Editorial Comment:

Air Conditioning Locomotives

By Cy Martin

I predict that someday our beloved railroad industry will come to the conclusion that present day cab conditions are bad for our health. They will suddenly order the windows all sealed and put decent weather striping on the doors. They will spend what ever it takes to install good thermal and acoustics insulation. Such a program will mandate air conditioning and they will give anyone a Level III that doesn't use it.
---------------- There are people in our industry who gets paid big money to dream up ways to make life miserable for us. They orders things like the removal of existing locomotive air conditioners without replacing them, and provide cab radios with no external microphone or loud speaker.
They try to justify their existence by ordering the removal of the outside latches that enable us to hold the cab doors open in the hot summer time to get a bit of breeze. These fellows have convinced themselves that this is done for our safety.
On the same floor with these fellows are the guys who want the windows and doors closed when a locomotive is tied up at the end of the shift. They must not know that when the next crew arrives a few minutes or hours later, they will find the cab temperature to be hovering at 130 degrees instead of a mere 110 -- or do they?
Go ahead and tell me it is to keep rain out of the cab. I think most of us have proven that a little water won't hurt the cab, since we sometimes have to sprinkle the inside with water to cool it down enough to be able to touch the controls.
All I can say to them is, "Come out of that air conditioned office and spend a whole day with one of us in July or August. Come ride a day in one of our cabs before you ask us to walk a mile in your shoes."
---------------- I used to have a modicum of sympathy for prison inmates whose punishment for a rules infractions was confinement in an iron box out in the hot sun.
That sympathy vanished when I went to work for the railroad industry and found I was given the same treatment every day while just doing my job.

---------------- I can understand the incentive for keeping a customer's vegetables cool during shipment, but why is there no incentive to protect our perishable human crew members from the same temperature extremes?
Have you ever wondered how the railroads can guarantee reliable refrigeration for a boxcar of food products when they can't find a reliable vendor for a locomotive air conditioners?
---------------- An employee of another railroad told me recently that they furnish their employees with a headset they can plug into the locomotive radio. It has a microphone and doubles as ear protection.
Personally, I don't want to work with my head clamped up in a damned contraption for 12-hours, any more than I want to wear plugs in my ears and pour medicine in them at bedtime to fight chronic fungus infections.
I want a safe, air condition cab, where I can exist like a 20th Century human being, instead of a cave man.
Cy is a locomotive engineer at Fort Worth.
9-97