@Rich Melvin posted:The PSR railroad way of doing business is essentially, “This is how we run things. Deal with it.”
And that was the personality of the late individual who instituted PSR (by ramming it down the throats of everyone who even slightly resisted and could not be fired).
You can't often run a local or an industry switcher because of one customer's production schedule, but you can get your customers together and work out some kind of service solution that they can live with. Many of them don't care when they are switched, but they all want to be switched consistently. Once you have gained their trust, though, you can't change the plan unilaterally because of budget cuts. You have to keep them in partnership if you want to change the service to them.
I wish I could tell you that I was always insightful enough to have conducted business that way but I learned it the hard way in the worst blunder of my railroad career. The fact that I was ordered to do it is no excuse. I should have met with the Superintendent and laid out a plan like I described in the first paragraph. I got the blame for the disaster, and had a Vice President just looking for an excuse to fire me for years after that.
