Engineer to conductor radio frequencies?

I'm a rookie when it comes to railroad frequencies, so i am still learning.

When freight crews are switching an industrial park or a customer, obviously the engineer uses a radio to talk to the guy throwing the switches and uncoupling the cars.

1. Do crews talk to each other useing one of the standard RR channels?(i am assuming no)

2.If not, are these frenquencies avaliable? (namley csx in the boston area)

Thanks!

Triker wrote:I'm a rookie...

1. Do crews talk to each other......

2.If not, are these frenquencies avaliable?

1. Yes, they do talk to each other, on a regular radio channel

2. Yes, these freqs are available. try looking here: FREQS

So would crews (conduter to engineer) typicaly switch to a yard channel when sorting and placing cars for a customer as opposed to useing the lines main dispatch channel?

It would depend on where they were, and how busy the channel was. when I worked the River line, the Lehigh line, the Trenton line, etc., when we switched industries, we used the regular road channels, that were assigned to those lines. Those portables don't xmit very far, and the engineer has less to say on the radio, than the ground crew, so there isn't that much interference. You would need to stay on the channels of that line, to hear the DS if he was calling, hear other trains in the area, either by their calls, or by listening for detectors going off, etc. Yard crews and those who work in the immediate vicinity of the yard, will usually be found on a freq assigned to that particular yard. Many jobs work in the yard, at the same time, on the same channel. There are radio rules in effect, to protect everyone there, and to assure each crew is talking to members of their crew only. Hand signals take some of the burden away, as do wayside signals, in places like humps, mini humps and shove lights in places where they are being used. Hope this helped.....

I heard from some old-timers long ago that trains crews at one time would use their own personal walkie-talkies, usually Army surplus, to do yard work. Most radio rules are pretty explicit now that crews are prohibited from using anything other than company radios and company channels while switching, or any other time on the job for that matter.

Not only RR rules but FRA rules prohibit using any radio's not in Railroad spectrum.

http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2005/ ... 220.43.htm
Citizen bands is 27 Mhz and family service and Nextells etc.

GA says "Hand signals take some of the burden away". Maybe, but I find that increasingly today either guys have a panic attack and are incapable of working without a radio, or else I wind up with guys using "home grown" signals for their pike which bear no relation whatever to standard signals. Example - coming in for a hitch, getting close, guy swings his hand back and forth about three times parallel to the ground. I stop, of course. After he brings me in for the hitch he later asked why I stopped. I said he told me to. "Oh, no, that means 'half a car', like the line in a fraction, or cutting something in half". I wanted to haul out the rule book, show him the diagram, and say "here, that's what you did, and it means STOP". Most places, I'm not staying long enough to teach them any different but it's tough to adapt sometimes. I don't mind weird signals for some track or spot but when they get creative with stop forward and back up, it makes you wonder.

Hi,
Here in the Boston area we use 3 of the AAR channels for road setoffs and yard switching.
Channel 1 AAR channel 46 46 (160.8Mhz) is the road channel and using for setoffs of road jobs such as the auto rack setoff at East Brookfield.
Channel 2 AAR channel 64 64 (161.07Mhz) is used in Boston, Framingham, and Worcester for yard switching and road setoffs.
Channel 3 AAR channel 50 50 (160.86) in used in Framingham for switching when channel 2 is busy with other communication traffic.
Regards,
Railman

When I worked for UP, when we were in the yard we used 2424, but when we were on the road, we used 2020, and then on the ground we used the same, the traffic wasn't that bad in the subdivision, so it was not major.