Hunter Harrison has wasted no time putting his imprint on Canadian Pacific. My friends at that railroad say he is already a making changes large and small. To my knowledge no one has been dismissed. That will come later. Harrison has been making his way across Canada and the northern United States since taking on the job June 29, and he keeps asking: Why do we do this? What do we do that? When he gets unsatisfactory answers, red tape gets cut, rules are changed, trains are operated differently, and the like. Case in point Number 1: The rule prohibiting getting on or off moving equipment. It has been in force for several years, and it’s not clear that the result is a safer work environment, I am told. But it is clear that this rule inhibits productivity, and Harrison is seeking to have it altered. Case in point Number 2: A CP intermodal train changes crews 13 times between Montreal and Vancouver. Harrison asked, why are these supposed hotshots scheduled to dwell in places like Ignace and Chapleau, Ont., for 20 minutes or longer when a step off-step on crew change takes more like five minutes. So schedules are being tightened. Harrison figures that limiting crew changes of intermodal trains to a brisk 5 minutes will take six hours out of the cross-country trip. Case in point Number 3: Harrison wondered why so many intermodal trains are stopping along the way to pick up or set off just a few containers at the smaller ramps in Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg. Try doing this in winter and then timing how long it takes to get a train’s air back up in -35-degree Farenheit weather. The result was that Vancouver-Toronto trains 110-111 were abolished and in their places trains 100-101 were created with no work en route and high priority. The first 101 arrived Vancouver 17 hours earlier than 111 would have gotten there under the old schedule. Case in point Number 4: CP’s manifest business in Canada is wretched. What customers the railroad hasn’t run off were nabbed by Canadian National, which knows well the value of handling single cars if they’re priced right and switched efficiently. One reason CP fares so poorly may be that its service sucks. There was not a single manifest train scheduled between Toronto and Vancouver. Instead, pairs are run Montreal-Toronto, Toronto-Winnipeg, Winnipeg-Calgary, and Calgary-Vancouver. A car billed across Canada gets handed from one train to the next, each time probably waiting a day or two or three. Harrison changed all that, instituting a transcon manifest train each way marshaled in such a manner that it can make setouts and pickups along the way without having to go over the hump yards. And he’s putting pressure on the sales force to fill these and other manifest trains with more business.
All of this is to the good. Multiply these by the dozens of other changes I expect to occur in months to come, and you can almost see that operating ratio bending down. — Fred W. Frailey
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.