I know that many CSX yards were plugged when EHH first closed down their humps. I just wondered if things were moving any better now. I live close the Nashville TN. I do see a fair number of trains moving. Of course, I am looking from the outside in and I don’t have anything but anecdotal knowledge.
Absolutely not, they have been worse the last 2-3 weeks. Cars out of route by hundreds of miles. Cars sitting at Atlanta for 8-9 days, my Florida plant they shut down a week ago fo rnot switching them for over a week, almost did it again yesterday. I am losing track of al the trucks I ma running to keep plants going, having to act early on the trucks as so many are trucking to keep plants going due to CSX issues that trucks are hard to get in many places. One region in the Southeast is all gummed up, operations folks I know tell me it is the constant changes to the operating plan without sufficient fleshing out the details of how the operating plan is supposed to work is one culprit. PArking locomotives and trying to run long trains is another. Getting rid of helpers and having trains double the hill is congesting large sections of mainline.
Many of my CSX vendors are shipping rail very late as they are running out of empties due to significant delays.
Such is Eugene’s “transitory hiccups” from his circumsision railroading. We have businesses to run. We have switched a bunch of traffic and as we work out some transloads and expand some truck unloading cpacity issues at a couple plants even more traffic wil come off the CSX. Once we invest what we ned to on those logisitcal assetts, we will enter into long term contracts with the truckers and that volume will be off CSX for a good number of years to come.
Then EHH can sideline or sell more assets, furlough or fire more employees and run his “precision railroad”.
It won’t be long, and he can announce that he won’t be buying anymore engines or equipment for this dying railroad business.
Jeff
Thanks for the replies. It’s depressing to hear but thanks anyway.
CSX stock way up this morning for some reason. Funny how that is. Lately stock prices recede on good news and advance on bad news…Getting nervous now… CN on track for another record breaking quarter…may be time to sell out.
The numbers say CSX is in the ditch. Dwell is up. Train speed is down. Cars on line has increased even as business has dropped off. This is a classic congested railroad set of numbers.
The trend seems to be in the wrong direction, as well.
What we don’t know is if EHH has monkeyed with any of the measures definitions. He was not a fan of the public numbers at CN and CP. They did not publish when he was there. He can’t pull CSX out because they are mandated by the STB to publish. He CAN monkey with the definitions a bit to soften the impact of poor operations on the numbers, however.
If what we are seeing are EHH’s ‘sharpened’ numbers, heaven help us on what the REAL numbers are.
They sure are not moving through Willard, or my home rails on the Indy line. I have a friend that works for a certain railroad and he said it is a mess. The IP dispatcher just told a few to be prepared to sit for hours. They plug the yard and mains up and nothing can go anyplace!
Last Saturday, I drove two hours to Deshler to see how things were moving. They weren’t. In five hours, only two trains on the two-track ex B&O Chicago line. the whole time I was there, they were trying to get a mis-routed rack train off the Toledo line and headed to Willard. It was still on the wrong track when I left. The locals said there were 3 dead trains between Deshler and Willard.
I am of the opinion that Harrison has “Peter principled out”. His successes at CN and CP improved the railroads to a degree but there was a lot of ‘cleanup’ that had to be done after his departure from both.
Sure, getting operations on CSX’s major corridors in order and delivering to customers in the promised time is admirable. Falsh back to when he took the reins at CN and ask what customers had to say about service in that era. It became so bad General Motors trucked production to Conrail in Utica, MI to avoid dealing with his dictatorial edicts that they capitulate to his demands.
CN, and to some extent CP have recovered from his dictitorial edicts but it has taken time for both of the above to resolve the problems he created.
CSX is a ‘whole nuther kettle of fish’ with I’m not sure Harrison in competent enough to deal with.
I suppose the misrouting was EHH’s doing? That, at least, seems to be an example of either an accidental or deliberate error by someone involved with traffic - a dispatcher? It takes very little to tie up traffic, as Balt has pointed out in the past.
