Interesting story about schedule adherence...

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neroden

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Fellow named TAW on trainorders has a very interesting personal story from his time at BNSF, which may help explain what's causing most of the class Is to routinely delay Amtrak. It seems to be a cultural issue which runs quite deep. They *could* run Amtrak on time, but that would require a more disciplined and competent dispatching operation than they typically have....

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?4,4019935
 
We had an old adage on the good old EL: If you run your trains on time, your yards empty out. Traffic levels on the EL were falling off near its end, and that caused scheduling trouble. Later on, with Conrail, managers would see that the trains were running on time, but the trains were very short. Since labor was the single biggest budget item, they'd want to maximize tonnage, and make longer trains. That optimizes labor, but since trains had to wait for tonnage to fill out, the freight train schedules went right out the window.

The current Trains magazine talks about CSX going to a 28 hour cycle. Uh-oh - that's going to be a problem for Amtrak, which is obviously on a 24 hour cycle. The only reason CSX would do that is that it currently takes 28 hours to accumulate enough tonnage to fill out the trains. And evidently they are experimenting with distributed power to make the trains even bigger. I'm thinking that Amtrak's on-time performance on CSX will get worse.

jb
 
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We had an old adage on the good old EL: If you run your trains on time, your yards empty out. Traffic levels on the EL were falling off near its end, and that caused scheduling trouble. Later on, with Conrail, managers would see that the trains were running on time, but the trains were very short. Since labor was the single biggest budget item, they'd want to maximize tonnage, and make longer trains. That optimizes labor, but since trains had to wait for tonnage to fill out, the freight train schedules went right out the window.

The current Trains magazine talks about CSX going to a 28 hour cycle. Uh-oh - that's going to be a problem for Amtrak, which is obviously on a 24 hour cycle. The only reason CSX would do that is that it currently takes 28 hours to accumulate enough tonnage to fill out the trains. And evidently they are experimenting with distributed power to make the trains even bigger. I'm thinking that Amtrak's on-time performance on CSX will get worse.

jb
Good point. I also just read the Trains article regarding the 28-hour cycle. It never occurred to me how this would affect Amtrak. Will it be on all trains or just certain routes? I don't recall from the article which yards CSX is running this schedule from. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this shakes out, especially on single trackage.
 
Fellow named TAW on trainorders has a very interesting personal story from his time at BNSF, which may help explain what's causing most of the class Is to routinely delay Amtrak. It seems to be a cultural issue which runs quite deep. They *could* run Amtrak on time, but that would require a more disciplined and competent dispatching operation than they typically have....

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?4,4019935

Not too many people have disputed what COULD be done. The question often becomes is it WORTH it. I can't remember the name but a CSX official once declared his disdain for Amtrak's presence and flatly stated (paraphrasing) "that he'd rather pay the fines for delaying Amtrak since he probably makes more than the incentives."
 
After I mentioned that CSX is supposed to be going to a 28 hour cycle, it occurred to me that this might actually IMPROVE Amtrak performance on CSX, IF CSX has been using no effective schedules at all. At least things will work out favorably every 6 days.

jb
 
Interesting that TAW's post ended the discussion on TO. (I guess people don't like having their favorite myths dispelled.) But it also, IMO, lends credence to TAW's claims.
 
The current Trains magazine talks about CSX going to a 28 hour cycle. Uh-oh - that's going to be a problem for Amtrak, which is obviously on a 24 hour cycle. The only reason CSX would do that is that it currently takes 28 hours to accumulate enough tonnage to fill out the trains. And evidently they are experimenting with distributed power to make the trains even bigger. I'm thinking that Amtrak's on-time performance on CSX will get worse.
It would be madness for CSX to do this with the intermodals. UPS, FedEx, JB Hunt, they all want their containers delivered in a specified number of *days*.

Of course, recent CSX management is not known for sanity.

After I mentioned that CSX is supposed to be going to a 28 hour cycle, it occurred to me that this might actually IMPROVE Amtrak performance on CSX, IF CSX has been using no effective schedules at all. At least things will work out favorably every 6 days.
And of course there's this! If the 28-hour schedule is a replacement for no schedule at all...

Not too many people have disputed what COULD be done. The question often becomes is it WORTH it. I can't remember the name but a CSX official once declared his disdain for Amtrak's presence and flatly stated (paraphrasing) "that he'd rather pay the fines for delaying Amtrak since he probably makes more than the incentives."
One point made by TAW is that this bad attitude is not fact-based, and a second point is that the bad attitude is harmful to the freight business. In short, yes, it's worth it for CSX stockholders, but try to convince the lower-level railroad employees who are used to "playing it by ear" to run a scheduled railroad, and you have trouble.
Disclosure: I own shares in CN and Berkshire Hathaway. I sold my CSX stock years ago due to their management's disconnect from reality, during the period when they were, for no comprehensible reason, selling off most of their growing, high-margin intermodal businesses (which have done very well for their buyers).
 
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FWIW TAW's archived posts at TrainOrders are worth spending time on. He posts a lot on the Railroader's Nostalgia board.
 
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