Was this the reason Southern and N&W preferred long hood forward operations?

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Reading this today and saw this quote.

It's an interesting theory that I like better than "crew safety".

In order to save money on these claims, some railroads got creative. One solution was to equip locomotives with dual-control stands to make them truly bidirectional with either end acting as the “front.” Though an up-front cost, it saved time in the yard and eliminated any union claims. Southern Railway’s approach to bidirectional operations was to make the short end of the unit the rear while having the engineer on the right-hand side with the long hood leading. In the event a locomotive was running in “reverse,” the engineer would be on the left side but with a short hood so his forward vision to the right side wasn’t impaired.

[lock4244]

Crew safety could have been a concern in a time when people cared about the men working under them, and not just cutting their way to higher returns for the monied types.

I always figured that initially diesels were setup for long hood forward operation on early roadswitchers as a natural orientation given the standard steal locomotive cab was behind everything but the tender. Adoption of short hood forward being a drawn out process through the 1950's and into the 1960's with roads coming to the conclusion that short hood forward made the most sense at different times.

[signalmaintainer]

Reading this today and saw this quote.

It's an interesting theory that I like better than "crew safety".

During the 1960s when DW Brosnan was Southern's top dog, yeah, running long-hood forward had nothing to do with safety. The read
reason above is most plausible. From what I gather, Brosnan disliked the operating unions, along with just about everything and everyone else.

Note what happened after the SOU-NS merger: back to short hood forward.