That’s what it took to get to work yesterday, March 15.
After being in the motel in Fremont for almost 48 hours, I finally got called for a train out of the Omaha area. I was third of 4 crews called within about a 30 minute period. On the way down to the depot, the motel driver said that we would be coming back and they would save our rooms for us. Upon arrival at the yard office, the van dispatcher said all the roads out of Fremont were now closed due to the massive flooding in Nebraska. (They had deadheaded 4 crews home a few hours earlier and had been able to escape by van.) The van dispr had notified the railroad and was waiting back for their response. It was generally thought we would all tie back up at the motel.
The railroad called back. They had come up with Plan A. They were going to try to charter a flight out of Fremont for Omaha. Visions of a WW1 surplus Sopwith Camel popped into my head for some reason. They couldn’t charter a flight, so they went with Plan B. They sent one of the corporate jets to get us. So all 4 crews were airlifted out. We all got trains, although they changed who was getting which trains. We made a slight step up, originally we were going to have to put ours together in Council Bluffs. Instead we got a manifest out of Kansas City. After our group, they sent the plane back to Fremont for 4 more crews. It sounded like this group were going to trade one motel in Fremont for one in the Council Bluffs/Omaha area.
The newswire item has a few pictures, one being the curve at Logan, IA. (It’s captioned near Boone, but it’s just east of Missouri Valley.) When we went on duty, someone had earlier talked to a conductor on a work train there. They hadn’t dumped ballast yet because water was still up far enough that the MOW supervisor didn’t want his people walking through water along side the cars while operating the ball
Does that plane ride count on your HOS ( similarly, as a ‘cab ride’ might)? A trip like that is always grist for ‘war stories’ ver time! anot to mention really, different, and interesting. [:-^]
[ Years back, I took some bass fishing boats to Chicago, and delivered, on the day before the start of a 4 day holiday weekend.] Two of us were offered the chance to ride a 747 to Narita A/P (NRT). I loved it, Tuesday, my dispatcher wanted to know where the heck we had been; we’d missed loads to JFK…He did not believe that we’d ‘turned’ [swg] Tokyo over that weekend; until he spoke to the mgr at the airline.[:-^]
That ought to make for an interesting timeslip; do the air miles count towards the day’s run? And did you guys more-or-less step off the jet and on to the train? Too bad they didn’t use a helicopter–they could have dopped you off right at the train.
Jeff, what kind of speed restriction was there on the flooded portion?
We had a 10 mph over the part that had been underwater.
We were taken to the Fremont airport by our normal vans. At Omaha we were picked up by managers, who took us to our trains. They’ve been using managers to supplement our normal van drivers. So I don’t know if this was because of a van shortage or to impress upon us that we were in the spotlight. Because of something the manager said, I think it was the latter.
Once on our train while the conductor was back knocking off brakes, I heard the dispatcher come on the radio. He wasn’t on the closest tower to us, but I could hear him say “Emergency” three times and that either a levee or ice dam had been breeched and to watch out for flash flooding between MP 39 and MP 22. Watching the news, I think it might be a couple days before things start moving again.
The track department side, already spread thin, are probably scrambling to find ballast and surfacing equipment. Even thinner would be the structures people, but so far I haven’t heard about any bridges lost. The roadmasters (MTM) and division engineers (MTP) are not getting much sleep right now. Everything from ballast to rip rap is suddenly getting priority (cursing the lack of air dumps out there?)
As for the MTO’s, they are probably hustling crews around so they don’t appear to be the source of any holdup and the dispatchers, isolated as they are in Omaha, keep stuff moving in some fashion. (At least Harriman is central to the flooding and not thousands of miles away)…Secondary lines (like the KP) and alternate routes suddenly have a chance to shine. Stress levels are certainly up.
Then you break-up the qualified crews and have “pilots”. In the case of the KP, you can probably run at almost capacity for a while. (there is another thread just after PSR infected UP’s corporate thinking, that the KP was redundant. Hopefully the thinking is a little less gung-ho after things like this.
PDN: We used to sarcasticly refer to the the UP management titles as the “yuppie caste system” put in place for people that never set foot on the territory or got their hands dirty" (usually BA and CE degree-d non-railroaders) … never liked the term “general roadmaster” either.
Don’t know UP rules - CSX rules required a pilot for each craft that was not qualified. Additionally, they did not permit using a qualified Conductor to pilot a unqualified Engineer.
I understand what Balt & zugs are hinting at, but the KP was a little unusual that they had people on it that were qualified elsewhere and could come back to it. The last 6 years or so saw a slowdown on the use for the district, but there were plenty of folks still qualified on the district back around new years…Got used last year when the undercutter appeared on the transcon to attack the coal blow-dust recurring headache.
FRA has qualification standards - being qualified on the territory 6 years ago does not make you qualified on the territory today. FRA qualification regulations are the Catch 22 when a carrier down grades the use of a particular line.
I believe, but I can be mistaken, you have to have operated over a territory during the preceeding year to maintain qualification on that territory. On most carriers, how T&E crews complete their ‘time slip’ for their trips indicates what territories they have operated over and record of this is maintained in the computer system for qualification purposes.
The UP requires a trip within 12 months on non-heavy grade territories. (I think the FRA allows a longer period of grace time.) They do count trips worked as a conductor for those previously qualifed as engineers, but who have been cut back to conductor.
What they’ve done in the past for planned detours (over the CN or IAIS in my area) was to create a pilot pool. They would use engineers from the affected pool (those that were going to run the detours) and/or managers. They’ld get qualified (a hi-rail trip over the line in a fe