>His claim that the block was clear then dropped remains unsubstantiated, and why the conductor did not act to stop the train in advance of a mishap is unkown, but the Fresno C&E on the westbound cement train remain unable to return to work due to their specific permanent disablities.

The locomotive's event recorder gave every indication that the entire crew had fallen asleep. There were no throttle adjustments, brake applications, nor whistle blowing for quite a while, like at the crossings at the east end of Sharon and the west end of Kismet. The event recorder in the relay house at West Kismet didn't support the engineer's assertion that the signal was clear. I heard all this shortly after the accident in person from the last old-time RFE (out of Calwa), who has since retired.

Without these events occurring, there was nothing to reset an alertor, had there been [a functioning] one, unless of course it was one of the ones which required touching and releasing metal, although it's more than extremely doublful that any of these were still around. The train would have been stopped somewhere between Sharon and Kismet.

>3) Dispatchers should make a concerted effort to advise crews about meets or other pending moves.

On this I don't agree one bit. It's a trait of human nature that if someone tells that you that such-and-such will be so, this information will influence your perceptions of the situation when it arises. In other words, what you expect to see has a great influence on what you percieve when you look at it. This phenomenonn is widely recognized in the psychological world and legal community. Out there we run on signal indication, which means we are supposed to look at the signal when it becomes visible and do what it (its indication) tells us. In other words, we are supposed to watch what's going on and act accordingly. It's a very bad idea for the DS to prejudice our perceptions of what's going to transpire.

For this very reason, in the days of train orders most railroads required each crewmember to read all the orders before discussing any of them with their fellow crewmembers. There were all too many collisions which resulted from one crewmember reading an order erroneously, telling the rest of the crew what he read, and none of them caught the error. "No. 10 meet No. 9 at Bray instead of May". Bray and May are about 21 miles apart, so if someone inadvertently reversed the two names, or the listener misheard them because of background noise, it's a recepie for disaster, just like Kismet. (Bray and May used to be on the SP's Black Butte Sub.)

That guy's restriction to yard service is of only secondary importance because even the best get drowsy on occasion.