Schlimm do you have any clue on how logistics works at all. If a route is plugged you try and find a way around the blockage. The problem with railroads when one line gets plugged and the dispatchers start playing lets use this line they run out of crews and tracks they have in a hurry. We are both very familar with Chicago traffic patterns. Rush hour in Chicago can be a royal PITA on a good freaking day. Well say there is a major accident on the Ike inbound that is going to take 4 hours to clear up rolled over semi leaking cargo and such and those can take a while to clean up if it is hazmat. First off the Tristate is going to be jammed up to the Kennedy going north then inbound is going to be a mess on the Kennedy. If they can get in via 55 that is going to be a parking lot in a hurry from overloading. The side streets and roads are going to be jammed solid in a hurry. It happens then the delays and bad tempers happen.
That was one accident in a major city we are talking a systemwide melting down of a railroad that is starting to become paralized from their CEO’s actions and orders. They are running out of places to stash cars and trains crews are becoming tired engines are going to start to breakdown and pretty soon it will spread across the nation as interchange between CSX and the Western railroads breakdown. Why am I saying this it is so simple. CSX can’t take the cars they need to from UP and BNSF and they will have stash them someplace they will run out of places to hold them also. This meltdown unless something is done soon is going to dang near stop the railroads. I’m already seeing it on the BNSF trains I know that interchange with the CSX are shorter than normal. Their normal 12K footer that was run thru for the CSX has been cancelled until further notice due to service issues on CSX.
I hate to bring up facts in this conversation, since there seems to be so few. There was no “mis-routed” rack train. X276 was a detour because of the Sand Patch derailment, and its detour was the LONG way around. The track at Sand Patch was put back in service faster than anticipated, and it was decided to shove the track back at Deshler, and run on its normal route.
It wasn’t EHH, or a deliberate error. It was an operational decision.
The question was asked on the radio show “car talk” several years ago. If someone posts something that is clearly in error, and someone else responds with so
Thanks for the correction. I should have realized that in any “heated” situation, truth is often a casuality.
schlimm,
I had to re-read my post several times. I didn’t mention EHH, you used him to create a strawman to argue against.
n012944,
I used the word ‘mis-route’ as I thought I heard the crew say their train, “was put on the wrong track out of Toledo.” I tried to use a neutral term to make no inferrence as to intent or error, as I didn’t have any more information than that to determine the reason. I apologize if it didn’t sound that way.
Is it any wonder participation here is slower than it used to be? I can’t even say “this is what I saw and heard,” without being rebutted.
Having played in the arena for 26 years. Train ID’s are a form of shorthand for all operating personal to identify the train, what it carries and its destination.
Anyone that thinks they can just ‘throw any ID’ on a train has no concept of how the railroad works. Certain Train ID’s get operated on different route because of the ID - Train Dispatchers DO NOT REVIEW each trains ‘wheel report’ or consist to ‘know’ the actual destination of the cars in a train - they rely on the normal destination of the the Train ID to do that in ‘shorthand form’.
IF a train is going to something different than its normal blocking and work - THE CHANGES HAVE TO BE EMPHASIZED to everybody that will have any contact with the train. The changes don’t get trainsmitted by mental telepathy.
Let me ask you to remember a bit more specifically. Did the crew say ‘wrong track’ or did they say ‘wrong main’? The latter means something more specific and most certainly doesn’t imply “misrouting”.
Part of the problem here is that your post, innocently as it may have been intended, came right in the middle of a string of posts castigating Hunter Harrison for slowing down operations. It shouldn’t be surprising that people presumed your intent was to demonstrate ‘yet another’ example of that, and (in part therefore) that schlimm understood your post as criticizing EHH even though you didn’t name him implicitly. I had very much the same impression before I read your corrections.
Don’t worry about people on the forum seeming overly prone to pounce. Some people, myself included, don’t always use the niceties and netiquette we probably should in the heat of a discussion.
Hey, sorry, but nothing of the kind. It was just a (sarcastic) joke. I thought that was obvious but I’d better use the sarcasm emoji next time.