My uncle worked for a large railroad in Chicago, in their switching office. "You need a train engineer because that means someone not in management or the switching office is the guy whose hands were physically on the machine right before poor Mrs. Milly died. There is no other purpose to have them on the train. People like to think that having eyes on the ground stops accidents, because they think eyes on the ground stops physics, but if you are on the train track and the engineer can see you then physics says you better get off the train track because neither the engineer nor anyone save God Himself will stop the train from reaching your current location."

The train engineer's job is to hit the start button when the switching office says to. It's drive-by-wire, and he's not only just a wire, he's statistically speaking the most bug prone wire on the train.

He also had some sharp words for management on the topic of encouraging engineers to think they were responsible for accidents, claiming that it caused preventable suicides after unpreventable ones.