Why Do Train Crews Live in the Locomotive for Days?

Watch a freight train roll by and you see the locomotives, the endless line of cars, and up front, two people in the cab. What you do not see is that for those two people, that machine is not a workplace they clock out of at five. It is closer to a home they cannot leave. A crew can go out on a run and not sleep in their own bed for two, three, sometimes four days at a stretch, living out of a single bag, sleeping in strange towns, riding the rails to a place hundreds of miles from home and then waiting, sometimes for a full day, just to be allowed to ride back. People assume a train crew is like a bus driver. Finish the route, go home, see the family. It is nothing like that. In this video we walk through what life on the road really looks like for a modern freight crew. We start with the thing that surprises everybody, which is that a crew is not even allowed to sleep on a moving train, and the strange twelve hour rule the men call dying on the law. We get into the home terminal and away terminal system that leaves a crew stranded hundreds of miles from their family, waiting on a phone call that could come in three hours or twenty four. We look inside the grip, the ballistic nylon bag every railroader packs with several days of clothes, and what that bag tells you about the life. We go back to the old caboose, the little wooden car that was a rolling home for a hundred years before the railroads scrapped it to save money. And we get into limbo time, the disappeared hours that belong to the railroad and give the crew nothing back. Their bed at home becomes a place they visit between runs. The road is where they actually live. If you railroaded, or your father or grandfather did, the comments are for you. Tell us your worst tie up, your longest time away, your home terminal. The train rolls by, two people in the cab, and for them that machine is not where they work. It is where they live. #RailroadHistory #LegendaryLocomotives #FreightTrain #TrainCrew #Railroader #Conductor #LocomotiveEngineer #Caboose #TrainHistory