How's Precision Schedule Railroad (PSR) working for you?

As a former railroader very much involved in operations improvement, I'm not motivated to a nice response to that one.  We were trying to do all of the above in the 60's.  It was much more difficult then because we had only primitive computer power.

At the time of the PC merger, we were actually running a daily report that showed movement of auto rack cars compared with schedule, looking at individual movements.  We had begun research work on a car scheduling system.  After the 
PC merger, the VP in charge of that went to the MP.

Railroads have been working on the car scheduling problem since then.  Such a system was being implemented on the MP when it was acquired by the UP and then installed over the whole UP system.

There is one facotr that makes it close to impossible to actually realize precision scheduling of individual carload moves.  That is the unpredictable pattern of inputs to the system.  Shipperes have the option of releasing an individual car shipment when it's convenient for them.  Another is random breakdowns that delay cars and cannot be avoided at any reasonable cost.  You can get zero delay only by spending an infinite amount of money.  It's not like airplances and space vehicles where there is much risk of minor flaws killing people.

The 100, 150, 200 car trains that wish to be ran, cannot be held/serviced in many railyards...

I will tell you from a chemical rail shipper’s perspective PSR is nothing more than a bunch of railroad executive / Wall Street hype.  Service on CSX is essentially the same now as it was before  the PSR implementation fiasco with the possible exception of returning empty private cars.  Those now seem to take longer more circuitous return routes which enables CSX to ding you on excess empty mileage.

In addition to stuff like that; rates, switching and demurrage charges have been increased and free time on private cars held on railroad tracks pretty much eliminated.

At the same time railroads are siphoning money from customer pockets; they are spending millions on share buybacks.  In short; PSR has one constituency - investors.  None of this nonsense is targeted at helping customers, growing the business or, for that matter, reducing operational complexity for employees.

Curt

So the take away is if we have perfect rolling stock and engines, huge yards, perfect weather, perfect customers knowledge, everything 100% perfectly placed  etc, then PSR works.  If not then same old, same old.

UP seems to be running longer trains, but from what I can see on the Sunset and Hardy Toll Road lines, trains are parked trying to get into the Houston Terminal.  Looks like the 1996 Englewood meltdown.

PSR forgets something.  In the Houston area, gentlemen like Ike and Harvey crash the party from the Gulf.  In other parts ofvthe country you have flood and blizzards.  One cannot "PSR" the true effects of bad weather.

Another fault with this is earthquakes.

Any natural disaster anywhere on the system could bring it to a standstill in short order.

Wednesdays in the Harrisburg, PA area seem to be a NS traffic jam day.  As I drive north on the east side of the Susquehanna, all you see at midday are stopped trains on both sides of the river, even the one coming down from Sunbury.  Appears inefficient to this passerby.

Seeing more stopped trains on Wednesdays doesn't necessarily indicate inefficient.  Railroads have a weekly cycle of traffic volume, especially at the east and west ends of the national system.  They cannot, and should not, afford to have sufficient capacity to handle all trains promptly on the peak day.  Doing so would mean idle capacity on the other six days a week.  That's the quick route to bankruptcy.  What is most important is to have the capacity to handle a week of traffic each week.

Avoiding yard congestion is vital to moving the traffic.  It's much better to have trains idle on the main line than  to fill the yard so it can't be switched efficiently.

True, but there should be enough sidings to trains ready to LEAVE can have an unblocked main line.

As long as the Main Line has sidings so the trains needimg to LEAVE the yard can do so.  Pne of the reasons Englewood Yard tilted early after UP bought SP.

Dominic Mazoch posted:

As long as the Main Line has sidings so the trains needimg to LEAVE the yard can do so.  Pne of the reasons Englewood Yard tilted early after UP bought SP.

That is not a problem with a double track railroad which most lines around Harrisburg are.  Also we are talking here about a weekly traffic cycle on one railroad that is operating normally.  The Englewood situation is not a good example.  That mess was due to poor opertations planning in a merger of two railroads..

Englewood and the Houston Terminal tilted several time from the moment the hump was opened until Borg Day.  But that is a thread to itself!

Not a fan. The stock price has soared under EHH/Precision Railroading. But...There are fewer trains, I'm working less, there's less jobs to hold, and the management flavor seems to be even more picky than under the previous administration. Still a lot of smoke and mirrors accounting going on, the metrics have changed a little bit but the name of the game remains the same..."make" it look good.

