Remember this discussion buried somewhere in the discussion of Amtrak performance stats. I think the statement made was the freight railroads had issues keeping their freight shipments on time…maybe not. It’s been a while.
They have some work to do because OTR trucking companies do better than these annual percentages, in my opinion.
Once again somebody quotes a Newswire item that is closed to nonsubscribers, and can’t be bothered either to summarize or paraphrase the points from it.
I can only note that one of the few actual reasons for PSR as an operating model is to better provide arrival/delivery times ‘as promised’. To the extent UP in particular has “problems” with this, it would be to the degree PSR is misinterpreted in one of the ‘investor-friendly’ paradigms rather than effectively.
And, as noted, until this is done completely and reasonably consistently, there’s no reason to play the ‘Amtrak card’ either to hold up Amtrak service or try to ream some kind of concession from the Government in return for less interference with Amtrak train moves…
UP trip plan compliance for intermodal is up nine points, at 87%. Unfortunately, merchandise trip plan compliance is down seven points, to 67%.
Freight car velocity is down 2%, a bad thing, while terminal dwell is down 5%, a good thing. Train speed is flat, while locomotive productivity is up 19%.
Given that investor-driven PSR concentrates on cost reduction (not precision scheduling), which has resulted in two mile long “land barges,” crew shortages, and a host of other such issues, this is not terribly surprising.
When it come to railroad published metrics - I am a total cynic.
Figures lie, liars figure.
Remember one of the first things EHH did when he got to CSX was to change their metrics away from the standards that all the carriers had been reporting since the days of the Eastern meltdown from the CR split as well as the UP meltdown when it had fur balls trying to swallow CNW and SP. Change the metrics to numbers that ‘you control’ and not necessarily numbers that are actually happening.
Velocity, car dwell are easily fudged - normally if one goes up the other goes down and vice versa. It takes all of a railroads resources, human and other, to make the property ‘work’. Too much emphasis on reducing ‘costs’ of any one aspect of those resources damages the productivity of all the rest.
I could have sworn that some people claimed freight trains didn’t have a schedule. It would be pretty hard to judge on time performance without a schedule.
In all fairness, there’s a difference between a guaranteed-by-XX:yy delivery time and an operating schedule that covers all the control points, etc.
On the other hand, proper PSR implies not only some fairly rigorous version of the latter, but now also including the necessary tracking methods and software to track compliance with anticipated arrival times over the road, and perhaps more importantly update them frequently (even, efffectively, continuously) for best (or cheapest, or whatever) traffic management and ‘resource allocation’.
Only a moron would try to run a railroad by operating really long trains whenever one got padded out, then being surprised by not having somewhere to put one when it got to a yard or terminal. You might be able to train a better class of moron with experience, to get that kind of model to kinda sorta work some of the time, but it would be hella brittle even if it ran along cheaply ‘most’ of the time. And it would still be moronic, or the functional PC equivalent if that term becomes an insult to the actual cognition-disabled.
Oh that last paragraph. What I wish I could say.
A letter to employees last Jan 23, said First/Last mile compliance was 92%. That this drove trip plan compliance up.
They seem to be mixed on metrics. We no longer care about freight train metrics, it’s car metrics that are important. I guess they forgot how cars move. However, Vena awhile back was upset at how low our veloci
“No way to run a railroad.”
This isn’t a current observation.
When CSX started the automotive ramp outside of Atlanta on the single track Abbeville Sub. The ramp was located on a single track segment between passing sidings. The ‘scheduled’ work times for the trains that were to set off and/or pick up were 14 hours and 30 minutes - exclusive of running time between the passing sidings. That left 9 hours and 30 minutes available to all the other traffic that was operating on the subdivision. On Time metrics for the subdivision were well beyond pathetic.
Mantle Ridge has backed out of a part of their position in CSX, though Paul Hilal still retains his board seat.