Paul_D_North_Jrs wabash1 said, I believe NS has something similar
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
wabash1 that program has been out there for years not to worry it wont replace engineers
that program has been out there for years not to worry it wont replace engineers
Oh thank GOD! I was nearly weeping there for a moment.
The road to to success is always under construction. _____________________________________________________________________________ When the going gets tough, the tough use duct tape.
Railway Man Here's the summary: 90% of the cost-benefit economics can be summarized as loss of main track capacity (some) against increase in fuel economy (quite a bit), and ability to have more predictable operations. Loss of main-track capacity includes: (1) there will no longer be any "hot" engineers (2) the software will be more cautious because it will assume more worst-case scenarios (3) offset against this is there will no longer be any slowpoke or incompetent engineers, either; (4) and fewer bad-handling break-in-twos. A significant cost of doing this is installing more wayside detectors -- a lot more of them. That's figured in to #3 above.
Here's the summary:
What level of traffic would justify this kind of investment? What other factors would be considered before making this investment (other than the general stuff that factors into every decision, like business conditions, company's cash position, etc.)
Thanks.
beaulieu This is where I start seeing problems, to this point I see a spreading out away from the cities and a more dispersed population. Distribution is becoming more road dependent as the rail network has been contracting. The big question is will the transportation system adapt to the people or will the people adapt to the transportation system. The answer is probably not at either extreme, but may not be near the center either. People will see a movement in either direction as a lowering of their Standard of Living.
This is where I start seeing problems, to this point I see a spreading out away from the cities and a more dispersed population. Distribution is becoming more road dependent as the rail network has been contracting. The big question is will the transportation system adapt to the people or will the people adapt to the transportation system. The answer is probably not at either extreme, but may not be near the center either. People will see a movement in either direction as a lowering of their Standard of Living.
My understanding is that the preponderance of the ruralization is occuring in rings around major cities and a limited number of very desirable resort/vacation locations. As I look at the rest of the U.S., I see a hollowing out of population. I don't think this geographic pattern is disfavorable to high-density rail transportation, because the manufacturing and distribution will not be in the resort/vacation locations (land cost too high and political opposition too high). Certainly the dray costs climb upward, but the counter to it is the drop in rail rates as volume climbs to the logistic park. It's not a clean equation, and I'm using a lot of assumptions that could well prove wrong. Certainly if cost is no object many of us will prefer a 2.5-acre ranchette over a condo on the 23rd floor next to a freeway. But my guess is that transportation, utility, and environmental cost structures are already snapping the rubber band back on the past 50 years of sprawl.
Yes , but a site is only Greenfield once. What happens when Vern's Household Chemicals located nicely adjacent to your Intermodal Terminal Goes belly-up and Steve's Widget company wants a new Warehouse and Distribution Center but finds the nearest empty suitable site is now 3 to 4 miles away. The cost of tearing down and cleaning up the Chemical Company site is unaffordably high.
We agree on that. What is today's spanking new logistics park can become tomorrow's Packard factory in Detroit if the developer and railway isn't very careful to preserve value. I am continually perplexed by how many rail-served industrial parks I visit of 1960-vintage that have almost no carload traffic remaining. Death by a thousand cuts.
This is the part I am struggling with, surely as far as the track is concerned the costs are pretty much in direct correlation with ton-mileage, subject to some modification with less than optimum access for maintenance. For the trains anything you can do to keep the power and cars moving, and the crews tied up (obviously these conflict) . For dispatching anything that decreases variability of train operation simplifies matters and thereby lowers costs and might allow automation.
One thing I do see that would result from moving to your vision of one Intermodal and one Manifest per day connecting each Mega-Logistics Center is the need to hold for and maintain connections which is the bane of carload freight.
