Metro-North rail-traffic control staff has worked 7 days straight for ‘weeks on end’

[realizm]

 

Rail-traffic control staff at the Metro-North Railroad had been working seven days straight for “weeks on end” because of a manpower shortage during a period when the nation’s second-largest commuter railroad was vexed by five accidents.

 

These are the staffers who orchestrate commuter-train movements. Their job — at minimum — is to ensure trains don’t run into each other, or run over a Metro-North employee working along the tracks.

 

It’s exactly “the wrong place” to have fatigued employees, MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast said in an interview conducted by federal safety experts in March. “You overload them and they’ll make a bad decision.”

 

The manpower shortage in such a safety-critical area is just one of the shocking revelations that can be found in a 75-page transcript of an interview with Prendergast by the National Transportation Safety Board.

 

The NTSB was then investigating a series of five major Metro-North accidents that took place in less than one year, including the December derailment in the Bronx that killed four passengers.

 

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[TheNewYorkElevated]

Oh.. my... God... Things just got more serious up in here!

[MysteriousBtrain]

damn...

[Union Tpke]

OMG, what looked like as MNRR as having a perfect record from the outside for most of its existence turned out to be exactly the opposite and revealed to the public eye in the wrong way.

[bobtehpanda]

This is eerily similar to how the FAA has a chronic shortage of ATC workers... It's not an easy job and not a lot of people want it, but what can you do if only so many people are applying, and even fewer of those people can actually handle the job?