By the time I was 12 I had narrowed my occupational choices to a mere two. One was to be, like my father, a newspaperman. The other option was train dispatching. I chose the former, but my, I have always admired the men and women who direct the trains...

Yesterday morning near St. Augustine I watched two of Florida East Coast’s blue GP40-2s wheel 177 containers and trailers (yes, I counted) northward at a brisk 55 mph. Two smallish diesels can do that because the vast majority of those boxes...

Well, CSX sure made a mess of things in Emporia, Va. The town of almost 6,000 people, some 10 miles north of the North Carolina border, was invaded yesterday morning by System Tie and Surfacing Gang T-2. T-2 and its allied contractors proceeded to...

The coal and railroad businesses go hand in hand. CSX and Norfolk Southern get almost one-third of their revenues from coal, Union Pacific and BNSF Railway roughly one-fourth. So when BNSF has almost 130 trainsets of coal cars in storage — think...

I met the man who became Union Pacific's chief executive officer at a political convention in 2004 in New York. He was with Dick Davidson, then the CEO, and I was with my wife. Young was already the heir apparent. We exchanged introductions. The...

One of the things that must frustrate many railroad managers and their rank and file is the question posed in the title atop this essay: Should a manager want workers to think big like he or she does? Or is that too much to expect? At the other end...