Regular assigned jobs being abolished: crew has to be notified no less than 48 hrs before the assignment is abolished, and effected employees are placed to the bump board
That assumes that it was a foul up and not a deliberate move to high ball the pickup. I&
And sometimes it’s lazy crews that don’t want to do the work and managers that don’t keep after them. I worked with crews that would kill time any way they could so that they wouldn’t have time to pick up interchange cars near the end of their run. Some local crews would time their arrival at their off duty point so that they ran out of time on the main track and could not yard their train.
One conductor said making overtime started at the beginning of the day.
The Boston & Maine crew That I worked with winer]-spring 1952-53 Was customer-service oriented.
For those interested, there is a first person blurb in Rush Loving Jr’s book The Well Dressed Hobo concerning the final attrition of the ICG.
That’s a pretty rough statement to make about operating folks. Front office people often don’t appreciate the front line workers’ jobs.
An earlier post by another member says it all about management attitudes: “union required blatant overmanning” “contract required BS”
The actions I observed from SOU crews as they crossed over at Storrs Jct. in Cincinati as the made their way from their yard to interchange with the Big 4 yard West of Storrs Jct. You had to pick a known stationary object to be able to gauge their speed of movement - sometimes the stationary object moved faster.
Management has NEVER seen a non-management employee that they didn’t consider a slacker.
Except he’s right. Take it from me, an actual operating employee, though I don’t have nearly as much seniority as him.
The bad apples give the rest of us a bad name.
I’ve seen co-workers do everything he listed and then some, and I may have even participated in it myself on occasion (it is amazing how a bullying supervisor can negatively affect a crew’s work ethic).
As long as I am treated respectfully by management I will work to the best of my abilities.
When referring to the era of three brakemen per train and firemen on diesels, he has a point.
There are good operating guys and there are bad ones.
There are good managers and there are bad ones.
[quote user=“SD70Dude”]
charlie hebdo
mvlandsw
And sometimes it’s lazy crews that don’t want to do the work and managers that don’t keep after them. I worked with crews that would kill time any way they could so that they wouldn’t have time to pick up interchange cars near the end of their run. Some local crews would time their arrival at their off duty point so that they ran out of time on the main track and could not yard their train.
One conductor said making overtime started at the beginning of the day.
That’s a pretty rough statement to make about operating folks. Front office people often don’t appreciate the front line workers’ jobs.
Except he’s right. Take it from me, an actual operating employee, though I don’t have nearly as much seniority as him.
The bad apples give the rest of us a bad name.
I’ve seen co-workers do everything he listed and then some, and I may have even participated in it myself on occasion (it is amazing how a bullying supervisor can negatively affect a crew’s work ethic).
As long as I am treated respectfully by management I will work to the best of my abilities.
charlie hebdo
An earlier post by another member says it all about management attitudes: “union required blatant overmanning” “contract required BS”
When referring t
Firemen on freights started to be eliminated in 1972 and 1985 was the end.
Brakemen numbers were reduced starting in the 1970s. These have not been relevant issues (fireman on freight, three brakemen) for many years.
But they were during the era Ken was referring to.
You know me, I never let them off easy on here.
If management is stupid/incompetent enough to create an environment that allows and even encourages the BS described earlier, that’s on them. After all, it’s their train set, even if they don’t know how to play with it.
In Ken’s example of the bypassed lift, if there was indeed a good reason for it that reason was never communicated back to his department. And in that case the proper course of action would have been to come up with a recovery plan that saw the cars move on the next available train.
We still see this sort of thing happen today, and sometimes it is 100% due to lazyness and incompetence. But more often there is a reason, like three trains with work at a small yard all showing up at the same time, and there is only room for one of them. So someone’s work gets bypassed and cars are delayed and misrouted as a result.
This sort of thing shouldn’t happen, and yet it does, over and over and over again.
I’m not sure exactly when he worked for IC(G).
Sometimes it comes down to ticking off one customer vs ticking off 3…
If railroad decision making was easy - any idiot could do it. In reality it takes a special kind of idiot, some of them very highly paid.
A second truism is ‘becareful what you ask for - YOU MAY GET IT!!’ Malicious compliance is a female dog.
Keep the ICG discussion going. I grew up on a branch line (Mattoon to Evansville) and the daily locals were the main event of my childhood, particularly when they switched limestone cars into the team tracks a block away from my home.
ICG was a north south Penn Central with some very good mainlines (actually only 1) with too many branch lines and secondaries.
Back in Dec, 2019 I had a hip replacement with way too much time on my hands. I found some old dispatch sheets from 1966 online - Jon Roma has a great site…and spent a few days reviewing the IC’s operations including passenger trains. Pre- GMO merger, IC was running a pretty smooth operation, at least between Champaign and Centralia/Bluford.
Upper management did a great job of pruning the tree in the 1980s. I was fortunate enough to purchase IC stock in 1994 and it has exploded as CN ownership. One thing I never understood…why was the Iowa line repurchased? I dont get it now. I had a proxy statement book on it back in the 90s and unfortunately discarded it. Would love to review it now. I think they are only running one train each direction daily plus ethanol trains.
Any updates to that operation would be great.
Another interesting line was the East St. Louis to Duquoin line. I never realized the volumes that line carried until I spent a few hours at Barriger Library back in February (pre Covid) and took a look at a couple of books dealing with East St. Louis ops on ICG. Busy line, not only with coal but quite a bit of manifest business on the IC(G).
Ed
One version that I ran across suggested that the Iowa line was repurchased in part to make IC somewhat less attractive to possible merger partners. It obviously didn’t work that way.
OK, this is what I experienced at the ICG.
There were some particularly good people there in higher level positions, but generally it was run by a bunch of good ole’ boys who didn’t have a whole lot of education. They had experience. That meant they resisted change because any change would devalue the main strength they had, which was their experience. A good leader will need both, education and experience. This allows him/her to accept changes, which are always needed, and evaluate proposals for change in terms the real world. If all you’ve got is experience change can be a personal threat to you. So, there was a whole lot of resistance to change.
The ICG was extremely late in trying to rationalize its network. One VP-Law was Percy Johnson. He was off the GM&O, from Mississippi, and he hated line abandonments. They created political problems and union issues. Often, these were major fights, and the Law Department would be right in the middle of every such fight. But the existing network had been created when farmers hauled their crops out of the fields by team and wagon. When they quit doing that the network lost viability and needed to be restructured. A line abandonment certainly did impact local businesses such as lumber yards, agricultural supply dealers, etc. They screamed bloody murder to their politicians and things went from there. But the fact remained that the railroad simply was not viable while operating all that obsolete network. T
IC/ICG branch lines:
I was in Rantoul, IL twice for USAF training - 1968-9 and 1973-4. Didn’t have a car the first time, so my trainwatching was limited, not to mention that I hadn’t really gotten the bug yet.
The second time I had a car. I chased the branch east of Rantoul (which at one time ran to the Indiana line). Not much traffic. At that time it ran to Potomac.
I didn’t chase things west of Rantoul, but that ran all the way to Lincoln and beyond. Now it ends at a mill/elevator a few miles west of Rantoul.
I’m guessing the smaller towns eventually lost their elevators, likely a major source of traffic on both lines.
Old topo maps don’t show the E-W line crossing the N-S “Main Street of America” line - each was it’s own branch.