>That reason is, the ergonomic factor (my minor in college), that too much information leads quickly to confusion and mistakes.

According to a recent article in Scientific American, too many choices (i.e. "information") also leads to a feeling of depression.

>So couldn't he just help out by relaying signals in advance? Absolutely Not! The locomotive engineer must focus on only the one signal he just passed and the one he is approaching - any more to keep track of just adds to the chance of error. . . .
>Besides, what if the signal drops more restrictive after it has been radioed - as it easily could at any time; now the dispatcher's report is dangerously false.
>But then the most dangerous and likeliest cause of error, would be that the dispatcher can have hundreds of such aspects before him at once. The resultant high chance of reading the wrong one to an engineer is just too great. Whereas the locomotive engineer has only the signal in front of him to look at - and thus much less chance of a deadly mistake.

Because of all these reasons, and a few more, the only employees who can relay a signal indication verbally to an engineer are his own train crew members.

<One area that can be debated, is whether the dispatcher should inform trains of where he intends to do meets and passes, or crossovers. If he does, trainmen at least know what to expect. On the other hand, expecting a series of greens could lead to lapses of inattention, leading to an accident.

At most the DS should be limited to saying, "Right now I expect to hold you at XXX for ." Telling a train his intentions ventures into the area of poisoning and/or prejudicing the engineer's/conductor's expectations, and there is a whole history of disasters caused by this phenomenon attached to train order meeting points. Human perception is very heavily influenced by what it expects to see. Since the entire purpose of block signals, of which CTC and interlocking signals are part, is to inform the engineer/conductor of the current, rather fluid situation ahead of them as they progress down the track, it's an extremely bad and dangerous practice to color their perceptions ahead of time.

Whenever a DS tells me that I'm going to meet a train at or crossover at XXX, I reply "Thank you" and more or less promptly forget it. Then as I approach these locations, I observe and obey the signal indications because too many times the DS has change his mind and done something else by the time I get there. Besides how on earth did we use CTC and block signals before the 1960s brought the widespread use of radios?

>It took over hundred years for the industry to figure all this out (and a lot of pain and sorrow too) - we tamper at great peril if we don't take all that into account.

Books on the subject are rather difficult to find.

>Some outfits around here need to get back to basics - like not running the reds - like applying the brakes promptly upon passing an approach aspect. There is a damn good reason for that rule! If they just did that, very few accidental running of the reds would ever occur - without the signal system already accounting for it (that's what "running time" is for).

I prefer how an old timer from the 1930s put it: "If you had a yellow [signal], get by a red, and get fired, take your medicine. We don't want you out here either; you might kill one of us."

The problem is that beginning in the early 1950s, on account of competition from trucking and byzantine regulation, the RRs could no longer generate the revenue to support the joint employee/company safety committees and programs which had been evolving since the late 1890s/early 1900s. Today, the companies treat safety as a statistical commodity to be waived in the FRA's and media's faces and brokered and spoon fed to the employees, top down -- the employees receive rather than participated in the safety process as had been the practice in the past. This, coupled with the new wave, touchy-feely HR departmental hiring practises and personnel policies, has brought us to where we are now: a appreciable number of marginally competent employees, many with bad attitudes, whom you can't criticize for screwing up or you might get turned over diversity issues via 1-800-snitchline.