ns145
March 22, 2017, 1:03pm
41
BaltACD
Teething problems with UTCS… They’ve been pretty rare.
NS has 10 dispatching offices - one per division. Let me see if I can remeber…
Atlanta - Georgia
Birmingham - Alabama
Greenville - Piedmont
Harrisburg - Harrisburg
Pittsburgh - Pittsburgh
Dearborn - Dearborn
Decatur - Illinois
Bellevue - Lake
Knoxville - Central
Roanoke - Virginia
The dispatching system is GE’s UTCS. All divisions run on the same server and there is a hot backup as well as a disaster recovery server. Any desk on the network can dispatch any territory and there is a disaster recovery location (one for the whole network) so that, should a dispatch center have a long term issue, the division can be dispatched remotely.
NS’ Lake Division is dispatched from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
[snipped - PDN] . . . Most of the planners work well on single track, but have issues on multiple track, too many options for routing. The larger the railroad, the more you have to break down the railroad into smaller territories because planning a huge area takes too long (replans have to be able to be done in less than a couple minutes). That creates problems because territory A can plan to put a train approaching a boundary from territory B into a siding, while territory B can plan to put the train approaching from territory A into a siding. That creates a conflict that the two territories have to resolve. But when they resolve it, one or both territories have to replan, which can change the boundary conditions, which creates a new conflict, which causes a replan, which creates a new boundary conflict, which creates a new replan, etc, etc. They have resolved some of this but its still a work in progress.
[:-,] This seems like a chess game, only with potentially more pieces that are awfully big, heavy and long and can change shape, with a weirdly-shaped board, and strange rules about how the pieces can move . . . Probably more difficult than the 3-dimensional chess on Star Trek !