OK, since George W. Hilton retired, I think that Fred Frailey is the best railroad writer.
Here’s the best line from his writing in October, 2007 Trains:
“The railroad has a few tricks to help make reliablity easy. One is that expectations are spelled out in the employee timetable, which contains the starting time, running time, connections, destination blocks, and frequency of every through freight train.”
Glory Haliluya*!*
Praise The Lord and Pass the Ammunition! But it’s not a trick.
No railroad can expect to meet quality standards if they don’t tell the train crews and dispatchers what the quality standards are. I was riding our hotest train, #51 Intermodal, though Mississippi when a brakeman looked and me and asked: “Does this train have a schedule?”
Son of a Bitch! Big Time. The crew and dispatcher can’t keep the train on time if they don’t know what “on time” is.
I went back to Chicago and tried to get the hillbilly operating department to actually put the train’s schedules in the employee timetable. You’d a thought I’d ask them to flap their arms and fly. “Schedules?”
“We don’t need no stinking ‘Schedules’” They were quoting ABS rules to us. They didn’t have a clue. The IC has proven itself to be a very profitable railroad on its own part and now as a part of CN.
But those guys that were running it back then couldn’t understand why they had to establish a quality standard that said a train had to go by Centrailia at 10:04 PM if it was going to deramp in Memphis by 7:00 AM the next morning.
I agree with your assessment of Fred Frailey. The best today, if not ever.
The FEC article was a gem, finished it last night. Just a delight to read. The CEO down there (name escapes me) has sure done quite a job on that line. I question the logic of investing into the NS line to Macon or Atlanta. Are the margins there on intermodal to justify the investment.
Also, dont you think they could bump their intermodal rates from J’ville to Miami up a bit considering the trucking companies’ operating expenses between those points.
It will be interesting to see what Fortress does with this and Rail America. It seems like they did well with the FEC purchase, RA…dont know.
Nice to hear from you again, Greyhounds, it had been a while.
I agree with your assessment of the article. Although I am very concerned about Fortress Investments’ ownership. Ever hear of the term “pump and dump?” If that is their plan, in the non-illegal sense of course, I think the method for pumping it up prior to going public might not be beneficial to the FEC’s long-term outlook.
Then again, you never know. Maybe their plan is to dump a lot of money into it and let the market watch what it grow.
I hope it is not the former.
Gabe
P.S. With regard to schedules, do you think it is a lot more difficult for a bigger, more complex line like the IC to adhere to schedules as compared to the FEC? It seems like all of those branch lines and numerous yards would be much more difficult to coordinate. The obvious rejoinder is that the IC did eventually go to scheduled railroading. But, it cut SEVERAL of its branchlines in the process and even seemed to turn some business away. In contrast, the FEC seems to be much more of a one-line operation with the two endpoints of the line contributing most of its traffic.
I have to agree that Frailey is one of the very best at doing feature type stories on the here and now of the major railroads.
With regard to the ICG and train schedules in the 1970’s, there was a tendency of the Operating Department to run the trains a bit more to operating convenience than to adherance to a given schedule. At the time, there was no expectation that “scheduling” would get any where near today’s state of the art. What seems to prevail now are operating plans that specify just what trains will be used to get a car or cars from one point on the railroad to another. I think what Greyhounds means is that the named regular freight trains had no enroute schedule times. 51 and 52 were the daily TOFC trains between Chicago and Memphis. Origin departure and destination arrival times were advertised, but generally no times were given for any intermediate points.
Generally speaking, the IC only “named” or numbered freight trains running on what were the main lines of the day. Secondaries and branches got covered by locals with running times pretty much subject to the amount af work for any given day.
I would agree that the FEC has a relatively simple system compared to the class I’s, but it still takes some good thought to get the operation to a high level of efficiency.
But we were trying to get them to schedule just the time sensative intermodal trains. You can schedule a railroad freight system, you just have to want to do it. There were some exceptions, but most of our operating guys just didn’t understand the need to deliver on time. (I’m serious about that. They didn’t have a clue. I’m also serious about the exceptions, such as Jerry Bumpas, who must have gone through some tough times trying to do things right.)
I’ll vent and give two examples.
Telephone books were “hot freight”. The phone company didn’t want people calling directory assistance back then so they held the books until the last moment to get all the new numbers included. But, they didn’t get paid for the Yellow Pages advertising until the books were delivered and they had a substantial work force standing around ready to distribute the books.
So we needed to be “on time” with the phone books.
And one cold Friday I was on the phone with R.R. Donnely at Dwight, IL finalizing how many New Orleans phone book loads they’d have at the Kankakee ramp Saturday for Monday delivery. The last thing I did before I left Friday was take a note to our “operating guy” with the number of loads and tell him
Ah, this brings back warm fuzzy feelings about the IC in the 70’s when I would watch the daily locals between Mattoon and Evansville.
Once or twice a year I would go to Effingham and watch the heavy action. I did get one picture of a northbound pig train at Tolono, but most of the trains were manifests such as CN-1, CBP and GC-6. Also CS-1 and BC-4. Also some Inland Steel coal trains. Good times.