Yeah, they talk out of both sides of their mouths. Follow the rules too closely, they accuse you of "maliciously following the rules"..... heard that with my own ears.

I hear road crews come in and tell these stories of getting into it with "managers", and the older ones have the routine down pat.

Get some over eager manager in there trying to razz them for something and the employee can nitpick stuff to death on the engines... can find the most seemingly meaningless item on an engine inspection and get the engine bad ordered for a non-complying condition or unable to be used for a leader.

Had one the other day... said they were harrassing him about something and trying to hurry him out of town.

He said by the time they got done, he'd got all 3 engines on his outbound consist B/O'd, plus 2 more on another train that the mgrs. tried to get to replace the ones in his original consist. One of the more ingenious finds was some "FRA Approved Glazing" that was installed incorrectly! If you look at the windows on your engines... the glass has to be installed with one of the surfaces facing inwards. There is a decal right in the glass showing which side faces in. How he knew that, I don't know.

He has the phone number of regional FRA men and called them, in front of the managers, and told them he had some things to show them and asked if they'd come up and look.... he said that took all the wind out of the mgrs. sails!

He told me that they came up and found some things and later levied some fines to the railroad... I can't remember what they all were, but one of them was the agents did a followup on some of the engines he found to be non-complying and found that after the smoke cleared and everyone was gone, they went ahead and used some of those engines as leading units on other trains without repairing the defects. That is a NO-NO!

He said he stayed there in the terminal 12 hours, died and his train never left. They were still waiting for following trains to rob power off of. He deadheaded home in a van.

He said that the next time he came into the terminal, the MTO called him off to the side and said "do you have any idea how much money you cost on that last episode"?

That's what makes this rule test stuff so bad. It is an adversarial relationship we have with management. They screw us, so we retaliate in the only way we can. They find ways to cut off your means of escape from a trap that they set, so we have to have creative ways to make an end run around that trap.

But, don't get me wrong. The job is great, but they have done their best to take all the fun out of it.

The rule book is being used as a bludgeon instead of a training tool. When I was a Rules Examiner, I made it a point to point out why the rule was there, and if someone had a question, even if they were in the middle of a move, I answered it, and I'm sure they appreciated an atmosphere of openness without retaliation. Now...when I caught the VP blatantly violating the rules...well.....