CN at odds with union over voice recorders
Railway says it’s willing to invest in safety technology — but only if it can be used to monitor staff.
The country’s biggest railway agrees it’s a good idea to put voice recorders in trains. But CN officials want to use the technology to monitor their employees as well as provide information to accident investigators — a move that may be controversial with workers.
The Transportation Safety Board has renewed calls for voice recorders in trains in the wake of the fatal VIA derailment in Burlington last month. It noted that recorders are used in airplane cockpits and ships, but not on the rails.
Cockpit recordings in planes, however, are used only for investigations.
And the transcripts are never published in Canada, unlike the U.S., where transcripts are routinely made public in final reports.
The safety board has been pushing for voice recorders on trains since 2003, but the federal government has yet to make them mandatory.
Transport Minister Denis Lebel refused the Star’s request for an interview on rail safety.
Rail investigators say a voice recorder could have helped explain why the doomed VIA train was travelling at four times the authorized speed as it approached a crossover east of Aldershot on Feb. 26. Three engineers died.
The same concern was raised in the investigation report Tuesday on a similar crash in Quebec in 2010.
CN supports adding voice recorders to the black boxes on its trains, “so long as we have the ability to use them in rule compliance,” said company spokesman Jim Feeny.
“We monitor our crews. We regularly download the event recorders to ensure that the crews are following the rules in terms of speed, in terms of whistles, basically the control of the train — just as we use radar guns to monitor speed. We use technology not just (in an) investigation but in our day-to-day safety management. The voice recorders are just another tool.”
Citing privacy concerns, Feeny said voice recorders have “been under active discussion for quite some time” with the unions that represent train crews. Although he couldn’t say how much they would cost, Feeny said, “It’s an investment we’d be willing to make.” Bill Brehl, a division president with Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, said the Advisory Council for Rail Safety, of which he’s a member, is meeting soon to discuss voice recorders and their impact on safety. But Brehl said he personally would not support using them to “spy” on employees. “It’s a slippery slope when you start stepping on privacy issues under the guise of safety,” he said. An investment CN isn’t prepared to make yet is adding positive train control, a system that automatically applies the brakes to trains travelling at unauthorized speeds. “The technology needed to successfully implement positive train control is not yet ready for deployment in the U.S. or in Canada,” Feeny said. The U.S. has given railways until 2015 to install that technology. A Transportation Safety Board representative said Tuesday that Canadian railways are being forced to look at PTC on their U.S. tracks. But a January statement from the Association of American Railroads says key components are still in development, and that the vast network of track, switches and signals, added to the need to carefully integrate the technology among rail companies, make it impossible to implement in three years. A spokesperson for the National Association of Railroad Passengers said the objection is really about money. “The pushback you’re getting from a lot of freight railroads is that the safety improvements you would gain don’t justify the upfront cost,” said Sean Gail. With files from Bruce Campion-smith and Amy Dempsey