With all the flooding, it brings to mind a question: How do railroads typically arrange and manage detours? If the CN were to detour over the CP and then WSOR to get to Chicago, for example (don’t know if they are or not), how does railroad management work something like that out? I imagine there are basic contingency plans and the railroads know what phones to ring when problems occur, but there must be some situational planning meetings that take place to map-out a strategy. Is there a formal protocol for doing this or does a rail exec call another exec and they work it out by the seat of their pants?
What’s more - how do the crews manage the operation of a train over a foreign railroad where the crew is likely not qualified on the operating rules? Would the host road provide crews or at least a conductor?
It’s sort of like that. Railroads have been detouring over each others’ lines for more than 150 years, so there is considerable operational experience.
Contingency plans exist, but the day-to-day details are worked out by coordination of operating department officials, just like they do to interchange trains with each other. It takes work and coordination but there is nothing mysterious or careless about it.
Usually the foreign-road crews are not qualified on the home road so the home road provides a pilot who is qualified on that territory. All western railroads are GCOR railroads; while there are some differences in the GCOR for each of the Class Is (and the signal aspects and indications are different) the pilot keeps the foreign-road crew advised of that.
In other detour moves, the home road crew turns over the train to the detour road crew who will operate the train to the point where it is returned to the home road. This will normally occur where the origin of the detour and the destination of the detour cover multiple home road seniority districts. Additionally, home roads don’t like having their crews on trains that the home road is not in control of.
On this rail we run all the trains we dont pilot anything if the other railroad wants to send a train down here as they are doing we charge by the weight and distance. ( as they do us)we are running trains here that shoould be going across at hannible ,mo and some off the csx. the high water almost got us. 33.2 feet flood is 19 feet. several levys failed north of here. so far we have made it.
The amount of detouring that takes place in today’s railroad world is insignificant to the amount of detour operations that took place 40-50 years ago. The ‘redundant’ parallel routes basically no longer exist and those that do exist are operating very nearly at the lines capacity and their operational efficiency is damaged by accepting additional detour traffic.