Me realizing it takes a looooong time for a train to come to a complete stop.

If the pay's good...

Originally posted by TGC> The Games Collector:

If the pay's good...

$70k - 100k

my shechema raz could, he loves trains

Originally posted by salamander:

my shechema raz could, he loves trains

Nah I couldn't. Reading rail charts is a pain because they draw everything as straight lines. So even if part of the trackage curves, it's drawn as a straight line on the panel. I mean they obviously have to seeing as track curves all over the place like spaghetti. It's really hard to read yard maps because of this though.

As a back up, they number the tracks with both alphabet and numerals. The problem with being train dispatch is that you aren't overseeing just 1 yard, but entire sections which span out many cities. What's worse is the US hasn't invested in the safety systems Europe has. While we do have some safety systems, we have nothing compared to what they have over there. So here messing up is like messing up in air traffic control. When planes collide people die, when trains collide sometimes entire cities or a good portion of them can go missing like in Lac Megantac.

It's also one of those positions where if something happens it isn't the railroads fault, but yours. You assume full responsibility for the incident. This is enough to weed most people like myself out, but for others the pay is so high that they are fine rolling the dice. Dispatchers do screw up though, and they often end up bearing the brunt of the legal issues that comes with it. It is a very unforgiving job.

Strangely enough, in East Palestine Ohio, the dispatcher and the crew related to that accident were arrested and were going to be tried in court. Norfolk Southern wasn't really held accountable, but Norfolk Southern proceeded to dish out large bribes to city and state officials while taking charge of the clean up effort. This was one, to bail their crew out so they wouldn't testify in court about the equipment and working conditions, and then to fudge clean up numbers to make it look safer than it actually is. It's probably the most obvious and blatent coverup that has ever been done out in the open and people still didn't notice lol.

So all the guilty parties walked and now the firefighters who had no clue how to fight whatever was in the tank cars were blamed instead. This is how shifty a lot of the class 1 railroads are. I love trains, but not enough to work for insane soul sucking corporate railroads. Also Norfolk lied to the firefighters about what was in the cars originally. So the fire fighters were basically fighting mystery chemicals. It was a real "Who's that Pokemon?" type incident. Had Norfolk Southern decided not to do a coverup though, the rail crew and dispatch would have probably gone to jail.

I thought I could until about 4 minutes ago.

Good money but sounds incredibly boring, I doubt I could do it. Leave that job to the train enthusiasts who would actually like seeing all the trains going around.

I couldn't even get the idea of becoming a train dispatcher, I hardly have any experience being one in a video game.

Originally posted by EASY PETE:

Could you do it? Personally I don’t think i could, i would end up daydreaming or accidentally dropping my sandwich on the keyboard and all the trains would start derailing and blowing up

not formation, so nope i cant

I'd probably be happy to have any job working around trains for a time. I think I could do a control room job yes. But then again, no way to know unless I'm there doing it. Maybe I'd do what you say too idk haha.

Originally posted by Raz:

trains

aye, you have told me much of how horrific being train conductors or railway operators generally is in usa. it does not seem an enviable job at all, government security and dosh aside.

Don’t trust me to drive any vehicle cuz this will be me.
https://youtu.be/TNS9Soa3mQE?si=IRHTdE7CHSfKTPik

Originally posted by EASY PETE:

Could you do it? Personally I don’t think i could, i would end up daydreaming or accidentally dropping my sandwich on the keyboard and all the trains would start derailing and blowing up

Maybe you would fancy being an air traffic controller?

Maybe. I have done very time-sensitive systems work before. It would all depend on the particulars, I guess.

Originally posted by Despiser:

Originally posted by EASY PETE:

Could you do it? Personally I don’t think i could, i would end up daydreaming or accidentally dropping my sandwich on the keyboard and all the trains would start derailing and blowing up

Maybe you would fancy being an air traffic controller?

thats way more stressful though...people survive train derailments if mistakes are made, people generally do not survive plane crashes when mistakes are made.