“It Is Getting Worse. People Are Leaving”

It didn't happen in the US, but it has happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...

In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell" becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the rampant safety policy violations).

Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE, equipment interlocks and guards helping them out (lord knows they're running on blow and monster energy at least one day a month). They disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to be.

My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore and maple syrup land may be different.

One place had indoor escalator that you weren't allowed to walk on and must always hold the handrail as well. When it was broken, you couldn't use it as stairs and instead had to take this terrifying (though likely very safe) elevator.

Another rule I liked was to not allow strangers on the boat when you're rowing across the river. What river? What boats? What year was this written?

The majors varied pretty dramatically in regards to safety. XOM, COP, and Shell were excellent. Chevron pretty good. BP was terrible - all safety theater without a whole lot of safety.

My sister was working at a competitor around the time Deepwater Horizon went down, and had previously worked at BP. She was not at all surprised that it happened to BP, and had complained to us around 2005 that BP was a disaster waiting to happen.

They will find ways to blame employee error instead of taking responsibility when their own policies contribute to accidents, especially if there are fatalities. The dead guy probably did it to himself. It couldn't possibly be related to lack of sleep, lack of maintenance of important tools in use at the time, etc.

It is definitely one industry where HR has the company's back and you are fucked if you raise any issues with them. I had a situation where I violated a company policy on location one time and this violation caused my crew and therefore the company, to be kicked off the location and replaced by a competitor's crew with a competing tool. This resulted in a nice meeting with my Field Service Manager (my direct boss), my Regional Service Manager (his direct boss), and a person whom I discovered after the meeting was a company lawyer who was present only to document my clear failure so that they could justify termination.

Questions were asked by my bosses and I responded with truthful answers and long-winded descriptions of the thought processes behind those actions. When they ran out of questions and thought they had clearly documented that I broke the company's rules about what I could tell clients about their tool's performance and that termination was justified, the lawyer introduced himself to me. I had had no idea who he was up to then, he was just a suit with a notepad who spent his time there taking notes.

He thanked me for my thoughtful replies and turned to my bosses and told them that they could not fire me since the client had specifically asked me to answer his question based on my own personal experiences and that when I answered I was careful to base my answer only on my own personal experience - for better or worse. Additionally, since they knew that the experiences that I used in answering the client's questions were true and not embellished (they both had direct knowledge of the problems I had encountered and later described), there were no grounds to terminate.

Up to that point I had no idea that they were trying to terminate me. Basically, the company policy was to parrot the marketing bullshit and lie to the client about tool performance characteristics under adverse conditions.

When the lawyer had delivered the bad news to them he stood up and extended his hand, thanked me for my time and told me to keep up the good work.

I was fortunate that I had been able to send resumes several weeks before while I was recuperating from job-related knee surgery. One of those resumes ended up giving my life back to me and allowing me to expand my career and eventually become a consultant to the industry. Though its been thirty years now I can still say - Fuck Scumbagger.

Instead of reforming that law, or telling railroads to deal with it and pay more/reduce capacity, they're just gonna bend the safety laws instead.

Same problem applies to government and clearance jobs. FBI has said they can't find anyone to hire because everyone smokes pot now and that it's a problem for their hiring pipeline.

Because they can offload most of the costs of the derailments as externalities while pocketing the money from larger trains.

But if the derailments are <X% of the trains, and the rest of the trains are more cost-effective enough to make up for those, especially if the costs of the derailment to the environment, communities, and employees and such are externalized away from the MBA making these decisions, then they may decide it is worthwhile.

This is one of the reasons so many people have varying levels of distaste aimed at "MBAs"... it's not that hard to train people to push numbers around in any number of industries. It's easy to equip somebody with an MBA capable of doing that. Heck, based on what I've seen of MBA training, it's trivial compared to an engineering degree, no offense particularly intended, but it really isn't that hard to tell whether this number is bigger than that number, even with some statistics thrown in. The problem is that there is no way to scale up understanding all the details that are not and perhaps even can not be in the numbers, and that's where the MBAs can go trampling over companies.

I'm sure the numbers on these jumbo trains look great, even accounting for the derailments. I'm sure of that because the fact they're running them is pretty much proof of that. If the numbers weren't good, they never would have become popular enough to be worth writing about in the first place. The question is, what about the things not in the numbers? That I can't speak to and must defer to people with experience in the industry. So must the MBAs, but they are trained, deliberately or otherwise, not to.

