they weren't trained for that and the co-pilot's stick didn't have the stick-shaker that would have told him that one wing was stalling). This seems to be true in the case of many crashes. You'd have to look to something like TWA 800, brought down, they say, by a fuel tank explosion, where it was something no one aboard could do anything about.

Steve

If you look at the last two major fatal U. S. air crashes, the commuter jet crash near Buffalo several years ago, and the Asiana Airlines crash at SFO last year, both crashes were caused by pilot error. Looking at two major spectacular freight rail accidents in N. America in the past year - Lac Megantic, and the other oil train crash in N. Dakota, one was pretty much caused by gross negligence on the part of management, and the other most likely a mechanical or track structure failure. I don't think you can say that one mode of transportation is more likely to have human error accidents than another, or that those accidents are more or less likely to result in loss of life. Ninety-five percent of airline accidents in this day and age are survivable, just as rail safety has improved. Humans get disproportionately nervous about things around them they can't control - like commercial aviation, even though statistically the automobile trip to or from the airport is many times more dangerous than the actual flight. It's the familiar that makes us comfortable. Because of a couple of high-visibility accidents people become convinced that shipping hazardous cargo by rail must be inherently more dangerous than moving it by other means, even though that view is not backed up statistically (certainly moving them by highway is potentially far more dangerous). Most Americans have next to no interaction with railroads anymore, other than being inconvenienced at grade crossings. So, they are inclined to have less positive views or feelings about our favorite mode of transportation than they would have been 50 or 60 years ago.