John Hart watched in bewilderment as a Union Pacific locomotive repeatedly rammed rail cars until they toppled over in front of an oncoming freight train near the Stadium Drive crossing in Arlington last week.
He said it looked as if the locomotive were piloted by a crazed or angry engineer.
"He kept backing up and hitting it again," said Hart, who works for American Shell Center near the tracks on Division Street. "Everybody there was under the impression that he was hitting it on purpose."
The engine was, in fact, being controlled remotely, and the operator was merely out of position to see the cars that he was hitting, Union Pacific officials later said.
Although no one was hurt, the March 10 train accident has brought to Arlington a national debate between unions and railroads about the safety of remote-control switch engines and how they should be regulated.
How the issue is resolved will have a large impact on the area. For more than a century, Fort Worth's Tower 55 has been one of the nation's largest crossroads for freight. The Alliance Intermodal Terminal and switching yard on the Tarrant-Denton county line includes the largest switchyard operated by Burlington Northern Santa Fe in Texas. Union Pacific has two major Tarrant County switchyards. All three major facilities use remote technology.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen says remote-control locomotives are dangerous because they take one of the human operators out of the equation.
"That's one less set of eyes and judgment you have," said Terry Briggs, chairman of the union's Texas Legislative Board.
Union Pacific says the locomotives are safer -- for the same reason.
"You eliminate the chance of miscommunication," Omaha, Neb.-based spokesman John Bromley said.
Throwing the debate into starker relief, the east Arlington switchyard that is now using remote-control locomotives is the same one where an accident in December 2002 caused a derailment that left a rail car dangling over Texas 360.
That derailment shut down the freeway for hours, and falling debris caused several traffic accidents. But police said the rail car easily could have fallen and caused a deadly pileup.
The 2002 accident was caused by a conventional engineer-operated switch engine, but Briggs said the remote-control engines have made switchyards more dangerous.
Conventional switch-engine operations use an engineer and at least one switchman on the ground to watch in front of the rail cars as the switch engine is pushing.
With a remote-control switch engine, the switchman on the ground controls the train with a small transmitter attached to his vest. The switchman is completely responsible for the operation.
The union is lobbying for federal regulations that would require operators to see in front of the cars they are pushing, among other rules. Currently, the Federal Railroad Administration offers only recommendations for the use of remote-control locomotives -- not requirements.
The union would like the railroad administration to turn those recommendations into rules, because railroads are not enforcing them, Briggs said.
For example, the railroad administration suggests that operators not ride on rail cars while they are controlling the engine that is pushing them.
"The railroads have ignored that," Briggs said. "We have guys who are hanging on the side of a boxcar, with their lantern, with their radio, and operating the engine all at the same time."
About 30 U.S. cities, including Shreveport, La., have banned the use of remote-control switch engines until more safety considerations are put into place.
Bromley said that Union Pacific remote-control locomotive operations currently account for 21 percent of yard-crew hours.
As the use of the engines spreads, the railroad is keeping close track of safety statistics, Bromley said.
"We have not had a single accident where it was the fault of the technology," Bromley said. "They were all human error, as was the accident in Arlington. They would have still happened with a human engineer."
The injury rate for Union Pacific remote-control locomotives was 5.2 percent lower than conventional operations in 2003, measured in injuries per 10,000 job starts, Bromley said.
Remote-control locomotives had a slightly higher total accident rate, with 0.1 percent more wrecks, Bromley said.
Federal Railroad Administration spokesman Steven Kulm does not yet have numbers available but said Canadian railroads have used the remote-control locomotives for more than a decade and found them to be safer.
The Canadian national railroad, which pioneered the technology in the 1990s, claimed a 50 percent drop in rail-yard accidents, according to a report sent to U.S. railroad officials in 2000.
"In general, remote-control locomotives were deemed that they had a safe enough record in Canada that we allowed their use in switchyards," Kulm said.
Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., leaders of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, asked the Federal Railroad Administration to study the safety of remote-control locomotives.
They wrote in a September letter that "little data exists to judge the safety experience of this technology in the United States."
The railroad administration will release a preliminary report sometime this spring, Kulm said.
Briggs said that the research should have been done sooner, before the remote technology was so widely implemented.
"The railroads needed to slow down," Briggs said. "Now the employees and the public are the ones being experimented on."
Staff Writer Bryon Okada and Researcher Stacy Garcia Contributed to This Report.