I don't know if it is true that they _prefer_ trains that derail vs ones that do not. I can try to understand their _incentives_ though.

I would assume that they are incentivized to make money _this quarter_ or _this year_. I would also assume that they aren't really _caring_ about consequences that are not _fiscal_.

Given these two incentives, if someone asked me "Should we ship this train that might derail?" I wouldn't say "no". I would ask "what are the fiscal consequences if it does?" and "How much does it cost to not?"

Famous Fight Club quote about recalls and such. Same thing with companies breaking the rules in exchange for some sort of fine. It's not that they _want to break the rules_ it's that it's they are _incentivized_ to make the choice that _increases their odds of fiscal growth_.

A railroad engineer is going to value longevity/consistency, and lives to minimize (rather than capitalize) risk.

The two are not going to make good bed fellows.

I think the point of the article is that given the hazardous nature of much of the cargo being transported, there's no room for such gambling here, and yet it's being done routinely.

(No opinion if this actually is the cause, or what the dynamics are here; I don't know anything about trains or the businesses surrounding them.)

They calculated that the cost of lawsuits from people hurt by the car defects will be lower than the cost of fixing the defect itself.

Simply put: if they can externalize costs on society, they will.

So trains are optimised for profit. Now if your trains never derail, that means you may still have safety margin. There may be profit for the taking!!!

So keep optimising till it goes wrong. Then, figure out the cost of "going wrong". Figure that into your margins. If you get 99% delivery with 110% profit, does that beat 100% delivery for 100% profit?

TL;DR: that's how free markets work in capitalism. They optimise for profit.

When he's saying he's backing a 3-mile train into a depot, that's nothing to shake a stick at. That means nearby residents have to endure rail noise for the entire time the train overshoots the entrance and while it backs in, it means signals within a given radius must be down, even though a train may not be inbound, it means that the heavier a train gets the more unstable it's load can become on certain track and when it derails can cause catastrophic devestation to the environment (he mentioned carrying hazmat).

These all used to be pretty blueprint safety evaluations from what I knew. If things have changed then our perspective or priorities have changed, and I think that's what the author is getting at.

Derailments are still infrequent enough that the company can be insured against the losses, so if derailments happen, there’s effectively zero cost to the company.

That would change if this class of train made incidents so frequent that insurance companies were no longer willing to sell insurance for derailments incidents involving this type of train. At that point, they’d be phased out of the fleet (as they crashed out of service) and then individually written off as a tax-deductible loss.

* The people that live along the tracks should be grateful that the trains are crashing and spilling stuff on their land because they "create jobs" (hundreds of miles away not affecting anyone associated with the normal land use).

* The religion of "regulation is always bad". Usually associated with blame that the existing regulations are really the problem - the increase in accidents after loosening the regs is just coincidence.

* The cost of derailments is less than the extra profit of running unsafely. Anyone complaining about their dead overworked family members can be pointed at a different exhuasted worker making a mistake, so it's not like they have any culpability.

* Maintenance costs too much and would hurt our bottom line! (also look over here instead: record profits!)

Here is a just so story:

Lets say you are CEO of a train company. You need $500M in income each quarter to pay salaries and stay solvent. You are barely breaking even, and if you have to borrow money it will be at terrible terms that you realistically can't afford to pay back. Your competitor starts running trains that are 3 times longer, and therefore can undercut you on price. If you don't lower your prices you will get almost no business and you will have to lay off workers or take a loan you can't pay back to meet payroll. If you lower prices you will lose money on every shipment and will have to take a loan. You decide to just start running the longer trains as well. You may have a suspicion that this is unsafe and that long term the costs of increased insurance and repairs to tracks and lawsuits to dead workers will cost far more than what you save running longer trains, but also you aren't sure of that. It will take years to know for sure, and you don't have the capital stay in business long enough to bet that your competitor will go bankrupt.

More subtle is when the people making decisions (ie in the c-suite, board) have payoff curves that are substantially different from the company's payoff curve. Risking train derailment strikes me as being in this category. These schemes can be deeply convoluted. The author implies that there is substantial, uninsurable risk to cities that is implicitly taken on by any freight carrier. Holding everything else equal, increasing revenue while increasing the potential damage to a city is a potential source of profit.

If there is some kind of a moral incentive not to drop eggs, it is not reflected in the profit incentive.

