If a railfan video catches you screwing up, don't blame the railfan. You did it.
If you feel that management treated you badly in the above situation, blame management, not the railfan.
Either you screwed up or management screwed up (or worse). Don't blame the bystander who recorded the event!
Ed
This is correct. I mean it's technically correct.
Here's the rub: nobody performs their job, their hobby, or even household chores or other mundane tasks perfectly 100% of the time. Overtighten a screw and strip it, lose focus and slice into the woods, miss the other guy's turn signal and have to step on the brakes.... it happens. And we move on and make a little promise to ourselves to not make that mistake again.
So I'm going to paint a picture here and offer a little perspective. The last paper rule book I carried four years ago was in a six-inch binder, and that didn't contain all the system and division general orders and notices we were required to possess, read and be familiar with at the start of each tour of duty (I carry a company-provided iPad rulebook now).
Some of these rules are extremely vague, some contradict each other and just about any one can be modified by a local or system order at any time. It's a lot to keep up with for the most conscientious and experienced railroaders, not to mention relatively new or recently recalled-from-furlough employees. It's nearly impossible for the casual railfan to be aware of all these rules and how they pertain to each situation.
Other than yard jobs, road switchers and locals, when you see a train crew performing some kind of work other than rolling by at track speed, odds are it's either at the beginning of our day or at the end of our day ("day" being defined as the tour of duty which is limited to 12 hours). It's pretty easy to maintain focus during the beginning of your day and very easy to lose focus and make a mistake at the end of your day, especially when you're in the 10th, 11th and 12th hour. It's also easy to make a mistake when troubleshooting equipment or navigating a tricky rules scenario. And the potential for mistakes is magnified by fatigue, which is a chronic problem for on-call employees.
In this discussion
www.regulations.gov/document/FRA-2016-0036-0002of proposed rule making for inward facing cameras on passenger locomotives (a fascinating read, by the way), I found the following passage:
Pretty much every railroad employee deals with this reality, that we are being recorded and those recordings can be used in an investigation of an incident. In some ways it's like reality TV, where the cast of characters becomes so accustomed to the camera crew that they finally let their guard down and stop "performing" for the camera and just start being themselves. In the case of inward facing cameras and other fixed cameras on railroad property, the presence of the camera helps deter bad behaviors and rule violations but doesn't eliminate them.
The other side is that these cameras don't discriminate on what they record, and some of that content might be personally embarrassing. If you sit in one place long enough you'll have to scratch your butt or sneeze and get snot on your nose or have a wardrobe malfunction when you bend over to pick up something (a.k.a. plumber's crack). Or we may have to strip our coveralls down to our skivvies in the winter in order to use the tiny restroom in the nose (I've had a few female coworkers express embarrassment over this particular scenario). If you're tall, have a big frame, are overweight or any combination of the above it can be difficult to fit in the locomotive restroom. Removing clothes to use the restroom is impossible with the door closed for many people. I'm 5'-9"/170 lbs. and I have about an inch over my head when I stand in the restroom on a Dash 9. SD70ACes are less roomy and older standard cab locomotives are downright cramped. It is difficult for
me to maneuver inside the restroom on a stopped locomotive, so you can imagine what it's like for a bigger person on a moving locomotive bouncing and rocking around in the equivalent of a porta-potty at Woodstock.
All of these situations can be seen by inward facing cameras and every minute of every day recordings are being made. None of us operating employees have access to these recordings and we have no idea if they get passed around the office as hilarious viral videos amongst the unscrupulous of the people with access to those recordings.
Per CFR 49 part 217, railroads are required to conduct operational testing and observe employees performing their duties. Again, this is not a surprise to any railroad employee. We know full well we are likely to be observed doing just about any task. There is some debate over how that should be handled. Should a company officer who is witnessing an employee begin to perform a task unsafely allow the employee to continue and then stop the unsafe action only after it has occurred or should the officer intervene when an unsafe behavior is imminent? Should operational testing be used to audit behaviors or issue discipline? Or a combination of the two?
