Starting October 7th 2002, all yard jobs at Barstow are to
become Remote Control Yard jobs. A few have been RCOs all year long.
There has been talk of trying to add a second slug to each mother unit,
which would put a slug on each end of the SD39. This will probably not
happen, but it would make an interesting configuration of
Slug/SD39/Slug. On September 17th, the local from Lubbock to Amarillo
had SD39 6202 in the consist heading for Denver and eventually Lincoln
for RCO training. BNSF 2249 (GP38-2B) has been at Clovis for several
months, but is now moving to Denver for RCO training. It is taking a
rather round about route to get there. It departed Clovis on the local
moving to Amarillo, then moved to Fort Worth on a M-AMAFTW train. From
there, it went to Kansas City via the M-TPLKCK. It is now heading for
Kansas City and should move to Lincoln then to Denver.
Rumors are that by the end of the 2nd quarter of 2003,
3/4 of the yard jobs on BNSF will be Remote Control jobs. There are
some 800 daily yard jobs on BNSF and about 600 of them will be remote
jobs. The only problem is that the Remote jobs do not get as much work
done as a full yard crew. If work piles up, then an engineer is called
to run the engine to try to catch up the work. This has been done at
Newton, Kansas City, Clovis and Barstow that I am aware of.
