In a round about way, crews do write rules.... at least their actions are the direct cause of rules from incidents or accidents. I have my own rule in the GCOR that was written after an injury in 2008 that was no fault of my own, BUT they wrote a rule after that to prevent anyone else from being injured the same way 
So I didn't write it, but I caused it!
You might hear the expression.... "Rules were written in blood", well many of them were.
In a Santa Fe GCOR from 1909 there was a section dedicated on how to treat an employee with an amputation and was squirting blood. It talked about how to make a stretcher, how the other employees were to load and carry the injured employee on that stretcher, and to give him a shot of whiskey every 5 minutes if there was no doctor on duty at the terminal. How do you think they came up with that process or why? It was a way of life for railroaders back then.
Of course none of that is in our current GCOR, now we have sections on electronic devices and social media 
