This time, I'm with the railroad unions. Nobody I know on the railroad enjoys their job any more, I never see them anyway because they can't get any time off. The Wall Streeters are fixated on single person crews but I think that's completely nuts. Trains aren't like trucks and when things go wrong, if you're alone on the engine you're pretty much helpless. And since there's nobody on the property, well, help can be a long time and lots of miles away.
RRs are running 15,000 ton trains, that's basically the equivalent of 500 trucks with 500 drivers. One person? What could go wrong? Even trucks have relief drivers and the CB for company. Not on the RR.
And it gets better. The end game here is to have automatic trains with nobody on board at all. Completely robotized. I can imagine how that will go when the computer programs run up against the vicissitudes of an analog world.