Apparently one thing EHH did was shake-up labor relations. In the last couple years, they've gotten REALLY bad about not paying things...like deadheads. They now like to pay you time consumer versus the trip rate. And when transportation shot down the hourly wage EHH wanted, the railroad decided to respond punitively by doing things like restricting seniority moves (general committee was able to win two of their cases through arbitration only 2 weeks ago) and getting rid of long pools.

What I cannot figure is why a business, in this case, railroads, operate as they do.  I do not mean they should not make a profit.  But operate in a way that angers people.  And if these angry people vote, they might just vote in people who are willing to REREGULATE!  We now have enough people around who did not experiance the old ICC.

One of the things I've had conversations about with people is that idea that if enough railroad's go to PSR (Like how NS and UP are doing),  if enough shippers and employees got upset and went to the Feds, there tighter regulatory options may occur in the near future. It may not be that likely however, since shippers did go to the STB over the service issues at CSX when EHH/Mantle Ridge came to down...and nothing was done. Many employees, including self-admitting opponents of "big Government" have voiced that they would like Uncle Sam to come in and end PSR...which is 1: Unlikely, 2: Hypocritical, 3; Not the job of the government. I feel it's just their way of voicing frustration and the pain of lost income and job opportunities.

I feel like my friend at UP's take is a bit more closer to what the future holds: In this economy, the railroads have every chance to invest, expand, and do more. Yet under PSR, railroads are shrinking. If and when things get tight again, such as they did after the last economic meltdown, railroads will now have positioned themselves even farther away from solid footing because there won't be anything left to trim.

CSX has been financially successful as of late not because so many more customers are using their services...CSX is generating wealth by raising fees to shippers, selling assets, and flat out not paying or paying correctly, employees. That is not growth.

Jeffrey:

Your last two paragraphs above are an excellent summarization of the current situation.  They also convey a message it would behoove the rail analysts on Wall Street to think seriously about.  The overarching problem here is the investment community looks at railroads as a 3-6 month "play" when, in fact, railroads should be a 10-20 year "play". 

I'll be "pulling the pin" the end of May so I guess my dog in this fight is coming to an end but, my youngest son is employed by a Class 1 and I am concerned about his prospects for a rewarding career.

Curt

Along with PTC,GE Optimiser failure, and Precision so-called railroading ,the railroads are being choked to death.

Stocks are doing better,but the r.r.'s can show a reduction in officials and locomotives which looks good for the bean counters.

Precision railroading has brought attention to areas that probably needed some adjustments for years,but give a long term outlook I think the railroads have jumped in deep water before they learned to swim.

In time certain things will return just as they did up north.

OK, I'm just a civilian with no railroading experience but I can analyze what I read. This is from the OP, the definition of PSR given by Progressive Railroading:

"Shifting operational focus from moving trains to moving cars; minimizing car classification events and dwell time; employing more general purpose trains; and balancing train movements to improve asset utilization (ie minimal deadheading empty trains).  The operating strategy focuses on prioritizing car delivery on fixed point-to-point schedules while minimizing in-transit work events so customers can better plan shipment arrivals and departures."

"Shifting operational focus from moving trains to moving cars;"

Isn't this a meaningless statement? The singular method of getting cars moved is by moving trains. If you move the train you necessarily move the cars.

"minimizing car classification events and dwell time;"

I remember as a kid reading in Trains Magazine about all the excitement wrt limiting car classification as a way of speeding up service. Hasn't this been the goal of every Class I for a long time?

"employing more general purpose trains;"

Another meaningless statement? If you have 150 cars of coal to move from the Powder River Basin to Chicago a Unit Train is the only logical choice. If you hang 10 cars of general merchandise on the end you have added a classification operation to the run. Don't railroads always use "general purpose" trains when needed anyway?

"and balancing train movements to improve asset utilization (ie minimal deadheading empty trains)."

I really don't get this. Isn't that what the private car fleets (Procor, Railgon, Railbox) accomplish by minimizing deadheading?

"The operating strategy focuses on prioritizing car delivery on fixed point-to-point schedules while minimizing in-transit work events so customers can better plan shipment arrivals and departures."

Wouldn't implementation of this strategy result in more shorter trains rather than a smaller number of longer trains?

Lew

From an article I read the other day over on Railway Age...

"More important than operating ratios or ROI are service innovation and happy customers. The problem with letting finance be your master is that finance thinks that all industries exist primarily to help finance earn ever-higher rates of return — and there is, in fact, no rate of return which finance considers to be “enough.”"

"And for many Class I railroads, the best way to cut costs was to cease operations entirely. "