The reality is some individuals will draw attention to themselves - whether it's not getting enough done/working too slowly, raising safety concerns be they legitimate or dubious, rubbing a supervisor the wrong way with a bad attitude or a personal conflict, habitually violating rules, insubordination, you name it - and more often than not those individuals will be observed under the guise of operations testing. Other times individuals are observed purely as a numbers game; a trainmaster might tell you she's going to watch you switch cars because she's got to get some tests put in.
My employer has a group of rules experts who observe employees across the system (known as the "system hit team"). When a high profile incident has occurred or a series of incidents deemed to be precursors to a serious incident have occurred the system hit team will be deployed to observe the at-risk work groups, often from a hidden position.
If you're the type of person who regularly violates rules to get the work done faster or with less effort odds are you will be caught either in a standard operations test or a longer observation by the system hit team. If you regularly follow the rules you pretty much don't have anything to worry about. Having said that I've seen officers and hit team members point out and hold employees accountable for questionable interpretations of rules (what is the definition of "attending" rolling equipment?) or impossible scenarios (maintaining proper form tying a handbrake on a PS 5820cf hopper comes to mind because it's literally impossible to do). And I've seen officers hold grudges and target people they deem problem employees, whatever their criteria for that may be.
Surely those bad actors must be the exception, right? You'd be surprised how frequently this occurs, especially in an economically depressed period or when upper management is threatening cuts to personnel (a.k.a. PSR). It's the whole idea of justifying your existence and proving the value you provide to the company. If the system hit team is deployed to a problem area they aren't going to walk away empty handed. Somebody will be found violating rules. There's also the fact that relations between labor and management at railroads can be contentious and even toxic. People on both sides bring their experiences and biases with them and act accordingly. Distrust is pretty common. Occasionally there are employees and managers who respect one another and the work environment is less tense (I'd even call it fun with some of my favorite trainmasters, yardmasters and crew members).
Occasionally.
Most of the time you act as if you're sneaking behind enemy lines, covering your butt by calling things out on the radio (it's recorded) or using hand signals when you don't want things recorded. I could easily see railroaders being accused of paranoia.
Only the persecution is real and it is perpetuated by an elaborate organization.
This is the framework for why railroaders might take exception to being recorded. Anyone who has been pulled from service on a spurious claim or unusual interpretation of a vague rule and prosecuted with vigor by a company officer is shocked the first time it happens. You move on and make a little promise to yourself to not make that mistake again. When it happens the next time you're better prepared and you might put up a successful argument defending your actions. Any time after that it just sows cynicism and distrust.
So imagine you're exhausted, you've worked seventeen days in a row on your rest (because deadheads don't count as starts), and now in the eleventh hour you have to set out cars to a track that's been out of service for weeks because the switch was hard to throw but now it's back in service (unfortunately the fix was ineffective). You throw the switch but it won't latch so you bear down on the handle to force it. When you go to stand up you're off balance and nearly fall forward but you get your legs under yourself quickly and don't fall. You look down the track and start the shove into the track. As it passes by you look at the train list to verify you'll be cutting off ACFX 12345 and then you look at the cut of cars passing by and see it's four cars away. There's plenty of room in the track so you give the engineer an update on the car count and bring the train to a stop with the cut car in the clear. You tie the handbrakes from the ground when possible to avoid climbing the cars and possibly slipping or falling. One brake is hard to reach so you stretch on your tip-toes and turn it until it's secure. Roll test the cars, cut away, line the switch and go.
A railfan recorded video of you doing your job. Looked pretty normal, nothing really happened besides some cool railroad action.
The video pops up in the trainmaster's feed. He sees a conductor using bad form on the switch, "running" while switching (when the conductor nearly fell over after lining the switch), engaging in a task not related to the shove (looking at the train list), shoving blind (looking back down the train for the cut car) and fouling the track when tying that hard to reach handbrake (not an exception if the handbrake can be reached with both feet flat on the ground outside the rails).
The vast majority of the time these are not even considered a problem, especially if the conductor looked down the track and verified it was clear (shoving would be the major concern in this scenario). But according to the
letter of the rule, there is a way to see these as rule violations. Since shoving rules violations are major they can be cause for dismissal. You get the combination of the right employee and the right company officer and this is no longer a hypothetical scenario. Somebody just lost their job.
I don't know how often this happens. My guess is it's pretty rare. But I guarantee it happens. And nearly every railroader in today's world has felt like this could happen to them.
