>Look, I'm not going to get into some kind of pissing match with you.

You already are. If you don't like to do this sort of thing, why did you start?

> . . you said: "The presence or absence of a "mash button" is absolutely no indication of whether or not the apparatus is wired into the event recorder, and you can bet your bottom dollar that every locomotive built with a desktop control stand was also built with an event recorder." which doesn't seem to bolster your argument that an alerter would have saved the day?

The statement was in answer to an earlier post, which stated that mash-button alertors were old and/or weren't connected to the event recorder. Thus, my statement wasn't intended to accredit the efficacy of altertors but rather to clarify the mash-button/event recorder business. You read things in which weren't there.

>which you contradict yourself with "However, no matter how closely you set the alertor up to monitor the crew, there are always going to be occasions that they don't (and can't) save the day." Which is it Doc?

How is saying that alertors can be beneficial but not foolproof a contradiction? The word "cautionary" comes to mind rather than "contradiction".

>Let's seen now, could he have been woken up by the train going into emergency?? This, I can promise you, is nothing more than a sneeze of air from that modern control stand. I'm sorry, but that little fart of air would never wake anyone up, much less to a second unit brakeman stretched out.

The explanation for the possibility of the brakeman's waking up in time to jump can be found in this book: [www.amazon.com]

>Hey, Doc, how about sitting in the hole for two hours and then the signal goes clear with no word at all from the DS?

BTDT many times, in the days before radios too.

>You think we're still awake?

Probably not. I fell asleep myself several times in this very situation.

As for the rest of your typing, Ho Hum.