RWM
Railway Man To describe this more fully, this rail future looks like...............vast relocation of shippers and receivers into these 20,000-50,000 acre concentrations, each generating volumes of around 1.5 million a year lifts and 1,000 or more carloads a day.RWM
To describe this more fully, this rail future looks like...............vast relocation of shippers and receivers into these 20,000-50,000 acre concentrations, each generating volumes of around 1.5 million a year lifts and 1,000 or more carloads a day.RWM
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Railway Man,
Your response to beaulieu is one of the best posts that I have seen. Would I be correct to conclude that you work for a railroad or a railway consulting firm?
UlrichStill very complex and costly compared to simply getting a truck to the shipper..loading it...and beating out of town to the receiver. There's beauty and efficiency in simplicity.
Still very complex and costly compared to simply getting a truck to the shipper..loading it...and beating out of town to the receiver. There's beauty and efficiency in simplicity.
As long Fuel is cheap, and Driver expenses aren't too high and he doesn't mind being married to the truck. Certainly if you can get him home every night it works good. Of course it also assumes road congestion won't get worse, the States (Provinces) can continue to find the money to maintain and build roads.
Railway Man< Framing portion snipped for brevity>Now the answer. If we re-examine the outside influences -- technology, costs, markets, public policies -- I think I want to pick out costs and public policies as the two key influences. I don't think technology is going to give us any sudden game-changers in the next 20-30 years, just slow, incremental evolution. While many futurists and forum readers will passionately disagree, I don't think anyone at a railway is banking on the likelihood of sudden inventions such as the steam engine or the Bessemer steel process that will upend the equations of transportation. I think we can set markets aside as an influence, too, as I think those are more a derivative of costs and public policy than an independent actor. Of the two outside influences remaining, I think public policy shows a steady trend highly disfavorable to creation of new transportation facilities if the creation causes any change in the status quo of any person. The notable example is any plan that proposes to enlarge the footprint of a current facility. Land acquisition necessary for a new, widened, or extended longitudinal corridor, whether in mountain, plain, or urban landscape, runs into a buzzsaw of opposition from just about everyone from across the ideological spectrum. The continued pull-down of authority in the U.S. from the federal, state, and municipal level to the level of the individual is starting to give individual people veto power over the nation as a whole. There are a number of rail, highway, and power-line projects that are literally foundering right now on the rock of a single person's opposition. The result of that is that transportation modes do not have significant opportunity to rearrange their footprint. Rail is obvious, but truck too -- lengthening truck-trailer combo lengths, increasing truck weights, building ANY facility that creates new truck traffic, all of those are facing public opposition that will win, period. At a minimum any new transportation idea now faces years if not decades of public hearings, EISs, permits, etc., for which outcomes are uncertain and process costs high, not even mentioning the lost opportunity cost. (Sure, there can be apocalyptic events that change the public's mind and unite everyone, but for those in this forum who I note like to put their bets on game-changers in public policy occurring, and changing the face of transportation in the U.S., I think we will all be dead and waiting for them still to happen.)That leaves costs, and that is I think the most seriously influential future trend that will affect all transportation modes, as well as all forms of production. As I look into the future, what I see is nothing but a steady upward trend in the cost of energy, basic materials, and labor, because so much of the easy-to-strip resources that cost very little to obtain are permanently used up. Whether one is talking oil, coal, iron ore, fish in the ocean, aquifer water, or fertile soil, the last 200 years has sliced off what miners term the blossom ores. The remaining resources are deeper, farther away, harder to get at, or in the case of things like oil or Ogallala Aquifer water, approaching permanent exhaustion. All of this (plus public policy) will result in costs going up remorselessly. Labor costs will rise too, because so much of labor cost today consists of unfunded health, retirement, and lifestyle expectations of the public that have yet to be paid for, unless people start accepting a lower standard of living. I think that people will cling to their current standard of living until their fingers are cold and dead. Again, the futurists are claiming that technology will ride to our rescue in the final reel, but to me that is like betting that the dealer in a game of 21 will always draw to a bust on his face card up.
