Everything perpetually seems to stand still in railroad yards. But, if there were a constant motion of freight cars, those cars could reach their destination whoppingly fast, saving much wasted money.
In hard economic times, such money savings could keep workers on the payroll. When the economy improves, the retained workers would be available to handle the traffic crush that will inevitably arise.
Whaaaa?
This could be interesting
Econ 101 of railroading…Shippers load cars to be delivered to consignees. Railroads get paid to haul the cars from shipper to consignee. If shippers don’t ship; railroad don’t haul. Railroads don’t haul, they don’t need the people that facilitate hauling the shippers product.
Your observation that 'Everything perpetually seems to stand still in railroad yards.', highlights your lack of understanding of what is required to handle the business of moving shipments from thousands of shippers to thousands of consignees; all at the same time and in a organized manner at minimum total cost.
Whereas running more trains is the ultimate answer to yard congestion, it is not the answer to what you’re thinking. The cars aren’t standing still because of a lack of people to move them. I’m not sure how long you’re standing and watching some stationary cars, but they’re probably either being inspected, waiting their turn to be classified with facilities that are already at optimal size for efficiency (we only hump one train at a time!), or waiting for their scheduled trains to depart. Or perhaps you’re looking at a storage or heavy-bad-order track.
Increasing trains to handle the same amount of traffic would probably be a bigger waste of money than letting them sit for the hours it might take for their scheduled train to be ordered and readied for departure. When the traffic returns (and I agree with you that that’s inevitable), added trains will be run, and furloughed employees recalled. Yard jobs will be put on to build more trains, and perhaps some trains will be blocked to avoid yards that used to switch them out. Most railroads are now wisely spending the money to expand and improve their infrastructure, so they’ll be ready.
P.S. To say that “Everything perpetually seems to stand still” is suggesting that at least a couple of regular, respected posters on this Forum aren’t doing their jobs. You really don’t want to go there.
+1
BC - expand on your job a little for me. A train comes into Proviso, you break it down so cars are sent on to their destination. (Trying to be brief) - So in an 8 hour time period, how many cars humped on average? (remember watching North Platte and it seemed they went through a lot of cars in a couple of hours)
I would assume you may have some through freights - like unit grain trains, but do you have any other trains that don’t need “sorting” - just keep going? And are those routed around the outside of the yard like some our coal trains are here?
As for things looking like they are standing still, this is like me watching a BO set out on a coal train. I am only seeing the head end or 1/4 of the train. The real work is being done back in the yard where I can’t see it. Ergo, it looks like trains stand or only move a little in a 30-60 min time period.
There’s two approaches to the observation you made. One approach is to ask questions and gain insights. If history is any guide, the response would be generous and thorough. The other approach is to pronounce that the industry is wasting money, implicitly through its ineptness. The response to that approach, if any is made, will probably be hostile. I am left scratching my head why anyone would want to take the second approach, unless their idea of fun is to make other people angry.
RWM
Greetings CShaveRR,
What I am alluding to is way, way beyond present methodologies, so does not reflect poorly on anyone. The perspective spoken about embraces “sorting facilities” in lieu of “yards.” Thus, arriving railcars would depart within just a few hours.
That would require operating more trains, with more crews, more locomotives, and more main-track capacity, and much higher main-track maintenance costs. Against which there would be some savings in car hire. In round numbers, if one entire day of car hire was saved at $25 per car, the total possible savings in your plan is $2,500, against an increased cost of about $5,100. (Three additional train-service crews at a cost of about $1,200 each, an additional locomotive cost of about $900 (4 units for 4 trains, 1 each, instead of 2 units for one train, an additional fuel cost of $300, an additional track maintenance cost of $300 (less time for maintenance-of-way, and so forth. ) I haven’t figured in the cost of the additional sidings for all the new meet-and-pass events.
So why would anyone want to do that?
RWM
SJ, we try to hump over 600 cars per shift. A lot of factors can reduce this figure, but we’ve also gotten close to 900 on a good day. If the receiving yard is light, we’re switching cars that arrived and were inspected earlier in the shift (a couple of times recently, we had trains come in by 11:00 and they were over the hump by the time I left at 2:30–rare, but doable). North Platte has the advantage of having a pair of hump yards.
Yes, we have coal trains, grain trains, perishable trains (a few), sulfur trains, ethanol trains, auto trains (and intermodal, which are handled a bit differently), all of which go past the “business” portions of our yard. Some of the incoming manifest trains set out blocks of cars that are forwarded on the appropriate trains for classification elsewhere. We also have manifest trains that run between North Platte and our eastern connections.
This whole discussion reminds me of something we saw here a while back–a sort of turntable within a turntable, with everything spinning every which way. I’m sorry, but somewhere, somehow, reality has to set in, and our system works pretty well at what I assume is not an unreasonable cost to the company.
From this and your subsequent post, it sounds like you have a specific plan. Why don’t you lay it out for us? The objective of saving money is always appealing, but it is meaningless without a workable method.
A rose by any other name is still a rose. What you’re calling a sorting facility sounds like a yard to me. What am I missing?
First: Let’s not be too quick to jump to premature conclusions here and take offense unnecessarily from the observations and questions in the posts by the person who started this thread, croteaudd (at least not yet). Please understand that I’m not being condescending or adopting his (her ?) viewpoint. Instead, I’m sensing that the original poster may well be a person for whom English is not his (her) original language. While this topic and the comments may well be provocative (see below), I’m willing to bet that his selection of words was not deliberately intended have that effect. I’m no linguist, but there’s something about the choice of words, phrasing, and sentence structure here that’s indicating that to me. I have some number of relatives and acquaintances from eastern Europe, and that’s where I’m thinking this poster is from. So let’s cut him some slack on our interpretations from the nuances of his wording, at least until his intent and purpose becomes clearer.
