Hi All,

The problem here with a standard training program is if you certify someone as competent you also take on a liability. So what group nationally would take on such a liability? Another problem is we do not have a national rule book that everyone has to follow. So how do you deal with those differences? Also there is no one cookie cutter that locomotives or other pieces of rolling stock came out of and therefore they have different features that need to be addressed.

My personal experience was with a supervisor in 1996 who stated that I had firing experience. I retorted that the locomotive I had fired had lifting injectors and automatic dampers. The supervisor’s response was “Automatic dampers that sounds stupid”. It was a simple situation of different locomotives and different appliances because of the personal preference of the designers.

To that end we tend to focus on the locomotive(s) we have or just focus on a small part of our collections for training with the result that person is “only qualified on a certain piece of equipment. So then you have the scheduling issue compounded not only by what pieces are available but also by who can do what because our training program is not comprehensive enough to cover “everything” before we promote. Also by this standard, who is qualified on a new piece of active rolling stock?

Instead of worrying about each individual training program for each individual railroad that we can not control, how about working on a national data base of historic railroad practices for both maintenance and operation of equipment. There are a lot of possibilities to set up such a data base including collaboration with many institutions both public and private. I believe both the set up of and the encouragement of use could do the industry a lot of good.

Robby

There is significant difference between the concepts of "competent", "authorised" and "licenced" as also there are overlaps and precedences

Nobody drives an car, flies an airplane or captains a vessel (or for that matter practices Law, Engineering or medicine) without a "licence" from the powers that be - licences are issued in various jurisdictions and are generally recognised across borders. This is where nationally recognised competences and training schemes have a role to play and where various organisations can, when suitably accredited, train people and issue certification of competence which can lead to licensing.

Nobody gets a licence without demonstrating "competence" to an authorised assessor. Competence is assessed against agreed (or mandated) standards at a fairly abstract level. A licence says the person has demnstrated enough basic skills to be able to perform the role succesfully and safely - in general the "competence" demonstrated relates to the generic abilities demonstrated with the specific circumstances of the training and doesn't necessarily mean the person can be let loose on other, even similar, plant without local training.

Which is where "authorisation" comes in! No company in its right mind will allow a person to operate its plant without first providing training and assesment against the needs of the specific local circumstances.

So, to operate plant at site x, a person needs "authorisation" from the company and needs to hold a "licence" from the state gained by demonstrating basic "competence"

There are opportunities for organisations to train persons for licences and even to issue them - responsibility for their validity lies with the state. There are opportunities for industry groups (TRAIN etc) to influence the state as to what are the appropriate competences and how to assess them. And there are opportunities for individual companies to work together for mutual recognition of some aspects of the authorisations.

This is what is happening in Australia. It isn't rocket science, many other industries have acheived it - is rail so different?

If I remember correctly....do not both NORAC and GCOR leave qualification to the individual railroad to determine? I seem remember that to operate on class 1 track you had to have a set number of hours at the throttle,supervised of course, something like 80?
Seems that lately, you hear more and more about whats "safe", when in point of fact it should be more about training. Some of my past experiences include working for a shortline that didn't believe in training, they simply put you to work and if you didn't get hurt or derail too much then you "survived". they would have had less cost and "problems" if they had simply trained people properly. After awhile they got into trouble with their insurance company, due to a near death accident ("incident"?). so, they "fixed" the problem by becomming more "safe"- they started requiring safety glasses and earplugs,vests,etc. Instead of training employees to not do foolish things.
Point is, quite often the existing rules are more than sufficient. getting the company to follow them is the problem. an example being gettysburg.....company "policy" broke the existing rules, common sense was forgotten.....and bad things happened...

I have been a licensed operating engineer in NJ for about 30 years with a blue seal (3rd grade) steam-stationary and a red seal (2nd grade) Refrigeration-toxic & flammable and you are right Rob. But I think the state did away with the specific "locomotive" rating and it is now lumped under "portable boiler and steam prime mover". Anyhow,here is the state site for our laws if anybody cares to look at them.

http://lwd.dol.state.nj.us/labor/lsse/laws/boiler_law.html