“Movement in everything and everywhere is essential,” Haupt lectured Burnside one day. “Trains must not stand still, except when loading and unloading, and the time for this should be measured by minutes, not by hours.”
Hess, Earl J… Civil War Supply and Strategy (p. 498). LSU Press. Kindle Edition.
Haupt was pretty much the Union’s railroad logistics expert in the east during the US Civil War. He sure got it right a long, long time ago.
Please, no PSR hate posts. PSR is supposed to keep freight moving. I know, there have been some problems in implementation. Let us get past that.
Terminal time and velocity have been a bain of the railroad world for ages.
Concepts such as pre-blocking try to get past that, of course. It’s been my impression that railroads tend(ed) to work yard to yard (hump or flat-switched), sorting the cars every single time. That takes time, perhaps a day per yard, which could add a week or more for a coast to coast transit.
That said - the trains are moving, even if the cars aren’t. Even with today’s “land barges,” Deshler has been seeing 50-60 trains per day. You can’t set your watch by them, but it’s pretty close for the regulars.
One has to think about how ALL TRANSPORTATION service their end customers!
DAILY - once every 24 hours, except Saturday & Sunday in many cases.
If you ‘rush’ your service so a Saturday delivery can be accomplished, but the customer won’t accept delivery until Monday - What have you accomplished?
USPS, UPS, FedEx in most cases only make daily deliveries in most cases.
To have any effect - any enhancement of the transportation function must improve the Origin-Destination elapsed time by a day - or nothing has been accomplished.
My industry- building materials- is having acute shortages of a lot of things right now. A lot of the peskier issues are with hardware that comes from Asia. The standard answer we get is that our shipment of widgets has been in a ship off California waiting weeks to be unloaded.
I wonder how that situation affects the rail shipment of the goods once they’re unloaded? Is transit time faster because there is less of that kind of traffic on the rails? Typical American patience- if the ships are 6 weeks behind, we want the railroads or the truckers to try and pick up 20 minutes here and there to make up for it.
Well, the implication of “Precision Scheduled” in PSR was that it would speed up delivery. Why else care about a precision schedule? In any case, a speed up of delivery was also directly claimed in the promotion of PSR. However, now PSR seems to have evolved to mean longer, but fewer trains as exemplified by the monster train land barges.
If the monster trains are primarily intended to control (limit) costs, what effect do they have on delivery speed? Do they speed it up, slow it down, or have no effect?
Remember Haupt formed his ideas in the era of Sundial timing and not atomic clocks. Logistics is restricted most by the speed that the shippers and receivers of goods can changed the status of the vehicles from loaded to empty and vice versa. Transportation of the vehicles cannot commence until those actions have been completed.
My readings of history indicate that the congestion of the railroads that happened in WW 1 was because of the railroads hauling more traffic to the ports for shipment overseas than the ports could handle. When the government looked at the situation the only thing they could see were the ‘clogged’ railways and came up with USRA as the solution. PSR was not a factor.
PSR is about the railroads’ bottom line. It really doesn’t keep cars moving better then what the way they used to move freight. In my experience, it just alleviates dwell time at the major terminals and moves it to smaller terminals. Instead of 24 hours at North Platte, cars spend 10 or 12 hours there but another 10 or 12 hours downstream because they were moved on out of NP on a train generally directed towards the destination. The cars get setout at an intermediate point to wait for the proper train. I think it actually leads to cars being handling more than they used to be.
They recently changed the air brake rule to allow cars to be off air for 24 hours before a new air test is required. It used to be 2 hours, went to 4 hours and now went to 24 hours. Why? To allow a solid block (air tested) of cars to sit longer somewhere waiting for the next train (one going to or towards the actual block’s destination) to pick them up. We have a few manifests that routinely need to be recrewed because of the assigned work events and locations. You can almost expect that all trains that need to work a specific yard, seem to turn up at the same time. The work events themselves are often bigger. Sometimes picking up or setting out (or both) 5, 6, 7 thousand feet of train.
Someone coined what PSR really stands for: “Pick up, Set out. Recrew.”
