Railroad engineers work under much stiffer regulations than do truck drivers. I suppose you can argue that they should, but that's not the point. I'm sure we could debate the skills it takes to operate 7,000-horsepower locomotives
pulling 100-car trains versus an 80,000-pound set of doubles or even triples.
The point is: If a train engineer screws up, he often doesn't get a second chance. One goof, he's fired - gone. Not so with truck drivers, except for the most flagrant violation.
Regulations for engineers and drivers emanate from the same bureaucracy, the federal Department of Transportation. The train guys fall under the Federal Railroad Administration; truck drivers under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Same church, different pew. Railroad engineers must meet federal standards to be licenses, as must truckers.
The following argument for change comes from a locomotive engineer who had been an over-the-road trucker for 11 years. Steven Kay sounds off in the June issue of Trains magazine in a column titled, "Why the government should treat truckers like engineers." He argues that we'd get many unsafe drivers off the road in a hurry if they worked under railroad rules. Kay calls for the railroads and motorists groups to petition to hold truck drivers to the same standards and penalties as railroad engineers.
Here are highlights of engineer operating rules. Three serious violations are:

• Exceeding any speed limit by more than 10 mph;

• Working past allowable hours of service;

• Passing a stop signal or entering a track segment without authority.

Even for the first offense, an engineer faces very stiff fines and probable suspension of his license. Penalties increase if any additional violations occur within set time limits.
Engineer Kay argues that since both engineer and driver license statutes were created to ensure both public and workplace safety, then why shouldn't truck drivers be held to similar standards? A trucker exceeding the speed limit by 10 mph would equate to a 30-day loss of the driver's CDL for a first-time offense.
Locomotives by law have event recorders that continuously record speed, horn usage (required by trains), headlights, bell operation, throttle setting and brake application pressures. Kay says truck recorders could pick up similar data, and should. After all, the public is in even closer proximity to trucks going down the highway than with trains on their private right of way.
In Kay's logic, when a truck is stopped, whether it be for speeding, a weight check or involved in an accident, federal regulations should require that the recorder be downloaded and tickets issued for any and all violations found. Of course, driver hours would be monitored this way. Locomotive recorders track engineers, too.
If the recorder shows a serious violation, Kay believes, that evidence should be brought before a judge and if found guilty, the driver should have his CDL revoked and his truck impounded until a properly licensed driver is available to continue the trip. Kay has little sympathy for the argument that a trucker loses his livelihood if his CDL is revoked. "If locomotive engineers can function in this regulatory climate, so can truck drivers," he writes.
It's a fact that in today's railroading, crew changes are frequently made when a crew approaches its maximum hours. No longer are trains brought into yards; the second crew drives to the designated meeting point, the crews switch and the old crew drives back. I've even witnessed a crew change in Montana while the train crept along at 1 mph.
It would be interesting, to say the least, if the feds were to pick up on Steven Kay's arguments and try to make driver regs parallel to engineers rules. If this were to happen, the trucking industry's reaction would make the current driver hours-of-service controversy seem rather mild.

You can read Jim Winsor's column on equipment and safety each month in Newport's Heavy Duty Trucking magazine. See if you qualify for a free subscription at www.heavydutytrucking.com.