Saftey Certified

      Its the beginning of the year and time to redo all of our qualifications and certifications.  In the signal department this means heading to your regions safety certification conference, and thats where I have been all week. We actually hold these bi-annually and  ours is held in Hagerstown, MD.  I am part of the Eastern Region which includes parts of the Con-rail, B&O, C&O and RF&P properties.  It is nice to see some faces you haven't seen in a while and get the chance to see and hear some of the issues and solutions other teams have come up with.
     In past years, this has been called death by power point, you would sit there for 3 days watching 8 hours of power point slides and listen to rule after rule.  It was pretty hard to take, and pretty hard to stay awake some days.  This year they did a pretty good job teaching us some good information and,having some hands on stuff and keeping us awake.  Sure there was still the required FRA training, but they even tried their best to spice that up the best they could.  So hats off to the guys that tried get us educated and keep us entertained at the same time.  This year we had no draft dodging speaker that had so many concussions he wasn't coherent.  Things also ran pretty smoothly, last year was a cluster, late classes, no one real sure what was going on, this year we had a few classes run over but for us we were doing pretty good
     But of course that's not what makes this job fun.  Put 300 signalman in the same place and you are bound to have a lot of fun.  Sadly for you folks, not to much of that will make the Internet.  The best I can do for you is put up a picture of the killer heels of choice this year.  The rest is up to your imagination.