The problems with ‘directional running’ are really not about line of road movement…they are about terminal capacity…terminal operation is all about juggling inbound and outbound movements…doesn’t make any difference if it is a hump yard classifying cars or a intermodal terminal handling intermodal trailers/containers. Terminal, as they exist today, cannot act as holding yards to permit directional running. Secondarily, directional running can only exist over a small portion of today’s class I carriers, as their end to end route structures have more than 6 or 12 hour routes. Directional running may be appropriate for one or two subdivisions, not for a entire railroad of Class I size.
PAUL:
So with all of those changes and restrictions, how would you classify this line - is it capable of 60 - 70 MPH service, or not ?
I guess if the route is constantly fluctuating in terms of speed then it is probably not a 60-70 mph route. I mean if you can not have 20-50 mi stretches where you do not have to worry about slowing down then I would not consider the route being classified as capable of being considered 60-70 mph service. Also the number of stretches capable of such speeds should be considered as well. I am not expecting Coal or Manifest consist to be moving at these speeds but I would expect intermodal to be capable of such.
Coarse I do wonder how much speed restrictions would change if they started making smaller consists. Whoever brought that it makes a great point.
I will have to ask my friend as to why the Spruce Creek Tunnels show up as 58 mph.
Short-fast-frequent trains on D&RGW is one of those stories that captured the railfan imagination following an article in Trains (circa 1964, as I recall), and subsquently amplified, celebrated, and held up as an example to us by numerous railfan pundits. It didn’t work and was abandoned; D&RGW reverted to long-slow-infrequent trains. Under the short-fast-frequent concept, crew costs went up, fuel costs went up, and locomotive costs went up. Car hire went down a little. Revenue per car did not go up. It could not; railroads were regulated at that time! Because costs per car went up, but revenue per car could not go up, every carload of additional business attracted by the faster service (which was not much faster, nor was much new business attracted) was a carload hauled at a lower margin, in some cases at a negative mar
Interesting thoughts, RWM. But I wonder if today, shorter and faster trains would possibly be more productive if the need for such large power was also reduced. Would an SD40 like locomotive, or two, be better with 50 cars than two behemouth 7000hp units with 125 or 150 cars? What would the cost impact be on crew cost and use from the 4 and 5 man crews of the 60’s to the 2 man crews of today? Computerized traffic control, wayside dectection, today’s technologies in track and train? All could mean a different dynamic and different outcome. Even a chance to look at crew fatigue and home resting.
As for fleeting…I see a lot of back up in Binghamton these days with the new single track operation west to Owego, NY and, in reality I think, all the way to Waverly, distances of 25 and 45 miles. I will admit there is still track work being done…pick up and clean up of track 1 still in progress. There are grumblings already about the missing track for the 45 miles but I think that it is only because of the work being done. By next Spring the single track program will be in place all the way through as the interlocking is in at Owego to cross over and send everything west on 2 and is in fact being done. (What is surprising to me is that the Herzog train runs track one to pick up and clean up track 2 from the side rather than one train working one direction picking up from behind…seems to me quicker without stopping for traffic or interfearing with traffic flow in general.) Another problem here is that east of Binghamton you have two different traffic patterns, one south and east to Scranton, Allentown, or Harrisburg, the other northeast to Albany, Montreal, or New England. Westbound service for fleeting would be dependent on both feeds being in the same time frame. Add to that the 3 times a week feed from the NYS&W, too.
To begin with, I am going to call a train ‘short’ if it is under 75 cars lengths long (regardless of tonnage) and assuming proper train blocking and no distributed power.### As long as everything is working correctly, then I agree with what you say. However, when things start going wrong, the longer the train–the slower the problems get resolved; and let’s not forget to factor in weather-related delays. In addition, some operating territories are more favorable to different size trains.### I cannot see how shorter trains on the DRGW increased costs, at least in its’ mountain districts. When factoring in time needed to add/remove helpers, the cost of the additional helper crew, and the limited time on duty vs miles covered, not to mention the increased likelihood of a break-in-two, I sure do not see savings.### Additionally, the big train will have to be handled with kid gloves the entire trip due to the complexities of operating a huge train over difficult terrain. Whereas a short train can be run much quicker account less slack action and less occurrences of some cars of the train going uphill and some cars going downhill and further along in the train more cars going uphill, etc., all at the same time. Perhaps on the wide-open prairies with flat profiles and limited curvature a long h
Track/train dynamics is not my area of expertise, but comparing my manuals from the 1960s to my manuals of today, I’m not seeing much difference in the net result on track design such as superelevation, spiral length, tangency between curves, etc… I certainly am not finding any significant difference in the amount of superelevation that is required for freight trains or passenger trains for a given speed, for a given degree of curvature, for a given unbalance.