Second: I quite agree with piouslion1 and CNW 6000 that “This could be interesting” - with the understanding that they mean in an intelllectual sense (not like schoolboys sensing a pending fight in the yard). What the poster seems to be saying is essentially what John G. Kneiling said many times over - rightly or wrongly - over during his career in Trains, but now with the added aspect of keeping more railroaders employed during the present economic downturn. This is a topic I’m interested in, so this post may be one of those where "There but for the grace of God go I . . . ".
Third - the substantive merits of this (RWM’s $ figures above): The savings side seems easy enough - "[O]ne entire day of car hire . . . saved at $25 per car, the tot
Paul - many years ago when Carl and I were both fairly new to the forums, he commented on going to his mother’s house for a visit. I teased him (think Smothers Brothers) that Mom always did like him best. It grew from there.
The real inside joke was that we had never even met at that point. We have several times since then. Now the joke is that I am his little sister, even tho I am older than he.
And then there is cousin Ed in Houston…
You’re making this far too hard, Paul.
The problem as stated is “cars dwell too long in yards.” But that is a red-herring metric that only approximates, often highly inaccurately, the true problem, which is “total car trip cycle time.” The RPM website measures car dwell because it’s a daily metric one can use to gauge system congestion on any given Class 1. When the RPM website came out, a lot of us groaned because we knew it would fuel the desire of people to misuse it for purposes not intended nor appropriate, such as presuming they could use it to analyze a complex system with a simple tool, kind of like doing needlepoint with a sledgehammer. And that is precisely what has happened, and as a result we have all sorts of opinions by newly minted experts being used to justify all manner of poor investment and public policy decisions.
There are only two solutions to reducing dwell time and car-cycle time: depart the cars more quickly from the yard, or avoid the yard altogether. The first solution requires more frequent departures, which requires smaller trains. For example, if the yard generates 100 cars a day for Chicago, and those cars trickle in over 24 hours, and one 100-car train a day is run, the cars dwell 12 hours on average. If the yard wants to reduce the dwell time to 3 hours on average, then it needs to run a train every 6 hours, which will be 25 cars long. 4x as much trains, 4x (or more) the train-mile cost (because you’ll need a lot more sidings for meet and pass events), but we’ve saved 18 hours of car hire per car, on average.
The second solution requires trains that do not stop for sorting, which ALSO requires smaller trains. There is no way around this, except (1) demarketing those pesky customers, or (2) slashing rates and getting a huge increase in volume. And guess what, those are options that have been done, too.
The #1 way to reduce costs at a railroad is run bigger trains.
Paul, it’s neither “inside” nor a joke. SJ has always displayed all of the attributes I would like to have had in a little sister–smart, witty, and curious and excited about something that means a lot to a big brother. It didn’t take me long for me to “adopt” her. We hit it off quite well when we met, and our respective spouses get along, too. Cousin Ed and I are both railroaders (and yes, Sis and I have met him in person, too). Meanwhile, I’ve been getting along a lot better with my little sisters in real life since adopting SJ. Don’t know what that says, but I’m not knocking it.
Would it be safe to assume that the industry has addressed this issue (indirectly) by the movement of a significant portion of the freight handled to intermodal?
There seems to be much higher frequencies of O/D movements via intermodal than carload.
I asked the same question years ago (regarding more frequent departures) and it was pointed out the carload volume between most points is quite small.
It is very similar to the airline hub and spoke system.
ed
RWM -
“Making this far too hard”, eh ? Why is it I seem to have heard that before . . . . [:-^]
But thanks for the - as always - informative and thought-provoking post. There’s some aspects to this that I know I don’t yet understand, and you’ve definitely touched on some of them. Let me digest this a little further, and see if I can either come to a better understanding of it all, or ask / comment with something more considered, rather than denial, repetition, mere rebuttal, etc.
Mookie & Carl - OK, thanks for confirming that. I thought that might be the case, but like I said, you had me going for a while looking for members that I didn’t recognize but whom each of you thought had something to add on this . . . and in view of your participation here, if you thought it was worthwhile, then I thought I’d better see what it was. Take care - stay warm & dry.
To be continued (I think). Best regards to all.
Precisely.
The intermodal business model actually has more O-D pairs than the carload model, but the railway itself doesn’t truly seem them because it’s portion of the model only looks at the ramp to ramp O-D pairs. And even with that, the volumes in any given ramp O-D pair can be excruciatingly low. I recall a visit to one of the big Chicago terminals where the terminal superintendent pointed out two five-packs holding 20 containers arriving from Fresno, and remarking that most days those 20 containers had 15 to 16 destinations long east. He used this as illustration why the vaunted steel-wheel interchange through Chicago that a lot of experts say the railways should do, is in reality, not an economical solution. In other words, once you have the container off the car and on rubber, you might as well keep it there until it gets to a solid trainload heading to its destination, and use the Chicago street system to sort it all out.
(This is why so many small ramps were closed immediately after Staggers – because their volume contribution to each lane was really awful).
Similarly, I fly a lot, and when the flight is late and the attendant reads off the connecting gates, it’s interesting to see how 180 United passengers arriving Denver from Chicago can scatter into 40 or 50 connecting flights, all onesy-twosy. In other words, on any given day, the number of passengers flying, say, San Diego-Sioux