Now the answer. If we re-examine the outside influences -- technology, costs, markets, public policies -- I think I want to pick out costs and public policies as the two key influences. I don't think technology is going to give us any sudden game-changers in the next 20-30 years, just slow, incremental evolution. While many futurists and forum readers will passionately disagree, I don't think anyone at a railway is banking on the likelihood of sudden inventions such as the steam engine or the Bessemer steel process that will upend the equations of transportation. I think we can set markets aside as an influence, too, as I think those are more a derivative of costs and public policy than an independent actor.
Of the two outside influences remaining, I think public policy shows a steady trend highly disfavorable to creation of new transportation facilities if the creation causes any change in the status quo of any person. The notable example is any plan that proposes to enlarge the footprint of a current facility. Land acquisition necessary for a new, widened, or extended longitudinal corridor, whether in mountain, plain, or urban landscape, runs into a buzzsaw of opposition from just about everyone from across the ideological spectrum. The continued pull-down of authority in the U.S. from the federal, state, and municipal level to the level of the individual is starting to give individual people veto power over the nation as a whole. There are a number of rail, highway, and power-line projects that are literally foundering right now on the rock of a single person's opposition. The result of that is that transportation modes do not have significant opportunity to rearrange their footprint. Rail is obvious, but truck too -- lengthening truck-trailer combo lengths, increasing truck weights, building ANY facility that creates new truck traffic, all of those are facing public opposition that will win, period. At a minimum any new transportation idea now faces years if not decades of public hearings, EISs, permits, etc., for which outcomes are uncertain and process costs high, not even mentioning the lost opportunity cost. (Sure, there can be apocalyptic events that change the public's mind and unite everyone, but for those in this forum who I note like to put their bets on game-changers in public policy occurring, and changing the face of transportation in the U.S., I think we will all be dead and waiting for them still to happen.)
That leaves costs, and that is I think the most seriously influential future trend that will affect all transportation modes, as well as all forms of production. As I look into the future, what I see is nothing but a steady upward trend in the cost of energy, basic materials, and labor, because so much of the easy-to-strip resources that cost very little to obtain are permanently used up. Whether one is talking oil, coal, iron ore, fish in the ocean, aquifer water, or fertile soil, the last 200 years has sliced off what miners term the blossom ores. The remaining resources are deeper, farther away, harder to get at, or in the case of things like oil or Ogallala Aquifer water, approaching permanent exhaustion. All of this (plus public policy) will result in costs going up remorselessly. Labor costs will rise too, because so much of labor cost today consists of unfunded health, retirement, and lifestyle expectations of the public that have yet to be paid for, unless people start accepting a lower standard of living. I think that people will cling to their current standard of living until their fingers are cold and dead. Again, the futurists are claiming that technology will ride to our rescue in the final reel, but to me that is like betting that the dealer in a game of 21 will always draw to a bust on his face card up.
I think these climbs in input costs will have highly uneven effects on transportation modes. Those modes that need lots of oil, labor, or materials will be highly disfavored unless they can radically increase their productivity. Trucking is very labor intensive and very oil intensive compared to rail, and surprising to most people, water transportation is much more vulnerable to oil price increases than rail. Changing the footprint to adapt any mode to a new economic equation is going to be virtually impossible, too, so we will live with what we have.One outcome of higher input costs will be a shift in markets. As truck transportation goes up in price, that doesn't necessarily mean that people will start shifting truckload freight to carload or intermodal freight. Many shippers and receivers instead will find it more economical to rearrange their locations of production and distribution to reduce total truck haul mileage, i.e., sources of production will be disseminated to move them closer to markets. Thus while this trend might reduce truck ton-miles, it might not proportionally increase rail ton-miles. However, countering against this, many shippers and receivers will find it economically infeasible to disseminate their production and distribution sources, and instead will seek to go in the other direction, and concentrate them. That will tend to favor rail market share of ton-miles at the expense of truck ton-miles.
