Experience does matter, and that being said. How many times have I seen someone giving me a signal to come ahead or back up, while someone was in between lacing up the air? More times than I care to remember.

In the days of lanterns an experienced hoghead would or should know where is pin puller, field man, and conductor were. Of course I've known people with sleep apnea that could literally sleep with their eyes open, that switchmen wouldn't work with when they showed up unrested.

Then there was the time they sent a drunk conductor, and two brakemen one with two days, and one with two weeks (who was a foamer to boot), and we needed to switch out 60 cars of tomatoes in about 4 hours, with air made. The "foamer" was field man (as the more "experienced" crewman, and the two day kind was pin puller. We had to pull a shed, and I told the field man where to make the cut on the list, right in front of him, I told the pin puller to make the air. The field man walked down to the cut, and promptly gave me a big back up, with the pin puller in between the cars...... He got more and more agitated that I was not taking his signal, and began walking back toward me on the engine, when he got to the engine he started yelling at me about taking his signal. I simply pointed back at his pin puller. coming out from between the cars, that he had walked by, without even noticing. He got a lesson about counting lanterns. It's a good thing that I was by then an "experienced" hoghead, at the age of 25, who had fired for a couple of years before being "stimulated" at the "stimulator" and promoted, and had some time to learn a few things, like counting your lanterns and knowing where all of your crewmembers were before you moved......

Inexperienced people in the cab or on the ground, or people with no learning curve, or who didn't give a #hit (in my career I've encountered all three kinds of stupid and dangerous)often don't keep track of folks are, and, as a result sometimes bad $hit happens. So they have these stupid rules, written in the blood of those maimed and killed, when @hit happens, to keep that from happening so often.

So, maybe because I've seen people run over by a train, while at work, making air down between cars, it doesn't sound like such a bad practice to me.