Everything is managed by managers for the same managers - there's literally nobody in charge; the bureaucracy perpetuates the bureaucracy for the sake of the bureaucracy.

http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/n...

The Federal Reserve survey of consumer finances shows that the majority of equity is held by a small percent of people.

Various shifts by corporations and government over the years have happened to raise the social security age, disrupt job security, unions and pensions, and shift middle class retirement funds into the stock market. None of this have had much impact other than that ownership of equity on the minority side of the equation may now be more widely distributed.

I hope the third option is a bit more of just trying to take the situation in. This is someone sharing their experience, the executives running the show have their perspective as well. I'm not sure why we have to jump so quickly to "I found data that refutes this, is this person lying or is the data wrong?". Just seems to leave out so much nuance. Feels like a very tech industry "see the data and make a decision". This situation is so human, it's about fear and whether those fears are being considered.

But the number of derailments dropped by more than 25% during that time, so the probability of a given car being involved in a derailed train still decreased.

There's been other coverage of the ironically named "precision scheduling" in the rail industry causing a lot of labor problems, because it makes for nightmarishly unpredictable schedules for workers. They never know when a train is going to leave until it is full, so after working a shift, workers stay in a hotel waiting for a return trip that they won't know about until 90-120 minutes ahead of departure. I am guessing that the claims around increased derailment may actually be about frustration with the work environment.

https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1999/rail-safety-2020-20...

And then there's the human element. Nobody knows when they're going to work, how long it's going to take, what kind of bullshit they're going to run into. You can get stuck for long periods of time away from home terminal, and the Class 1 doesn't care. And there's things like rules on how to walk. The environment that's been constructed isn't meant for human consumption and it's taking a toll on the workforce. There's reams of other shit to whinge about.

And the derailments always matter, it's a total clusterfuck. They're not easy to fix, you've got to "bad order" and set out the car, at least by regulation. This involves rerailing, finding a set-out track, and making all the moves to get everything back in order. You've also got to wait for carmen (who are understaffed) and management, which depending on the route, could be a long sit. If it's bad enough it'll shut down traffic for a couple of days, requiring significant diversions around it while the Class 1 pays out the ass for a third party to come clean it all up and rerail shit.

None of the current infrastructure is built to deal with these train lengths, either, so everything moves slower. The fact the Surface Transportation Board had a hearing with the Class 1's, I think, is a pretty good indicator they're about as interested in moving goods as GE is in manufacturing.

^: Each coal car has two draw bars with +/- 2-3" about the same for shipping container cars (from eyeing it) of run built in. This varies with car, auto racks have way more run out. Opposing forces in the trainline will pull it apart, the more run to build the faster the opponent acceleration... This typically results in broken knuckles. But it is possible to just push cars off the rail with these forces, which is exacerbated by the doubled length.

The first involved an engineer friend who literally "went off the rails" with one of these big trains. The union went to bat for him for six months or a year or something to try and protect his job. Ultimately they determined that he was at fault, but without the union he would have had no representation or recourse against the train company at all.

A number of others involve injury: the unions make it difficult to terminate employees who are injured on the job; we don't really hear about how dangerous train work is. The article mentions that the conductor is "two" or "three miles" down the track at the end of train.

That is a big deal, because the engineer doesn't necessarily have immediate feedback on when to stop. I've seen with my own eyes guys on the ground trying to guide one of these super-long trains into the yard to connect to other cars and that is some scary stuff.

Finally, furloughs. I've had friends who were furloughed from their jobs at the train companies for years and had to go get a job at a grocery store stocking shelves. The train industry seems so have some regulation games going on at the governmental level and the union level. I'm not sure these guys would ever get their jobs back, with seniority, without union bargaining and playing interference with government.

Americans hate unions because big business here has been effective at demonizing them.

Do you think railroad engineers / conductors would know about a crappy API being pushed by Microsoft or Apple that would affect application development over the next 5 years?

Its not like we computer-engineers/software-engineers air out our dirty laundry each day to the public.

While I submit that the article has probably no value on its own, I don't think your argument makes sense either.

I think it is expected that people in position of power don't publicly speak about everything. I mean on one end of the spectrum nobody talked about dragnet until someone did. On the other end, "no one" talked about the problems with Boeing 737 max problem until planes started falling off the sky in the sense that we didn't pay attention.

I think why haven't we heard of this before is not an argument.

The number of derailings, the amount of hazardous material (chlorine is a blip), and the skill drain has brought the rail industry to a crisis point. We're just waiting for its Hindenburg moment.

