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Ed--I wondered when somebody finally was gonna say it--they are already "scheduled", albeit loosely in most cases. It probably would be useful for some of the other participants who don't normally deal with this issue (and I'll do it here--just because I have nothing better to do right now than stick my neck out) to note that you can distinguish between a schedule and a PUBLISHED schedule. Modern RRs have typically tried to "schedule" through operations, if for no other reason that on a crowded main line, there is only so much capacity, i.e. a fixed number of operational "slots", and you want to try to fill them as optimally as possible. The difference between this kind of operation and a published schedule (like what airlines use and the RRs used to use) is that there are legal and regulatory (even with deregulation) ramifications and requirements associated with publishing a schedule that can load the system with inefficiencies. As an example, to use the airline analogy again, missed conex due to some operational factors are penalized by requiring the payment to pax, in cash, services, or both, of compensation--think of the meal vouchers and getting put up in a hotel room overnight. That's why airlines will routinely hold many evening conex, particularly the late-night cleanup trips, for late inbounds with transferring pax. Similarly, with a published schedule, you're stuck and you can't leave early, even if you are full (with some small tolerances allowed in today's environment). Imagine a RR with available track slots and a crew holding a full intermodal or (let's talk big bucks) through chemical train in the yard for 4 hours before releasing it for no good reason until the published scheduled departure time, just because it got in early or got switched early--in the old TT days, they got around this problem by going on and dispatching it as a section of a previous schedule so it still had rights (extras had essentially no rights), and if you publish and hold to a rigid schedule, you're right back at the same point, but probably without the options they had back in the old days. On the other hand, being late to the gate due to a non-airline problem such as traffic or even security will largely get you a sympathetic look and possibly on-site help in arranging a new flight, if you're lucky and you hit a non-surly day and don't get a brush-off (I know--I've been accused by some crews of putting in more airborne hours in a month than they do, and I used to work for one of the major ALs). But, since the RR uses the "schedule" generally for internal operational management only, AND DOES NOT PUBLISH IT, there is no per-se legal obligation to the customers to run the train exactly when the RR decided and published that it was supposed to be run. In other words, a terminal delay can cost Southwest Airlines a potload of REAL $$ paid out to the pax (shippers) in addition to their internal costs for delay and lost opportunity, because the fact that the schedule is published puts that obligation on them, and in some of those situations, the connection does go out empty (or emptier) in order to stage the equipment and/or to keep a crew from going into their rest time, which can cascade into the next operational day or two and REALLY screw things up. But, if you don't publi***he schedule, the extra costs don't exist, because you are not advertising (and ultimately contracting for) arrival at a certain time. And, you can easily hold the departure for a hot block of cars without the feds getting uppity. Now, that said, there are contractual obligations with major shippers like UPS that do effectively put some trains on demanding and sometimes ambitious unpublished schedules. And, in many cases, like the airlines, if the driver misses the ramp cutoff, that trailer doesn't get lifted on schedule and gets back in line depending on the contractual obligation. So there are very real schedule issues still extant in the RR industry. But back to the original issue--would running an officially scheduled RR make it more efficient. I'm afraid I have to agree with Ed, Mark, and several of the others: probably not, primarily because there are too many significant terminal delay variables that cascade down the line and cause way too much variability. Build extra yard capacity just to hold a bunch of trains waiting to meet a published time? That's inherently cost inefficient and can propagate even worse delays and reductions in quality of service. Want to clog a hub airport? Just have a bunch of flights land early ahead of the current bank's release time. There is really no reason to institutionalize a rigidly fixed, published schedule for freight operations, particularly given that the RR already is running on a de facto schedule anyway, but with the critical flexibility of being able to release a train early or dispatch an extra if a slot is available. As nice as it may appear to be able to put crews on a fixed clock, with today's environment it won't work very well for a lot of reasons that have been discussed in other posts. And it wouldn't work well in the airline industry, either, if the potential for highly inefficient long delays were as common as it is in the RR industry. Besides that, with the exception of some big intermodal operators, most rail shippers and consignees are more interested in reliability and consistency in delivery and not raw speed. What they need is the delivery made day-by-day within the agreed-upon window, and not within X hours of shipment. They really don't care if it takes 9 days (that's just less warehousing cost to them, anyway), as long as it gets there every day between, say, 7 PM and 3 AM, spotted and ready to unload. That's not the case with the pax airline model, where time is money. Think about this. You put mainline crews on a fixed schedule and they bid a schedule, like an airline crew, that requires that they spend night 1 at location X, night 2 at location Y, etc. They show up at Z and take their train 101 out. Two hours later, some bozo (I'm not starting a new thread here) runs in front of them at a grade crossing in the middle of nowhere, gets smacked and goes to bozo _____[you fill in the blank here, preferably in another forum]. Now, we get to wait for the police, and the coroner, and all the rest of the happy crew that got yanked out of bed, and 4 hours later, we move at restricted speed the rest of the way to Y because bozo damaged 101's lead locomotive just enough, and we get in 15 minutes under the law. But, the crew was scheduled out on a tight turnaround, which they now cannot make because they must get their rest time per Federal law. So does 102, that they were scheduled to take out, just sit there waiting for time? Probably not. Instead the extra board goes to work and someone has to haul our late crew to Z. Now compound this, because bozo didn't just delay 101, he delayed every train following and every one approaching. And so now the crew schedulers must play the same game with a whole bunch of trains. It should be readily conclusive that it won't take much to cause the whole system to crater and really drive costs through the roof, just on all the extra board crews and shuffling to get people in place and back on schedule. That's why the airlines couldn't come back to full service instantly after 9/11. Almost every piece of equipment and every crew in the country was out of place in the rotation and had to be repositioned before normal operations could resume. This takes time--lots of it. They have the same problems with multi-hour weather events, but all of these are extraordinary. On the other hand, a RR has similar delays as a matter of routine, just because it moves at a slower pace, rendering it very costly and difficult to put mainline crews on fixed schedule or to move freight on a rigid published schedule.
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