With railroad computer system virtually connected; do paper waybills still
travel with the carload? With the computerization of waybills does any
physical document travel with a container or carload?
Back in the last millenium a bill of lading would generate a paper waybill, at
the origin station, that would travel with the load (with car/yard cards)
throughout the car’s journey to the destination station of the consignee.
Does HiWide, HAZMAT, Unload one side, Do not hump, or ? require them?
Slightly off topic …
What happened to the “Open & Prepaid Stations” book?
Paper waybills no longer accompany a manifest or carload type rail shipment. I’ll defer to someone else concerning waybill boxes on intermodal trailers or cans but, waybills are not carried in the cab.
Conductors have a paper wheel report listing their train and highlighting any hazmat but, no thick sheaf of waybills.
The Open & Prepay is still available either on a disk or via web subscription. For the last 8-10 years I worked, our rail fleet management program carried a subscription to electronically access both the Open & Prepay as well as UMLER.
Since “COMPUTERS” have now enshrined themselves in the Business (and Railroad) Worlds. Their presence, currently, as well as generationally; ‘Devices’, seem to be everywhere. Why not in, on, and around, the railroads?
This Forum has posters, who are retired, and currentlt employed by the railroads. They should be able to testify how important they have become to keeping the railroads running and fluid. Operationally, as well as to the other specific railroad crafts.
Back in the middle 80’s when Baltimore was constructing its subway system and constructing a subway tunnel under Baltimore Street in downtown Baltimore the contractors cut the main electrical and communication cables that supplied power and communications to the B&O Building which, at the time, housed both the computers and headquarters level supervision of the Chessie System (at the time beyond a couple of demonstration projects - CSX was just a corporate name - Chessie System and Seaboard System were separate operating entities.) The Chessie System corporate Car and Train Management computers lost approximately 3 days of transactions as the field locations were not able to send or receive data from the headquarters computers. Ultimate cost ???
About 1994 or 95 a virus somehow was entered the CSX Main Frame computer system - the virus (to my knowledge) on affected the communication links between the Main Frame and remote computer systems that communicated data too and from the Main Frame ie. the Computer Aided Dispatching System. The effect of the virus manifested itself with CADS, busying up the Comm Links to the Main Frame until the CADS would crash. CADS would be rebooted, run a short period of time and crash again. The repeated crashing l
When the utility I worked for built a new data center, and when I was delegated the task of contracting with the telephone company for communication circuits between the new site and the Hq, I planned for totally diverse routes with service from two different cental offices at each end. This incurred extra costs. A couple of years later, one of the bell systems major tandem central offices* had a fire that caused a loss of communications for a western suburb, its hospital, the police and fire and anything routed through it. Half of the subject data circuits went through it and were OOS for about a week, and the other half went through a south eastern tandem C.O. We did not have any lost data. I will never forget my department head jokingly saying to me, “You didn’t have to burn the C.O. down to prove your point”. Subsequently, I was involved with installing our own fiber optic ring** network which can survive a cut fiber cable and has almost total diversity. Planning for operations that must operate without fail is expensive but the alternative may cost a corporation its existance.
*Tandem C.O.s are hubs that other C.O.s connect to like a hump yard and local yards. Long distance carriers connect to tandem C.O.s.
**Ring architecture has communications going around the ring both way and if node A is talking to node D via B & C, and the ring is A, B, C, D, E, F, & A. The path will switch (in nanoseconts) from node A to node D via F, & E.
I was in the SP “TOPS Control Center” in the 70s & Early 80s. The TOPS (and TCC) Mainframes in San Francisco. Before I started the SP “rule of thumb” was a computer outage of 20 minute was “do-able”, (preferably with notice); after that major yards had to decide when to start sending mudhops to walk the yard. While “surprise” outages did occur; longer than 20 minutes outages were rare.
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake SP communications remained up (which also allowed the city’s telephone system to remain up). The TOPS & TCC computers were back online (I think) before 7:00 PM. SP’s VM System was the next system back online. This ran it’s PROFS/Office system, which provided corporate email.
Sunday mornings from 0045 to 0200 CSX routinely shut down the Main Frame for weekly updates - all locations pulled whatever data they would need to continue working through the outage prior to the system going down. From the CADS perspective the Train Order Printers would be down, however, each location that had a Train Order Printer also had a Fax machine and the Train Messages could be sent from CADS over the CSX Technofax system - each Train Order Printer address also had a fax telephone number associated with it and accessing it was a option in the screen Train Dispatchers used to send Train Messages from CADS.
A issue that developed over time was when various field locations were placed in new Area Codes as the the expansion of cell phones changed the boundry’s of Area Codes. For the most part one didn’t find out about the changed area code until you tried to send to the ‘old’ number and the fax would not go through.
We still require a Paper trail for our billing on all shipments. So yes paper Bill of Ladings are required and are still mandated for all hazmat shipments on OTR trucks. Why that way when the driver is out of the truck the BOL can be put in an easy to see place like in the windshield so if there is an emergency that requires action with the load they know exactly WHAT they are dealing with. It saves time and can save a freaking life knowing that your dealing with something that might explode if it got wet and your wanting to throw water on it.
Railroad ‘Train Documents’ in addition to a listing of car standing in train order also contain the Emergency Data sheets for each of the kinds of HAZMAT in the train a well as the car numbers of each of the different forms of HAZMAT that are in the train. The Conductor is required to keep his ‘Train Documents’ up to date with any pickups and/or set offs the train has made and make suitable information available to Emergency Responders when necessary.
Real dumb question. Fax machines are mention in this discussion. So are the locomotives equip with fax machines to receive orders or any other train communications? If so, is it the train crews responsibility to add paper and toner? Always see references to fax machines so got to ask. Also, can the train crews fax their GrupHub lunch orders from the same fax machine? Thanks everyone.
We stopped getting all the emergency response info with our train lists. All conductors are supposed to have the current orange book Tree mentioned. We are to refer to it for the emergency information.
No faxes yet, but mandatory directives (track bulletins dealing with temporary slows or grade crossing signal failures and track warrants) can be sent via PTC. Verbal authorities, such as, for entering controlled track (CTC, etc) or passing a signal displaying stop can also be sent via PTC. Some of them need to be read back to the dispatcher, some can just be acknowledged that the crew received them.
On the PTC screen. You have to leave the operating screen (the one with the track segment map, signal locations, etc) to access the various message/authority and or track bulletin screens.
While both the engineer and conductor have their own screen, only the engineer’s screen has the working buttons. The conductor can’t access a mandatory directive without the engineer changing to the proper screen. The conductor is to copy on paper the directive sent via PTC. There is no requirement to being stopped while doing so. Leaving the operation screen means not being able to see or acknowledge an unforseen status in PTC. We’ve discussed this amongst ourselves at union meetings and are waiting to hear from higher up if we should start stopping before taking a mandatory directive in this manner.