4 replies to this topic

[EllisSimon]

I'll admit it. My wife, Tracey, and I were planning to drive from Long Island to Rochester, NY yesterday to attend a special concert. Our daughter, Emma, was to sing at Rochester's famous Eastman Theatre as a member of the New York All-State Women's Choir. But reports Monday of a pending snow storm affecting Upstate New York prompted us to travel by rail instead, going up on #63, the Toronto-bound Maple Leaf , and returning on #284, the morning train from Niagara Falls.

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The full report with comments about CSX dispatching can be read here.

Edited by RailHaRRy, 07 December 2003 - 08:27 PM.

[ICGsteve]

Ellis, I am becoming convinced that a lot of the problems we see in train movements has to do with bad dispaching. PArt of the problem has to do with huge dispaching centers where a dispacher is controlling a stretch of railroad that he/she knows liitle about first hand, and also because both managers and dispachers have become technology dependent. The railroad does not see any reason to put a lot of effort into developing seasoned pro's, and dispachers are leary of overriding computer generated movement plans. In the old days you had salty dogs with thirty years on the division managing dispaching and mentoring the younger guys. They would come against a problem and remember something similar that happend years ago and how the solution worked or did not, and put their grey matter to work on a plan. I think that the same intellectuall drain that took place at NASA and was partly to blame for the latest orbitor loss also is partly to blame for the inability or railroads to work around problems and keep the trains moving. My hunch is that the best dispachers quickly tire of nitwit managers and retire, and that the people taking over never had the opportunity to fully develop their chops.

Edited by ICGsteve, 05 December 2003 - 02:03 AM.

[EllisSimon]

Dispatching is just part of the story. The real issue is that railroad managers, in their never-ending quest to please investors, are continually trying to jam more traffic over a shrinking infrastructure. In the case of the Chicago line, there aren't enough crossovers to enable Amtrak trains to pass slow-moving freights. Even if there were, I doubt it would have helped much on Wednesday since there would have been no place to put our train on the Utica - Amsterdam leg. We had five freights heading in the opposite direction and they pretty much clogged the westbound track. I agree that decentralized dispatching is more effective than these giant dispatch centers 1,000 miles or more from the action. However, according to one of the conductors on my train, the Chicago line isn't dispatched from Jacksonville; at least not yet. Seems other merger integration costs have put this on the back burner. There's another problem with Jacksonville. You may recall that CSX virtually shut down when a hurricane prevented dispatchers from getting to work. OTOH, had the center been located in the Northeast the same dispatchers might have had problems due to the snow storm we're having. The real answer is redundancy, something that seems to be missing from railroading today.

[ICGsteve]

I think you are almost making my point-since everyday on the railroad is crisis managment because too many trains are on the line, the railroad really feels the loss of the seasoned dispatchers who could work around problems and get the line moving. I have been in Arizona almost five years now, aften traveling I-10 next to the ex SP LA-Elpaso line, and far to often I find everything at a near standstill. Most of the trains are long haul, the old problem of unreliable motive power (in the last decade of the sp) is history, the loads, lengths and the grades are known, so the line should never be so congested that everyhting is standing for two hundred miles waiting for one train to clear, yet that seems to happen fairly regularly. It almost has to be because dispachers are screwing-up. BTW- when a situation develops that has too many trains and not enough places to park them, or trains that are too long to park, it is still a dispaching error. The major terminals must control the mix of trains that they send out so that they do not clog the line hundreds of miles down stream, yet that seems not to happen. I am not sure that the problem is tons per day, but rather that freq's and lengths are not managed for the realities of the lines that they will be traveling on. While capacity is a problem, the current capacity seems often poorly managed.

[EllisSimon]

It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If you send the trains out of the yard you clog the main line. If you keep them in the yard you clog the yard. UP is probably inclined to do the former because of the problems they faced in Houston during the integration of the SP. That's why I say blame has to go higher up than the dispatcher; all the way to the CEO's office. If CEOs were more concerned with improving operations and less with the size of their bonuses these problems wouldn't occur.