Re stopping distances. In and of itself, stopping distances matter only for wayside signal spacing on a line of road equipped with ABS or CTC. In dark territory, it matters not. (I have dispatched dark territory using manual block rules with a 60 mph maximum freight train speed, but I don’t think there is any of that left in the U.S. now) If the signals are not far enough apart for the desired maximum speeds, that can be mitigated by changing the signal aspect progression, e.g., having two hard
The cost studies we do continually demonstrate that longer trains are the way to go, as do the line-of-road capacity studies. We’ve certainly looked at short-frequent concepts. We will continue to look at short-frequent concepts. I am pretty sure after I retire in a few years that the people I’ve trained will continue to consider short-frequent concepts. It’s easy to do and the payoff if it works, compared to the cost to run these studies, is potentially enormous, so we’re not about to not turn over that stone just because we might not have done it that way before. We haven’t found one that pencilled out yet.
As to fast, we haven’t been able to demonstrate either with capacity simulations, or with real-world experience, that shorter and more frequent was able to do anything other than suck up crews and kill track capacity. It really falls apart on single-track railroads because there’s a greater frequency of meet-pass events, and those are time killers.
This is not to say that there’s no upper limit to train length. There is. Every subdivision has a sweet spot on train length versus cost versus revenue, and going off the deep end on too long is not a good idea either. Lots of eager young operating officers have
Which is why when it dropped below zero we split trains in two, as I think your road did also?
It did cost more, but like everything in railroading, a lot had to do with local conditions:
- The local contract required a day’s pay for a helper crew whether he had one push or thre
My recollection was 1968 (think I have good memory, but know it isn’t perfect), will be easy to check once Kalmbach gets the index back on-line. You did get the right decade.
Short and fast makes more sense for passengers than freight.
-Erik
For 20 or 30 years, I have been of the opinion that speed, i.e., time in transit for freight, has been a bogus issue largley promoted by United Parcel Service. But, if I can be a conspircy therorist, the concept was also pushed by my fellow bean counters who looked at the short term interest rates of the 1980’s of 15 to 25% and concluded that inventory carrying costs demanded that everything had to get to the destination faster. The argument has merits if the time is weeks versus days. But more often the issue became confused with the concept of “just in time”, which when effectively employed means how long it takes to get here is irrelevant, so long as we don’t have to stop our further processing waiting for the shipment to arrive.
Any good professional in the business of buying transportation service-traffic or transportation managers, purchasing agents, production and logistics managers, (now all known as “supply side” managers)-are very capable of planning deliveries to keep the internal operations of their businesses running smoothly. The one who is always on the phone yelling he needs to have a shipment buy 6:00am tomorrow probably should be contemplating a future career as a Walmart greeter.
As for general public consumers buying on-line, I have to wonder how meany actually know that their package arrived two days later than the advertised schedule. (I do. My my January Trains has yet to be delivered, but I am special).
Just because they are in competition with very time efficient over-the-road trucking service, railroads have to be dealing with transit times on intermodal service. While the speed of intermodal trains is a factor in the business, it appears to me that terminal operations have been recognized as the low hanging fruit. Compared to just a couple of decades ago, I suspect with improvments in terminal design, handling equipment and IT, the time to get a shipment through an
The tracks in the San Juaquin Valley from Bakersfield to Stockton is flat and pretty straight and is definetly capable of 70MPH trains. I do not know what speed Amtrak runs its trains at along this corridor to Sacramento.
[quote user=“Railway Man”]
henry6:
Another way to achieve faster freight schedules was what the D&RGW did years ago: shorter trains. Yeah, more trains, more crews, but got over the road faster, got better locomotive/equipment utilization, better crew utilization, less overtime, satisfied customers. Win/win/win/win/win situation. But bottom liners saw longer trains meant fewer trains, fewer crews, maybe only a couple fewer locomotives, and less money spent therefore higher return. But that higher return was on investment and not repeat business. Larger locomotives, larger cars, better equipment technology of course allows for longer trains, but still, I don’t think it matches fast, reliable service to the customer (who will pay for the service) nor for the equipment utilization.
[snipped out “fleeting”]
Short-fast-frequent trains on D&RGW is one of those stories that captured the railfan imagination following an article in Trains (circa 1964, as I recall), and subsquently amplified, celebrated, and held up as an example to us by numerous railfan pundits. It didn’t work and was abandoned; D&RGW reverted to long-slow-infrequent trains. Under the short-fast-frequent concept, crew costs went up, fuel costs went up, and locomotive costs went up. Car hire went down a little. Revenue per car did not go up. It could not; railroads were regulated at that time! Because costs per car went up, but revenue per car could not go up, every carload of additional business attracted by the faster service (which was not much faster, nor was much new business attracted) was a carload hauled at a lower margin, in some cases at a negative margin. You cannot lose a dollar on every carload and hope to make it up on volume. Bottom-line types – which is what railroaders are supposed
More pertinent to the topic of this thread, the “Fast and Frequent Railroad” referenced above says that back then, of the D&RGW’s 564 rail miles from Denver to Salt Lake City, 2/3 (372 miles) were posted for freight speeds of 60 MPH, and 1/4 (130 miles) for speeds up to 70 MPH (pg. 20, cols. 1 - 2).