I think these climbs in input costs will have highly uneven effects on transportation modes. Those modes that need lots of oil, labor, or materials will be highly disfavored unless they can radically increase their productivity. Trucking is very labor intensive and very oil intensive compared to rail, and surprising to most people, water transportation is much more vulnerable to oil price increases than rail. Changing the footprint to adapt any mode to a new economic equation is going to be virtually impossible, too, so we will live with what we have.
One outcome of higher input costs will be a shift in markets. As truck transportation goes up in price, that doesn't necessarily mean that people will start shifting truckload freight to carload or intermodal freight. Many shippers and receivers instead will find it more economical to rearrange their locations of production and distribution to reduce total truck haul mileage, i.e., sources of production will be disseminated to move them closer to markets. Thus while this trend might reduce truck ton-miles, it might not proportionally increase rail ton-miles. However, countering against this, many shippers and receivers will find it economically infeasible to disseminate their production and distribution sources, and instead will seek to go in the other direction, and concentrate them. That will tend to favor rail market share of ton-miles at the expense of truck ton-miles.
Or it may make some products unaffordable and put those manufacturers out of business. Food is the only sure thing.
I think another way to frame your question is whether railways are putting too much emphasis in longer, heavier trains and fewer and fewer O-D pairs with greater and greater volumes between them, and instead should think about shorter, lighter trains with more and more O-D pairs, and make up on volume what they lose on productivity of their unit of production. Where I come down on this question is that I think cost pressures on transportation modes as well as producers and shippers will create opportunities in both directions. But from the point of view of a railway, and given what I know about rail operating cost structures, I think the greater market opportunity will lie in even longer, heavier, trains, and even fewer O-D pairs. The key to making this work is to create a small number of giant logistics parks with "super lanes" connecting them. That in turn creates huge productivity advantages that in turn generates transportation cost savings that in turn incentives the shipper and receiver to desert their existing, disseminated production and distribution facilities that are dependent upon trucks for long hauls, and concentrate their facilities into the logistics parks to gain the low cost of rail long-hauls. The shippers and receivers then repurpose the truck out of the lanes and into a gathering and distribution role to and from these rail intermodal and carload hubs. (As I look at the long-term investment patterns of the industrial land developers, I see a lot of evidence that that is the future they already have envisioned. Also of note, J.B. Hunt, once about the largest truckload carrier in the U.S., now derives only 14% of its revenue from truckload and more than 50% from domestic intermodal.)
True but I was surprised by just how small a share the 10 largest hauliers had combined versus the total truckload market.
To describe this more fully, this rail future looks like two overlapping networks of great, big, logistics parks, each with about 25 hubs, that can each develop train-load volumes of domestic intermodal and loose-car freight on a daily or better basis to and from each other with between one and zero intermediate sorts. The manufacturing and distribution cost efficiency of the lower transportation costs plus the synergistic effects of the co-located manufacturing and distribution results in a vast relocation of shippers and receivers into these 20,000-50,000 acre concentrations, each generating volumes of around 1.5 million a year lifts and 1,000 or more carloads a day. This doesn't mean the end of loose-car freight to small shippers and receivers, but I think it does point toward a future where O-D pairs of less than 500 cars/year are squeezed out by cost, unless one end of the O-D pair is one of these monster logistics parks. (This model is nothing new -- it's a return to the big-city freighthouse of 1920, just writ XXL. In a nod to our friend Mr. Greyhounds, I think this model would not have dwindled nearly as much as it did had the ICC not disallowed the railways to develop effective truck gathering and distribution networks in the 1930s. On the other hand, the inadvertent favor the ICC gave railways in this decision is that we're not now stuck with having to abandon landlocked and obsolete logistics parks with inefficient main line access.)
The alternative is, as you asked me to consider, a future of less concentration of volume into the trainload, and greater numbers of O-D pairs. I think the cost structure that would create for railways always increases faster than the revenue stream that appears to pay for it -- the more volume you get, the more money you lose. And, more importantly, I think the market is going in the other direction. I think fuel cost and labor cost pressure on trucks (and rail) will strongly disfavor that kind of a market continuing to expand, compared to the alternative of greater concentration I describe above. In sum, I think the rail future is a rapid growth in domestic intermodal, some growth in carload, stagnation in bulk unit and international intermodal volumes, and the greatest return on investment is in logistics parks and "super lanes", rather than in trying to develop a smaller unit of production with a higher rate structure to pay for it.
