It’s almost midnight and the Trains are still running. I went down to the Amtrak station in Omaha and watched some Trains. Yes their still running. I saw an eastbound BNSF Intermodel going down to Gibson yard. Then I saw at least 5 Eastbound UP Coal loads going into Council Bluffs. And heard another BNSF Train rolling by Amtrak. I just got back home here in Blair and a Westbound just came through. I guess the Trains will keep rolling well into the night. Happy holidays.
I heard a CN train about 30 minutes ago up here.
Most mainline operations will be uneffected. Locals & most many yd jobs will be annulled. Our yd closed up end of 1st shift Sun and start back up 2nd shift Mon. Should be same for New Yrs.
NS put out a statement that they would be curtailing operations from later Christmas Eve through Christmas Day. This held true as the live scanner feed for the normally busy Pittsburgh Line through the Horseshoe Curve area of Pennsylvania was nearly silent on Christmas Day. Normally 50-60 trains a day run through there but it was down to one Amtrak train in each direction for the holiday.
There are plenty of trains that still need to run, regardless of holiday–some intermodal trains are on weekly schedules, and coal is usually run continuously. We were having difficulties on Christmas Eve due to one connection not taking cars from us (we make four classifications for them, and there were ten or more tracks in our bowl filled with cars for them). Today things should be spent in working through the backlog caused by the yard being shut down yesterday, but it should have been possible to run most manifest scheduled with cars already classified–I really don’t know what was run, because I wasn’t about to stay and find out!
…That is really some contrast to a few decades ago when it seemed railroad operations would somewhat continue to run…Especially passenger trains, when they were still plentyful.
But that was then and this is now…
Not the way most of us would like to see it but simply the way it is now.
Actually, Quentin, the railroads have (at least around here) returned a lot more to operating things than they had as recently as, say, five years ago. In my yard, I used to be able to count on having holidays off, but now we usually work through them. Christmas this year (with the yard shut down for 24 hours) was more the exception. As of now, there is no shutdown scheduled for New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day (both of which are paid holidays for yard forces). Of course, this coming week is always the slowest week of the year for freight railroads in general, so they may change that. I also remember how it was when I first hired out–everything ran every day, including holidays, and you just hoped that holidays would coincide with rest days if you had any sort of life on the outside.
Here in Milwaukee, the CP kept it going but at a reduced pace. Amtrak still ran just like any other day (and has in my observation been really good with running ontime lately.) The Wisconsin Southern yard however was noticably vacant and quite empty which is a rare thing.
Cheers!
~METRO