On page 22, there’s another ‘sidebar’ - “The West Corners The Speed Market” (cols. 1 - 2), but that is based on the number of miles included in recent years in Trains’ then-annual “Speed Survey” by Donald M. Steffee. In that year’s article “Setting The Stage For Speed” in the June 1968 Trains (Vol. 28. No. 8, pp. 24 - 37), the thresholds are 50 and 55 MPH for extended distances between yards or crew change/ train service points, etc. - “Race Of The Redballs” (pgs. 30 - 32), and “Table of Aggregate MIleage” (pg. 33). In the latter, the U.S. “Freight” total for “55 MPH Or Over” was 7,185 miles for 55 “runs” = a specific train’s schedule that operated at 5 times weekly, so an indiividual route segment could have been counted or included more than once, which is of course different from the Original Poster’s question. Similarly, the U.S. Freight total for “50 MPH Or Over” was 32,083 miles for 236 “runs”.
The annual “Speed Survey” was discontinued sometime in the 1970’s, supposedly because poor track conditions were limiting the number of miles with high-speed running, as I recall. In addition, the passenger trains that were the mainstays of the Survey’s review anad reader interest had been cut drastically by the May 15 (?), 1971 advent of Amtrak, which also slowed down some of th
The CSX ‘Chicago Line’ (nee, CR/NYC Water Level Route) through Utica routinely sees 60 MPH freights, as evidenced by the reports from the Whitesboro defect detector.
But I’ve never heard anything faster, Amtrak notwithstanding.
The 2008 CSX timetable lists 50 for freight and 60 for intermodal for most of the line between Selkirk and Buffalo, with a few assorted slowdowns for stations, yards, and special features (“Big Nose Curve” at MP QM192.5 gets 45).
Dewitt Yard garners 30, and Rochester 45 for through trains.
Paul, I well remember the article
“The Fast and Frequent Railroad - An operating ratio isn’t necessarily holy writ” by Frank E. Shaffer, Trains, September 1968, Vol. 28 No. 11, pgs. 20 - 23 inclusive. The financial and statistical comparisons in the ‘sidebar’ “D&RGW must be doing something right” at the top of pg. 22, cols. 1 - 2 is interesting.
When I took my first ride on the RG, in July of 1972, I was looking forward to seeing such freights–but I do not recall seeing a single freight on our way from Denver to Salt Lake City.
As to current speeds, the California Zephyr makes good time when it is not going up or down mountains, especially around Grand Junction and west into Utah. Of course, the Gilully Loops (south of Provo), the Front Range, and the canyons east of Glenwood Springs make for slow travel for both freight and passenger service.
So it has been brought up that maintenance cost is a key factor in deciding to maintain Class 4 of 5 track, which most of us seem to already know.
So the question I have know is what exactly is factored in to find out that maintenance cost? Does the overall length of the trains have any sort of impact on what kind of maintenance is going to be needed?
Now lighter trains (like intermodal trains) do tend to have higher speeds. So even if not all of the trains on the route have to operate at 70 mph, how much of an affect is it to insure certain trains can operate at high speeds?
Its simple: will you make more money if track speed at a given point is 55, 60, 70, whatever miles per hour. If you don’t get a return on the traffic your carrying, it’s not worth the extra cost of faster track.
And if it is 70 mph for five out of 100 miles it certainly not worth it, But 70 out of a hundred miles might depending on cargo carried.
A question for Railway Man, is increasing train length running up against a problem of diminishing returns? It has been commented that the return from going to 315k freight cars from 286k , was significantly less than the gain going from 263k to 286k. Part of the problem was increased rail wear, and part of the problem was tare to weight ratio dropped slightly.
The short answer is that maintenance cost of a track segment is influenced most strongly by four independent variables: its location; FRA track class that it’s maintained to; gross tonnage (typically measured in million gross tons per year, or MGT); train frequency; and desire for operating reliabilty, as follows.
- location includes things likes subgrade, bridges, tunnels, drainage, climate and precipitation, grade crossings, adjoining land uses. Location can have non-linear impacts for the other two independent variables. For example, comparing two locations, one with good subgrade and another with poor, and all other variables identical At low MGTs, the affects of the poor subgrade may not be significant and the maintenance costs of the two lines segments may be virtually identical. At high MGTs, however, the line with the poor subgrade will start to have very large effects on maintenance costs for that line.
- FRA track class affects cost primarily on crosstie life-cycle, surfacing and lining frequency, inspection frequency. As the track class steps up, the number of allowable defective ties decreases and track geometry tolerances diminish.
- MGTs. This is a very good predictor of track maintenance costs. Rail wear is highly proportional to MGTs, though note that curve
I hope you start with RTC. It’s a capacity problem, primarily, no?