Railroad employees have to record and handle a great amount of information about the movement of freight and the equipment hauling the freight.
How long are these lists of information needed?
Obiviously, the employees and management need to keep track of where locomotives and cars have been for a while, so the equipment can be located again later. Some of this freight movement data would be needed later to prove to customers that their freight was hauled to a certain place at a certain time.
Who purges the data as soon as possible?
Who keeps the files stored for a long duration?
Is information like a train list now a confidential document?
Does this information ever become purposely available to researchers?
Yes, train consists are not for dissemination to the public, nor are lineups of trains traveling over a given line. I’ve heard of employees getting into a whole heap of trouble for tossing such things out of the cab window at Rochelle, for example.
I don’t know how long an inbound consist stays in the computer after a train is yarded or classified. It’s not very long, though–days, at most.
If I were to look up a car record, I’d be able to find the current movement only, or perhaps the preceding move as an empty before the car received its current load. Others may have access to older records.
Waybill information is kept for three years–but that just tells you about when the car was loaded and the routing–no arrival or unloading information.
I’m sure the mainframe can purge itself of outdated records at the appropriate time, probably without (or in spite of) human intervention.
I just wish your adult supervision would leave the M/W & Engineering records. (they can do all they want with the Operating stuff, but leave the stuff that has a future alone! Sadly, the Operating supervision calls the shots in places where they really should not!)
(1) Conrail’s old managers should be shot for some of the criminal things they did.
(2) The law and the claims officers of the two western Class 1’s would kill the people who trashed some of the Engineering records out here if they knew who that/those person(s) were. It has cost the railroads severely.
(I’m working for your employer right now trying to unearth something that happened on DRGW 20 years ago. Their “institutional memory” only seems to go back a few months)
It used to be that these records were kept indefinately.All are important to those modelers and/or historians who study them for prototype modeling or company histories.Engineering,maintenance of way,equipment diagrams,wheel reports,locomotive maintenance reports,etc are all valuable.To anyone who would throw these away without regards to history:would you throw away the Holly Bible,or the U.S.Constitution,or your family photo album or heritage?
That’s fine until you realize that anyone in upper railroad operating management ( any clown with a business administration degree and six months OJT) looks at storage of documents as an unwanted expense and has no concept of intrinsic worth - they live for the moment and could care less about the past.) The railroads are a business and not fodder for modelers, fomites and historians (who have a well documented reputation for being pests with the folks who manage railroad records- sorry folks-it’s the unfortunate truth …I still see it at the museums). Destruction of key records at Santa Fe was largely at the instigation of a management consultant [ the McKenzie Group] over the loud objection of the corporate rank and file who constantly used the archived records to protect company assets in court, in surveys and in other claims applications. Upper management (under the influence of Wall Ttreet Trash and the beancounters) would not listen to their own people which was a tragedy/ costly mistake.
Lots of stuff has to be kept 7 years for legal reasons. Most of that stuff is raw data stored away on tape and generally isn’t easily usable in it’s current form. Sometimes ending lawsuit make you keep stuff around even longer.
For managment purposes, data is kept in useful and easy to use forms for mgt reports, analysis, etc, in a data warehouse. Depending on the kind and amount of data, you might see 1 to 10 years stored. Car movement events tend to pile up quickly, so you might only see 13 months available - about a trillion records. However, car movement events that have been transformed into dwell and movent segments or even whole trips, along with waybill information tends to be kept longer - say 3 to 10 years.
Data much older than a few years tends to lose it’s relevence when the main purpose of keeping the data at all is to improve operations.
Engr. dwgs and specs generally are kept around for as long as you own the equipement. After that, they can be tossed. Conrail’s Mech Dept used to have the Penna. St. Museum come around and collect the obsolete stuff.
I always thought that most of the day to day information that constantly changes loses value to administrators after several months.
One would have hoped that long term information on Equipment and Structures would be considered archive worthy by the managment and that it would end up clean and dry in the proper storage area.