[masraum]

Originally Posted by Jolly Amaranto

There are at least three people who should have caught this before it happened. The dispatcher should know the route and the clearances before they scheduled a train onto a particular line. The train conductor should also know the route clearances and the height of loads in his train. The engineer just operates the locomotives and drives the train. He has to be checked out on the route and know all the speed restrictions, length of his train and other things and have some idea about the loads in the consist.

Thanks for the info. Clearly, I know squat about how trains run. My assumption was that the engineer, probably mostly just being a driver, wasn't the main guy responsible for knowing all of the details of the route, that stuff having been taken care of before he got involved.