Eli5: The train is on a track that determines where it will go, so what does the Engineer do?
In: Technology
You need to understand that the weight of the train is massive. Therefore speeding and slowing it down is a massive task too. It is quite a big task while going level but when you go uphill or downhill it becomes a stressful thing very fast. If you accidentally stop while going uphill you may have to go down all the way to try again. It might become impossible to run the train from where it stopped. You have to control your speed on going downhill to not overspeed the train while not heating up the braking equipment or running out of compressed air. Also there can be malfunctions on the trains systems that can need manual intervention. For example if a compressed air line between two carriage is broken for any reason the train would do a complete emergency stop and would release the brakes until air pressure is up again.
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