BTW - everything that you said about the ability to hire and keep good Dispatchers, will apply in Spades unless the Railroads can do something about working conditions for T&E personnel. At least for Dispatchers there is no good reason why their hours of work should vary.
I wonder if our successors 50 years from now will look back wistfully at the oil bubble of 1910-1990, when the world gushed with low-cost oil and created this wonderful bubble of low-cost truck transportation, which gave us great economic benefit while it lasted but in the long term couldn't be sustained.RWM
I wonder if our successors 50 years from now will look back wistfully at the oil bubble of 1910-1990, when the world gushed with low-cost oil and created this wonderful bubble of low-cost truck transportation, which gave us great economic benefit while it lasted but in the long term couldn't be sustained.
Or the long gone higher Standard of Living for the majority of the people.
That Crane is computer operated. There is no human intervention to operate it other than someone to order a Container to be moved.
Every Container leaving ECT Delta Terminal whether by Highway or Rail is moved by one of the Cranes shown. The Terminal shown has the highest throughput of any in the World at least until the Euromax sister terminal to the north is completed.
The movement could be to a truck waiting at Outbound spot #4 or for Train 42769 on Oostellijke Terminal Track #3.
That crane pretty much sums up why intermodal isn't all that competitive on shorthauls. The expense of that crane..the expense of a highly skilled operator to run it...along with the dray expenses at either end make it one costly undertaking compared to simply hauling the container from door to door on a truck. On longer hauls it makes more sense to use rail as those fixed expenses are a smaller portion of the total expense.
Paul_D_North_Jr Thanks for that link. [And so much for great new ideas to make a fortune with . . . ] Do you have a link or more detailed description of how it works - the crane, the truck, and that part of the system, etc. I'm not looking for the electro-mechanical 'nut-and-bolt' details, but more like the general process. For example, somebody has to tell the crane - at least in general terms - which container[s] to pick and set. I presume that once it's pointed in the right direction, the crane handles the rest of the minutiae of moving there and correctly positioning itself and then aligning the spreader with the container's corners to pick it up, etc. - correct [Q] And then, do the automated trucks go to a storage or holding yard, how are they coordinated and unloaded, etc. - that kind of thing. Any additional information you can provide will be appreciated. Thanks. - Paul North.
Thanks for that link. [And so much for great new ideas to make a fortune with . . . ]
Do you have a link or more detailed description of how it works - the crane, the truck, and that part of the system, etc. I'm not looking for the electro-mechanical 'nut-and-bolt' details, but more like the general process. For example, somebody has to tell the crane - at least in general terms - which container[s] to pick and set. I presume that once it's pointed in the right direction, the crane handles the rest of the minutiae of moving there and correctly positioning itself and then aligning the spreader with the container's corners to pick it up, etc. - correct [Q] And then, do the automated trucks go to a storage or holding yard, how are they coordinated and unloaded, etc. - that kind of thing.
Any additional information you can provide will be appreciated. Thanks.
- Paul North.
I think they use a computerized virtual inventory system, whereby the computer decides where to store each container and when each container is then dispatched to either the highway terminal the rail terminal or the quayside container crane.
If you have Google Earth software this add-on database of European Intermodal Terminals is useful.
