CSX Conductor wrote:Hate to ruin your day CSX Engineer98, but I heard that they called "giddie-up" / "you got a flashing clear" man to the school along with our female conductor out of Beacon Park for the class in May, but ended up not sending either of them.
Unfortunately we both know, as well as everybody who knows that fool, that he will never get reprimanded due to the fact that the company is afraid that he will "pull the race card".
Sadly we all know how dangerous this particular guy is, especially you from first hand experience. but we just have to be extra careful around him. Last good one I heard was he told his engineer that they had an Approach on track #2 @CP-43 to shove off in the yard, engineer looked back and saw track #2 all red & track #1 had an Approach for a westbound MBTA Commuter Train. Good thing the engineer didn't move.
Every terminal has a few of those...sometimes more than a few.
The problem is systemic...institutional. CSX doesn't
pay to train these men; which means they don't represent a capital investment. Which means they're not taking risk (in their view) in hiring personnel who are unfit for the job.
Somehow, these brainiacs in Jax haven't figured out that morons like that
cause expensive train accidents; and not every problem can be prevented with more "training" (paperwork and BS radio transmissions) and accusations of crew misconduct.
The company for whatever reason is hypersensitive on the issue of race. In one of the terminals I've worked out of, there's a conductor, minority group, who's got a track record of uncooperation and did time in prison for a violent crime. The loser got in my face, end of a run while yarding a train...
...I walked away and dumped it onto the yardmaster...
...and I was out of service for
three weeks while they tried to figure a way to fire
ME withOUT firing
HIM. (They couldn't; they brought us both back).
They
will not fire a woman or minority. They seldom fire a new guy who clearly cannot understand railroad work. And they keep taking noobies who are adequete conductors but not suitable as engineers, and cranking them through Choo-Choo College.
The mentality seems to be that the job is so simple,
any monkey can do it. That's an arrogance borne of never having worked our jobs on the ground; of coming off the street into management positions on the railroad; and it's the elitism of the college set which looks down at those of us with dirt under our fingernails.
It will be the Acheillies' Heel of CSX's operatons.