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That's why my bro-in-law left being a train engineer. As the new guy, he had no control of his schedule and was constantly on call. He couldn't plan any time off with us or his friends, and it caused too much stress in his life. Something as simple as a consistent schedule would have done wonders for his mental health and allowed him to continue doing something that he had wanted to do for so long.

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This is why "Precision" is Newspeak in so called Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). All but a few engineers and conductors for whom trains can be reliability scheduled are on-call as a train is built up to the arbitrary number of 150 cars or whatever. Whenever it's of the "precise" size it goes, unless one of those two are unavailable.

And since no one can predict when a substitute might be needed, it would take many more spare engineers and conductors to cover for those out on a sick day. This has to be why the railroads are fighting so hard against this apparently trivial benefit, despite the bad optics etc.

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