European Intermodal Terminal Overlay for Google Earth
Now with that add-on installed type in "Maasvlakte, Netherlands" into the search window. Zoom in on the ECT Delta Terminal. You will notice that the SW, SE, and NE quadrants of the Delta Terminal quay are already equipped with this system. The 22 Ship unloading cranes on the south side of the quay feed 84 of these storage units which act as buffers between the trains and trucks on one side and the ships and barges on the other. The photograph shows the ship end of the stacking area, movements to rail or highway are at the opposite end of the pile. At this point in time the automatic haulage is used to feed the ship loading systems only. The opposite end loads to straddle carriers that load the regular highway trucks or the "Road Trains" that feed either the Western (Westelijke) or Eastern (Oostelijke) rail terminals. I would expect they will figure out a way to segregate the land side in order to automate it like they have the seaward side in the next few years.
BTW if you can't use the overlay plug in these coordinates into Google Earth and you are looking at the ECT Delta Terminal 51 degrees 57' 10" North latitude 4 degrees 3' 10" East longitude
My thoughts were based on the dispersion of population out of the core cities, and your previous comments on drayage costs being a significant problem for Intermodal. What you are suggesting is the very antithesis of the principal of "Just in Time" production, unless the material stockpiled was maintained in the most basic state of a raw material. I see problems of diminishing returns to productivity in the constant increases in the size of the trains, take the shuttle grain trains, what is the next step 130 or 150 cars? This would imply fewer, further apart loading terminals requiring greater truck haulage, or on the other hand it could make it economic to develop a regional railroad system independent of the line-haul companies, perhaps in some ways similar to the sugarcane railways, operational only during harvest season.
With reference to the automated off-road haulage here is a photograph of a totally automated container crane and two automated off-road haulage vehicles operating at the ECT Terminal at Rotterdam's Maasvlakte 1 Container Port.
ECT Container Handling System
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut? No, that's too mean to Mr. Kneiling. He was right in this case, but both premature and cluttered up his message with too much jeremiad and too much engineering gizmos such as the giant off-road dray trucks. If your audience is already predisposed to think you're a jerk, and if you can't resist diverting mid-message into sideshows, it's unlikely you'll ever get your point across. Which means you've wasted your time.
In my experience, if your solution can't be explained in 30 seconds, your solution is probably too complicated to work. If it relies on the invention or adoption of more than one piece of new equipment, it is probably too expensive to work. If more than one chains of command have to agree to it, it's probably too unfocused to work.
Kneiling wanted to be another Robert Moses, a man who would have had no compunction enforcing his will on the public and democracy be dam-ned. I think he was always frustrated by the messiness of human power and social structures, which always got in the way of his ideas.
RWM -
First - I offer belated thanks for your thorough and detailed explanation of last Friday (07-17-2009, 7:11 PM) of the difference between PTC and automated train control - more importantly, the 'architecture' of the logic systems for authority, safety, and efficiency behind them - in response to my question.
Second - As I read the above exposition - as well as several others you've written recently - that line from Billy Joel's song "The Piano Man" keeps coming to mind: "Man, what are you doing here ?". I know that I - and many others, too, I'm sure - are very appreciative that you are.
Third - You're probably not going to want to hear/ read this, but I need to say it anyway: The system you describe in the quote below seems exactly like what John Kneiling advocated and predicted for his 'land-ship' integral trains of 5 miles' length with distributed power, serving industrial parks that had giant off-road container drayage trucks (kind of like those Australian 'road-trains' above, I suppose). If there's a substantive difference (other than brevity), I don't see it, and would like to know what it is. But regardless of that, the similarity doesn't detract from the concept or the forces that will create it - I too see things moving that way. The former Bethlehem Steel plant on the east side of Bethlehem, PA is well on its way to becoming one of those - I believe that Majestic Realty from California has big plans for that site.
Again, thanks for your insights and analysis. It's always informative and fun to read.
Best regards,
Railway Man [many snips] But from the point of view of a railway, and given what I know about rail operating cost structures, I think the greater market opportunity will lie in even longer, heavier, trains, and even fewer O-D pairs. The key to making this work is to create a small number of giant logistics parks with "super lanes" connecting them. That in turn creates huge productivity advantages that in turn generates transportation cost savings that in turn incentives the shipper and receiver to desert their existing, disseminated production and distribution facilities that are dependent upon trucks for long hauls, and concentrate their facilities into the logistics parks to gain the low cost of rail long-hauls. The shippers and receivers then repurpose the truck out of the lanes and into a gathering and distribution role to and from these rail intermodal and carload hubs. [snips] RWM
It can only be a throttle assist. It can't replace engineer's responsibilities. No matter what you do there are too many variables that wander off from any programmed situation, you need your engineer there to keep control of the engine.
