The engineer was nearby

[bappy7]

Now that was a job. Train driver. You were the boss of a mighty means of transport. You sat at the head of an enormous horizontal mass, always with a view of the converging rails in front of you, which never touched, twinkling level crossings whose beams always bowed for you as you passed, the responsibility of bringing hundreds of people to their work or to their joys or sorrows. And when it froze, you could really make a difference.

Last Saturday's Volkskrant newspaper nicely describes what was expected of the driver. You brother cell phone list approached a frozen switch to within a few meters, slowly let the train drive onto it, checked whether the switch was set correctly and then drove on. Often the frost problem was already solved. Where necessary, the driver took out the crank and switched the switch. And if it really had to be done, he took the gas burner to thaw the switch. A varied job with responsibilities.

It's different now. A driver is from NS and the track is from ProRail. When it snows and freezes, the driver is only allowed to do two things: stop the train and start the procedure. The procedure that prescribes that ProRail is called. ProRail calls one of the permanent contractors, the contractor calls the mechanic, the mechanic gets in the car and gets stuck in the kilometers-long traffic jams because it is snowing and freezing.