This article is strange in that it's focusing on a single issue of "PSR", but in general terms anyone casually following the industry even as a fan would be well aware of the labor vs. management conflict that has been brewing and escalating for decades. You can only squeeze so much efficiency out of systems before they break.

I'm certain your ignorance is a sign of something suspicious - just not about this topic.

Information hardly ever travels as fast as information can travel.

We've had arguments on HN about whether or not open secrets in tech are true. Some posters assembling a laundry list of reasons the assertion seemed unlikely or implausible. And other posters with first and second hand stories of it happening.

Why the fuck would we know anything about trains?

Of course, this is predicated on the idea that the thirteen amendment will stand, and exceptions won't be carved out to force these people back to work. I acknowledge that recent events may have people questioning that supposition.

What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable?

I’m being purposefully vague to fill in the holes with discussion.

Feel free to throw tomatoes at me if it’s a dumb idea. I’ve had dumber.

MRI coats me 1500 deductible. Plus whatever they bill insurance. Cash price $750. Is really screwed up.

It's insensitive, out of touch people like you that make it hell to be a front line worker.

No training is creating new work force and terrible working conditions are destroying the existing hard core of competent workers.

Game development is one area that could benefit from these. People in that industry suffer from a lot of stress and high rates of burnout due to overwork. edit: they're also paid significantly less than people working in web-dev.

For one, healthy good soil is rare and expensive. We're already wasting too much of it.

And as for "prime development land" - I know the thoughts as a Munich resident and every time I see a rare piece of land that's not been built I always think "just how much housing could be built there". The thing is, a city also needs un-obstructed green space for local micro-climate reasons [1]. You can't just build up everything and expect livable temperatures, especially not with climate change looming.

We should ask politicians instead why they let the rural areas rot to hell and beyond and people are forced to coop together in extremely dense unhealthy urban monster areas.

[1] https://www.local-energy.swiss/dam/jcr:0471327e-8fe2-4f9f-ac...

I agree. But that doesnt mean that we should care less about Ukraine though (which still makes sense bc its closer to 'home'), it means we should have cared way more about the same war happening in the middle east.

How many people do you know who work for Wal-Mart? How are they doing right now? How many unemployed people do you know? People who are getting evicted? I know at least 5 and they are all doing terribly. The cost of living has nearly doubled for the poorest among us and wages have barely budged. They can't afford to live close to their jobs because of skyrocketing rents and can't afford cars to drive to work. They have no savings and are a hairs breadth from homelessness which is becoming a bigger target for police.

Well yea. I'm not sure what the issue is there. Right now almost every company in America is struggling to attract workers and they're being forced to raise wages, increase benefits, move to 4-day work weeks, etc. Everyone is impatient. They want changes now but these things take time to evolve. It's much better for companies and people to organize democratically and organically - that's a fundamental principle for me, and then if those organizations in the long run are trending toward a negative outcome, that's when we need government to step in. Right now I see trends moving the right way, so I'm reluctant to support adding government intervention just to speed things up. It's a cost and inefficiency. I support government intervention and regulation, but it has to be used as a reluctant tool for great good. Environmental regulations, for example, are fantastic and I wholly support them. Mandatory 4-day work weeks when we are already trending in that direction doesn't seem like a good use of regulatory resources.

> Based on historical trends, I suspect relying purely on the market mechanics will result in business failure, and then the policy action will be to save (bail out) the rail companies that are too big to fail. This will then lead to a bunch of strict controls so that bail outs never occur again, creating a regulatory moat further blocking future competition without significantly changing the corporate culture that led to the issue in the first place.

The correct thing to do is not to implement policy action here and let the businesses fail. That's the missing piece. Too Big to Fail is a government failure, not a market failure.

> How many trillionaires need to be minted on the backs of the population majority before significant regulatory limitations sound palatable? I guess I just don't understand the free market concept. It's like... sure it works great assuming you don't factor in the chaos components like greed, limitless ambition, explosive population growth, limited resources, natural disasters, international politics, etc etc etc etc etc.

I really, really can't stand this type of mentality. It makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. Poor government in, say, America doesn't change the success of capitalism - ask Sweden and Denmark, for example. Both countries are staunch free-market capitalist economies. You're mistaking government failures for market failures. You should be asking why your government is not curbing excessive population growth, not Pepsi or Google.