BaltACDIn your Grad school example, I would be willing to bet that the President's secretary had been in that position long term. Being in the position long term she had come to grips with the various timings of all the routine occurrences that affected the Presidents office and would anticipate the needs for certain things to occur at particular times through the year and already have 95% of all the needs handled when the time came. Those hired to replace the secretary have yet to learn the timing and the needs that are coming through the door....as a consequence they are having to think their way through the occurrence 100% in real time while performing the actions. A persons efficiency decreases when, for every step of the way, he has to think about 'what is next and how do I do that'. You can act or you can think...but you can't do both at the most effective level together.
Yes, I really do not know how long she had been there--it may have been thirty-three years--but she had certainly grown with the job; as more needed to be done, she added the responsibility to what she already had, and saved the additional cost of another employee. And, you are right about the learning processes of the replacements. I rather doubt that she left a training manual.
She was also a fan of the Georgia Crackers (minor league baseball team). I may have a faulty recall, but I believe that she could give you statistics for many years of their play.
Johnny
beaulieu Railway Man, do you think that the problem might be the fact that the railroads have locked themselves into being only able to serve a market that has become highly competitive, might be part of the problem? Consider the BNSF, how many total customers did the constituent companies have in the 1950s versus how many they have now, and consider how many shipments. As I see it, the railroads have gotten more efficient at moving what they move, the problem is that the have done this by concentrating continually on a smaller and smaller portion of the market. Railroads have achieved efficiency by raising the minimum size of their basic unit of production. To raise Railroad's market share significantly they will have to accomplish two things, first they have to find a way to handle smaller shipments, and second they have to find a way to reach smaller shippers. And as a corollary they need to stop pulling back to fewer and fewer, and more widely dispersed terminals.
Railway Man, do you think that the problem might be the fact that the railroads have locked themselves into being only able to serve a market that has become highly competitive, might be part of the problem? Consider the BNSF, how many total customers did the constituent companies have in the 1950s versus how many they have now, and consider how many shipments. As I see it, the railroads have gotten more efficient at moving what they move, the problem is that the have done this by concentrating continually on a smaller and smaller portion of the market. Railroads have achieved efficiency by raising the minimum size of their basic unit of production. To raise Railroad's market share significantly they will have to accomplish two things, first they have to find a way to handle smaller shipments, and second they have to find a way to reach smaller shippers. And as a corollary they need to stop pulling back to fewer and fewer, and more widely dispersed terminals.
Interesting question because it's a core question that is the foundation of almost every decision in which I am involved professionally. While we might not specifically discuss this question every day at work, with what are usually less-than-macro decisions, we are informed by this question always.
Before I start to address your question, I need to lay down a framework on which the answer will rest, as follows. I think the key to shaping any railroading decision that involves markets, costs, and pricing starts with having a solid understanding of the unit of production of a transportation mode, and understanding how the productivity of that unit is likely to be influenced by future changes in technology, external cost inputs, markets, and public policy outcomes of citizen goals and aspirations. For the railway, the basic unit of production is the train. Productivity is created by getting more output out of the train for less input of labor, fuel, main track capacity, etc. For the truckload carrier, the unit is the 53' box 95-99% of the time and 28' doubles and triples the other 1-5% of the time. Productivity is created by getting greater output for less input of labor, fuel, and terminal expense, or by getting Washington, D.C., to permit more weight and length per unit. The rail unit of production is tightly restricted upward in physical size by technology and the physical plant. The truck unit is tightly restricted upward by regulation. Downward limits for both are largely cost-related -- cost inputs do not decline as fast as production outputs, meaning prices have to go up. Price increases encounter market resistance. All of these limits are dynamic, and how they will change is unpredictable on a fine scale. Internally to railways, the physical plant is functionally focused on a decision about the optimum size of the unit of production, i.e., the size of the train. Doubling the size of the rail unit and halving the number of units, or halving the size of the unit and doubling their number, has dramatic effects on the productivity of the rail plant. Internally to trucking, the more important limit is public policy, not physical plant or technology, because trucks are tenants on a public infrastructure. Obviously as shown by Australian road trains, a single truckload can be much larger than is permittable in the U.S.
