What's the big deal? I worked for Penn Central as a brakeman back in the early seventies and have lost a train or two during my tenure there. One payday the conductor and i go to a local bar near the train yard that we had dropped some cars off at and proceeded to drink our lunch between rounds of pool. After a couple of hours we go back to get our engine and it's gone. We had to get a track crew to take us back to our yard in Pennsy. They found the engine three days later on a side track with a thoroughly inebriated engineer.

Another time we where taking a train up state and had to round a mountain with two hundred cars attached to the engines, earlier we had a card game and drinking contest in the caboose while we where waiting for some of our load to be ready. When you rounded a mountain like that the sightline from the rear, middle and front of train had to be maintained so the brakemen rode the cars holding on to the ladders so you could relay signals from the front and rear of the train. Problem was the engineer decided that was the time to lie down on the engine floor and take his afternoon nap, while the conductor had the luxury of sleeping in a bunk in the caboose. The 18 year old brakeman having no clue as to what was going on just hung on for quite a few miles until the train came to an stop.