Where are the BNSF’s dispatching locations? Was the Kansas City location consolidated into FTW? Is the New Westminster office still in Canada?
I have lost track of the locations after I retired from the BNSF in 2004.
Ed Burns
Ed:
So far as I am aware, they have the main dispatch center on the Fort Worth campus and a satellite/backup location further north at Alliance Yard. The location at Alliance was created after Covid hit in case an outbreak occurred within the main building.
I seem to recall that there was a special dispatching unit at San Bernardino to handle Cajon Pass. Anyone know about or remember that?
How did hte Texas storms affect BNSF dispatching ability?
The backup dispatching center has been around for a long time, to provide redundancy in case of a major problem at the main campus. A couple years ago, they moved everyone there for a some number of months while they renovated the regular NOC. They had moved back before Covid.
Then when Covid hit, they moved about half of the operation to the backup location, in order to spread people out and reduce transmission risk, and I believe that is still how they’re set up today.
Dan
Yes San Berdoo still has its disaptching office. From what I’ve read they handle all territory in California.
Can’t speak directly for BNSF, however, the CSX Dispatching Centers were all equipped with heavy duty ‘Uninteruptable Power Sources’ - heavy duty diesel generators with 1500 gallon fuel tanks for each generator. The equipment was tested weekly - hot, cold, rain, snow. Fuel tanks were kept within 100 gallons of full.
I doubt BNSF left their Dispatching Center to the vagarities of the PPP Texas power grid.
The problem with the dispatch centers may not be at the dispatch centers.
Any data relay site that doesn’t have similar backup power will put a chink in the armor, as they say.
I would presume that they have addressed that - there’s enough severe weather through most of BNSF’s territory that they likely would.
On a personal level, my cable service uses a booster box on a pole not far from my home. If commercial power goes out, so does the booster box, cutting my Internet even though I have a UPS on the modem and wifi here at the house…
Didn’t realize the backup location had been around that long Dan. Thank you for the clarification!
All the backup power in the world does not matter if your people cannot get to them.
I know most of the telcom ops centers have some sort of dormatory facilities as well.
When I worked for the US government, the entire data center went down. One of our UPS went down and took the others with it. Not supposed to happen, BUT it did. Mainfram computers do not like that. A week later, we were still having problems iwth them. The midrange and PC’s were fine once we brought all of them up.
During the Chessie System era, the System main frame computers were installed on the 12th Floor of the B&O Building at 2 North Charles Street in downtown Baltimore. The power feed was directly from Baltimore Gas & Electric who had their main offices in the next block North.
During the construction of the Baltimore Subway (such as it is) the main feeds to the B&O building were cut accidently by construction equipment. For whatever the reasons it took almost a week to get power restored to the computers. There was no UPS to back up the power feed. Much data was lost forever as it never got captured in the first place. The railroad operated, the back room business of the railroad is what suffered.
There is also a satellite facility in the Houston Area (Pearland IIRC) that had has it’s ups and downs after the UP meltdown and coordination between Class 1’s.
All:
Thanks for the information. Does anyone know if the New Westminster BC office is still there or did it also move to FTW?
Ed Burns
Still there with UP and BNSF dispatchers: Spring, Texas
Still there at New Westminster. The Canadians won’t allow track within Canada to be controlled by those outside the country. (I imagine there are small exceptions to this, but this is the overall reason they’re still there.) The employees became train dispatchers around 1980 or so, and prior to that the territory was handled out of the BN Seattle office (with the control operators for the CTC machine in New Westminster becoming the train dispatchers). CN took over the main line operation (from BNSF) from the Fraser River Bridge to Vancouver in 2006.
Mark:
Please call Ed Burns at 1 763 234 9306 about some people you and I worked with as this would not be proper over this reply.
NP Eddie you should PM VerMontanan your number instead of posting it here…
Good thought I should have given him my e-mail instead.
Thanks.
Ed