It can be mind-boggling to consider that trains — which may weigh tens of thousands of tons and stretch for miles — can be controlled by a crew of one.

It can be equally mind-boggling to consider that cars have been driving around parts of the country — including Pittsburgh — in recent times with nobody at the controls.

Those ways of thinking converged like tracks in a rail yard at a hearing last week of the State House Transportation Committee in Altoona.

Committee member Martina White, R-Philadelphia, in 2016 introduced a bill that would require at least two crew members in the cab of freight trains, a proposal that potentially conflicts with long-term plans by Norfolk Southern and other railroads to deploy one-person locomotive crews — in keeping with the withdrawal in May by the Federal Railroad Administration of a 2016 proposal to require at least two crew members.

If he were in an airplane about to take off, and learned there was only one pilot in the cockpit, he’d be praying the pilot didn’t have a heart attack, said committee Chairman Tim Hennessey, R-Chester and Montgomery counties, when the subject of White’s bill arose at the hearing. Why shouldn’t the consideration that makes one-pilot passenger planes unthinkable apply to freight trains, Hennessey asked rhetorically.

There are single-person cab crews on Amtrak passenger trains and urban subway trains now, said Norfolk Southern Resident Vice President Rudy Husband. And there’s technology that can shut off a freight train when the engineer fails to punch an alert button every 20 or 30 seconds, Husband said.

Moreover, there’s no data that shows that two-person crews are safer, he stated.

“It’s mystifying to me that Pennsylvania is thinking of mandating the number of people in the cab (of freight trains), while it’s a leader in the development of autonomous vehicles,” Husband said.

There should be a national study to find out for sure whether a one-person freight cab is just as safe, said committee member Ed Neilson, D-Philadelphia.

For now — while corporate shareholders may like the idea of saving labor costs with single-person cabs — “I don’t want to trust my neighbors’ lives” to such a configuration, said Neilson, whose home city was the site of an Amtrak crash in May 2015 that killed eight and injured 200.

White proposed the bill not so much to be definitive, but “so we could have the conversation” on the merits, she said.

The Federal Railroad Administration withdrew its two-person cab proposal in May because studies haven’t shown two people make operations safer, according to an agency notice in Federal Register.

Before the decision, the agency took written comments — 1,545 in favor of two-person cabs, 39 in favor of cabs with only one.

Most of those favoring two spoke as individuals and most of those were current or former train crew members, according to the FRA.

One talked of having saved the life of a person in an ambulance that was stuck at a grade crossing by descending from the cab and, working with the engineer, separating the train to let the ambulance through, thus getting the victim treatment sooner than would have been possible otherwise, according to the FRA.

Railroad companies, railroad associations and other organizations comprised most of the commenters in favor of two-person crews, according to the FRA. The lack of data showing that a single-person cab is hazardous makes a two-person mandate “arbitrary,” according to the American Association of Railroads, the FRA stated. The proposal for the two-person cab rule, moreover, indicates there has been a massive underestimate of ongoing industry costs for keeping two people in locomotives, according to the association. Requiring two-person cabs threatens to stifle the innovation necessary to make one-person cabs safe, according to the association. Single-person freight crews in Europe have been successful, and they can be a model for the transition here, the association said.

Still, one-person freight crews seem to be a bend or two away from showing up on local tracks, according to a June article in rail wayage.com by retired locomotive engineer and union member William C. Keppen Jr., citing a presentation by Norfolk Southern CEO James Squires.

Before railroads feel empowered to deploy one-person crews, not only will there need to be regulatory clarity in their favor, but there needs to be more implementation of Positive Train Control technology to prevent derailments and collisions caused by speeding and misplacement of trains — and favorable collective bargaining agreements, according to Keppen, citing Squires.

The FRA decision “open(s) the door” for the transition to single-person cabs, but doesn’t fully clear the way, given that the FRA action doesn’t constitute a federal standard per se, and given that “the clock is running on the current administration in Washington,” Keppen indicated.

As for state laws that would require two-person crews, like the one proposed by White, the FRA itself has announced its intention to skirt those through pre-emption, if a national standard is adopted, Keppen wrote, citing Squires.

The FRA would seem to be able to enforce such a pre-emption, as the Federal Railroad Safety Act of 1970 allows state standards to contradict federal ones only if they don’t “create an undue burden on interstate commerce, (are) not incompatible with federal standards, and (are) necessary to eliminate or reduce local safety hazards,” Keppen wrote.

The collective bargaining portion of the fight won’t be easy for the railroads, however, Keppen predicted.

Train crew size — which has gone from five to three to two over the years — has traditionally been worked out through collective bargaining, Husband told the committee.

“(But) labor is preparing to fight those battles to the death,” Keppen wrote.

“Railroads might eventually prevail and win the crew consist wars, but it promises to be a long and bloody fight,” he wrote.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.