Amtrak experiencing crew shortage - but shortage might be intentional
In yesterday’s article about the 11+ hour delay of a San Joaquin train (see Some bad PR for Amtrak - again …), I reported that I found it hard to believe that it took Amtrak 6 hours (probably way more) to come up with a relief crew for the delayed and stranded train #704. But as it turns out, it may be that Amtrak simply doesn’t have any extra crews available for incidents like this. The following was posted by Christina Castillo on the All_Aboard group today:
Rest assured, in all crew bases in every part of the country, trains are running on a shoestring and a prayer. If things go well, the performance will be positive and the passengers will be well served. But make no mistake, if a major mechanical problem, a derailment, or a natural disaster occurs, in many cases, there ain’t no plan “B”. There ain’t no relief crew. There ain’t no spare engine, diner,or sleeper. Amtrak has no “bench”. It is a reality we work with every day. It has been this way for a long time.
So it seems that Amtrak has been forced to make such severe cutbacks in their operating crews that they can no longer afford to have extra crews available for special situations like this. And this happened in a rather busy corridor - image what would have happened if this would have taken place in, say, El Paso or some such place…
This raises another question - would it be possible for Amtrak to “borrow” a BNSF crew in such a case? Or are BNSF freight crews not qualified to run passenger trains anymore? And of course, the irony is that if Amtrak was running more trains, it would have more crews on the roster and it would be more economical to have extra crews available … Oh well …
Posted in: Uncategorized | February 27, 2006 9:58 pm
1 Comment »
Anonymous, on February 28, 2006 @ 9:47 am
“Borrow a freight crew? Sure it’s possible, but the freight railroads are not interested in using their own short supply of rested crews to help Amtrak. They might clear the mainline or in a rare circumstance to get a crew to the other end of the railroad for operational purposes. In normal circumstancese they would not be interested.
RSS-Comment-Feed | TrackBack URI