Is there such a thing as trains moving frieght on Christmas Day? I’m under the impression that that rail companies take Christmas Day off.
Last Christmas, we were in Aberdeen, S.D., on the BNSF(former Milwaukee Road) line. The amount of railtraffic was about 1/2 of a normal day, but the trains kept rolling.
I don’t know if it was system wide but on the Milw in 1978(???) they shut down the Idaho Divn for the day. A complication arose when nobody could find the key to the St Maries depot )ordinarily a 24 hr stn).
For 2005 and 2006 employees of the CN did not operate trains on Christmas Day.
Now in 2007 what the CN Management has decided for Christmas Day has not been released to the public.
Andrew
Maybe not on the GTW, but on the WC we did.
Big E
Really ? I remember working many Christmas days in N. Fond Du Lac and the only thing moving was the trains that were coming from Chicago to get the trains home. Our job was to drive around doing fire watch … making sure that the locomotives out in the yards were still running and didn’t need to be drained, including the yard engines in Neenah. On WC , nothing really moved on Christmas day . After the CN takeover there wasn’t much of a change execpt that there were more North Bound trains tying up in Fond Du Lac and more power to the house.
Has this changed since 2004 ?
What area of WC did you work in ?
I think NS just runs important unit trains.
The Long Island Rail Road and Metro North run on a holiday schedule, as does the New York City Subway.
Here on the BNSF Chicago-Aurora triple track “racetrack” we see sparse freight traffic on Christmas but there still are some that run. All kidding aside, I am sure the various railroads have crew members who are not Christians who can run the trains.
We run only the most important trains - the van trains and the Juice.
Nick
The Holiday plans for my area usually read like this: Operations will be reduced except for Automotive traffic, Coal traffic, Intermodal traffic, Grain shuttles and premium manifest traffic.
It means most yard jobs and locals do not work and a few of the lowest priority manifests don’t run. Although one Christmas Eve I was called for a MCBPR that was in the yard and marked, “laid down for the Holiday” on the line-up.
Of course anything that is to be run depends on crew availability. That in itself slows things down.
Jeff
The CN-Grand Trunk Western employees might have been working on Christmas, but there were no trains moving through Michigan in 2005 and 2006.
Andrew
On the TPW shortline. There were only 2 jobs working. one was the Yard switcher. His one job was to make up the Z train, and then get the heck out and go home. The Z train was usually a train that would run at night, but if memory serves The Z train would run during the day that day with a few stops as possible. Mainly intermodal cars, and have to, and I mean absolutly have to cars for indianna.
what does being a christian got to do with it? the railroad is a 24/7 company just because i haft to work dont mean i am not a christian it means i haft to protect my job. there has been times i was called to work when i wanted to be home. and christmas was one of those times but that is railroading.
My wife is a nurse in a nursing home. They sure don’t close down for holidays. It used to be traditional for Jewish and non-religious staff to substitute for Christians on holiday duty. And vice-versa. This tradition has pretty much disappeared. There are just not enough non-Christian staffers to make it work.
My wife is a Staff Developer (training, education, and licensing) now and does not work shifts on the floor but she is expected to fill in if unexpected personnel problems occur. Scheduling around holidays is a major headache.
Jack
Railroad Holiday Operations are driven by the requirements of their customers. If a customer is operating their facility and require rail service for that operation the carrier will attempt to provide that service. Carriers formulate Holiday Plans in order to accommodate their customers; that being said, while the carriers formulate their plans, they are bound by the implementation of the BLE/UTU ‘holiday plan’ that will generally be a big variance from the company plan.
Truckers like to work hard until Chain Season and live off the fattened bank account through the lean months of the holidays starting at thanksgiving. At least that was the goal. No use being out on Christmas week 1000 miles from home spending truckstop money and hauling nothing.
I recall Thanksgiving day one year where I traveled 620 miles and didnt see another truck of any kind in the central part of the USA. Not one. (And maybe 10 cars total)
Back in the 80s as a tower op i always worked Xmas it was 20 hours pay for 8 hours work. The only traffic we would have was a couple of road trains going to their terminals.