By Tom Dodge, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – Science is providing Americans with the leisure comparable to Roman life at its most decadent. You've seen their statuary: the Romans were so fat they had to wear those enormous gowns they called togas to cover their protuberances. They lay around like slugs on reclining couches, and the only energy they expended was when they ordered their slaves to bring them more food.
We have slaves, too, though they aren't Greek or Ethiopian. Our slaves are called remote controls. They change our TV stations, open our car doors and our garage doors, and so on. They fly spy planes over whatever country we're planning to bomb next. Remote controls are making us fat, lazy, and stupid, and in some ways, obsolete. But the worst thing they do is click the romance out of our lives.
When I was little boy, my dream was to be an engineer on the railroad. Later on, I was able to become a fireman for the Texas and Pacific Railroad in Fort Worth. That life was derailed in 1965 when the last of the firemen were phased out. Diesel locomotives in the late 1940's had made obsolete their job of operating the gauges that controlled the flow of oil into the fireboxes that heated the boilers of the old steam locomotives. Before this, firemen actually shoveled coal or wood into the fireboxes.
Firemen hung on during the oil-burning days but by the time I came along, their primary job was passing signals from the switchmen to the engineer when the switchmen were on the opposite side of the train. Other times we ran the engines when the engineer got tired.
Also about this time cabooses, started disappearing at the end of long freight trains. If you look carefully at the rear of the final car, you will see a small box. This bit of scientific progress eliminated many brakemen and switchmen jobs.
Because of these scientific advancements, I lost all hope of ever being an engineer.
Now, that romantic dream is fading for all other young boys who lie awake in their beds and hear the train whistle wailing and the train clattering by, out there in the night.
The dream is not completely defunct yet, despite philosopher Marshall McLuen's observation that we see life only through the rear-view mirror. ut the reality is that remote controls have already replaced the engineer on switch engines in the Union Pacific switchyards of North Texas. A switchman on the ground with a remote control switches all the boxcars with no one at all in the cab. Engineers still run freight and passenger trains on the main line but, if McLuen is correct, engineers no longer exist at all on the big bosses' planning boards.
It's safer and cheaper to do it this way. The Union Pacific has been able to cut 600 jobs. Accidents and injuries are down considerably and so, I'm sure, are arguments, with no hoghead around to express his opinion about where the cars ought to go. The switchman can even blow the whistle by remote.
Tony Hartzel, the transportation editor for the Dallas Morning News, and I'm proud to say, one of my former students, wrote a news story about railroad by remote control. "It's a couch potato's dream," he wrote.
Some dream.
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.