If they cared about service, maybe instead of one train a day to specific destinations, maybe two trains dispatched. (Remember DRGW’s “Short, Fast, Frequent” chronicled in Trains’ back in the 1970s?)
But either way, lone land barges or frequent shorter trains may not matter, when you’ve told the customer you’re only going to switch them certain days of the week. We used to run two 5 day a week wayfreights, one west the other east out of my home terminal. Now we run one wa
The Class 1’s are on the fast track to re-regulation… or oblivion, whichever comes first. I guess every service business tests customer tolerance to some extent in the eternal quest to cut costs, but the C1s seem to take it to extremes.
It has been my experience - every ‘fad’ that strikes the industry eventually ends up with a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting between the company and the revenue providers. After that meeting adjustments get made.
Wall Steet ‘hedge trimmers’ created PSR. When the revenue providers trim Wall Street, the worm will have turned. If the attempt to re-regulate the industry gains a foothold, watch the hedge trimmers try to get lost in the grass.
PSR is about the railroads’ bottom line. It really doesn’t keep cars moving better then what the way they used to move freight. In my experience, it just alleviates dwell time at the major terminals and moves it to smaller terminals. Instead of 24 hours at North Platte, cars spend 10 or 12 hours there but another 10 or 12 hours downstream because they were moved on out of NP on a train generally directed towards the destination. The cars get setout at an intermediate point to wait for the proper train. I think it actually leads to cars being handling more than they used to be.
They recently changed the air brake rule to allow cars to be off air for 24 hours before a new air test is required. It used to be 2 hours, went to 4 hours and now went to 24 hours. Why? To allow a solid block (air tested) of cars to sit longer somewhere waiting for the next train (one going to or towards the actual block’s destination) to pick them up. We have a few manifests that routinely need to be recrewed because of the assigned work events and locations. You can almost expect that all trains that need to work a specific yard, seem to turn up at the same time. The work events themselves are often bigger. Sometimes picking up or setting out (or both) 5, 6, 7 thousand feet of train.
Someone coined what PSR really stands for: “Pick up, Set out. Recrew.”
If they cared about service, maybe instead of one train a day to specific destinations, maybe two trains dispatched. (Remember DRGW’s “Short, Fast, Frequent” chronicled in Trains’ back in the 1970s?)
But either way, lone land barges or frequent shorter trains may not matter, when you’ve told the customer you’re only going to switch them certain days of the week. We used to run two 5 day a week wayfreights, one west the other east out
I believe its time railroads got out of the mind frame of just worrying about trains moving… Shippers are moving toward freight tracking for schedules instead of truck tracking, trailer tracking you name it. If railroads dare go this route being concerned with the actual knowing, understanding, and schedule of the freight on board this will naturally improve rolling stock utilization, crew HOS, dwell, etc… Dare I say even lower cost due to improved service?
The monster train concept seems to be especially appealing to the industry. I believe they tried to go down that road back in the 1950-60s by the introduction of M.U. capability naturally arriving with dieselization. But that still require all the power to be on the head end, and that was the limit to train length.
Nevertheless, railroads such as the Milwaukee and CGW routinely ran trains with 5-8 units and more than 200 cars. The objective for the industry’s love of monster trains is clear; they reduce crew cost per ton. From just a marketing sense, it drives home the point of the amazing amount of tonnage one man can move compared to arch rival, trucking.
PSR seems to be directed to meeting customer expectations for a more nimble and cost competitive service. So I have been surprised to hear railroads proclaiming that the embodiment of PSR is monster trains. Trains that are miles long, unable to fit into sidings and yards, and spend inordinate time on replacing broken knuckles, and succumbing to brake problems seem like the antitheses of PSR. I would expect faster, more frequent trains to be the natural expression of PSR.
This may explain why PSR has been so difficult to explain. Most explanations are full of incomprehensible platitudes and never say anything specific except for the word, “blocking.” It almost seems like railroads have adopted PSR just as a marketing slogan that merely sounds like a modern, forward thinking concept for a fast and nimble transpiration system.
