Word: conrail
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sensing an untold story, Sidey hit the rails to interview people at all levels of the freight industry. He rode a Conrail train up the west side of the Hudson River Valley, getting an engineer's-eye view of spectacular scenery; half a continent away, he observed the switchings, couplings and uncouplings at a vast freight yard in North Platte, Nebraska. These experiences called up memories of his Iowa childhood and his long romance with railroads: "I remember as a four-year-old hearing the train whistle on a winter morning and pressing my nose against an icy windowpane...
...Newark, New Jersey, and up the west side of the Hudson River, three locomotives lug 63 flatbed freight cars -- almost a mile of Conrail train for United Parcel and the U.S. Postal Service, due in California in 72 hours. Engineer Jim Metzger, 42, flicks his eyes like beacons from digital screens inside his cab to the roadbed and back -- right hand on the throttle controlling 11,400 horses, left hand on the three-tone whistle, two longs, a short and a long at every crossing. Past suburban backyards and friendly waves, through the West Point tunnel, rolling from 35 m.p.h...
Railroad baron William Henry Vanderbilt's scornful dismissal of rail patrons ("The public be damned"), which has shadowed the industry for more than a century, at last seems laid to rest. "We are customer driven; we tailor-make our service for our customers," says James Hagen, chairman of Conrail, a firm that was fabricated out of the bankrupt remains of dozens of lines, including the legendary New York Central and the Pennsylvania. Conrail lost $412 million in 1977, the first full year after it was birthed. Last year it made $282 million. Hagen and his cohorts in the rail business...
...knows how large a role fatigue has played in train and air disasters over the years, but the danger is undisputed. A drowsy engineer and crew were deemed the probable cause of the 1988 head-on collision of two Conrail freight trains near Thompsontown, Pa., a crash that cost four lives and $6 million. Long plane flights that cross through many time zones are more common than ever, and they often leave pilots suffering from jet lag. Yet today's highly automated cockpits require pilots to be especially vigilant in monitoring dials and digital displays. Says one pilot...
...campaign to uncover drug usage among workers has been fueled in part by a series of drug-related accidents. In one of the worst, a 1987 collision of Conrail and Amtrak trains that killed 16, investigators determined that a Conrail engineer and conductor had been smoking marijuana just before the accident. So far, testing has support from an important group: the workers. In a Gallup poll released last month, a majority of adults said they favored random testing...