If I may, now let me frame your question as follows: Would railways more positively influence market share, revenue, and profit by attempting to lower the size of the unit of production, or by attempting to increase the size of the unit of production? Or by some blend of both? Stated another way, would the negative productivity effects of smaller rail units be exceeded by the value of the market opportunities that would then appear?
One more set of key understandings: We know that railways since the 1830s have been adapting their physical plant to optimize its ability to extract the maximum value from future markets, technology, costs, and regulations. The focus for the last century has been on enabling an ever-larger train. Your proposition is that future markets are trending toward greater geographic fragmentation and smaller shipment sizes, which would favor a smaller rail unit of production. Behind your proposition is recent history: the steady growth of truck market share versus rail market share, as defined by revenue, and the stable split of market share between truck and rail as defined by ton-miles.
Aitomation is great, and I am sure you can do all that is being discussed here, BUT! Until the ENTIRE ire American network is enclosed on a Private R.O.W. There will be problems, not with the equipment of the rauilroads; the major issue, IMO will be tresspassers, and their lawyers.
Maybe , the railroads can hire the un-rmployed to count coup on the drivers who ignore grade crossing warnings? Create locomotives with large plows to sweep aside the carnage from crossing encounters?
As a retired software engineer/developer as well as a railfan and streetcar fan I would like to offer my opinion on this most interesting issue:
Total computer controlled operations of a rail line that maintains its way through public territory appears to be totally unfeasible. Of course, you can run trains computer controlled and optimized towards a variety of criteria, including fuel usage optimization, but to really be efficient a whole bunch of conditions would need to be met. Amongst these were: all trains need to be controlled the same way, including thrufare of yards, etc. No human access to the tracks had to be possible, i.e. conditions that could be met on a Maglev line or elevated Monorail, etc. Of course no crossings whatsoever, other than strictly computer controlled. The whole system needed to be made failsafe as much is possible, meaning that the whole network needed to be controlled by the same center using several computers that all need to have independent power supply, several GPS satellites, etc. At least three independent circuits necessary. What an effort! I doubt that it were cheaper than to employ a few thousand loco engineers. Also, the characteristics of locos that are mued today are very different. I am truly amazed to see that sometimes old Alcos get mixed with more modern EMDs etc. If I am not totally wrong, all the remote controls today are achieving is common throttle positions and braking power. Also, if some mid or end train helpers are employed they are controlled by radio devices whose signals will be transformed again into throttle and break positions, and this already with some delays. And if we are unlucky they are just in a tunnel and don't react immediately at all.
Now with the envisaged operatorless operations practically all locos need to get their signals at the same time, meaning that all railway tunnels need to be equipped with fail safe relay transmitters, etc.
If we look at the software required at the various levels, in the locos, the relay stations, the central ops center and its simultaneous backup and knowing my fellow software engineers I'm sure that development and testing will takes ages and will be very expensive.
Long will last the profession of loco engineer!
Railway ManTxhighballer: I and many like me agree with you 100%. But there is a lack of good engineers, and a lack of people who are willing to be railroaders for the wages that will make railroads competitive with other transportation modes, or, keep the cost of rail transportation low enough to retain shippers who will find alternatives to any transportation mode if the price of transportation rises $0.0001 a ton-mile. Rail rates have fallen dramatically since 1980 but rail market share has scarcely budged, which indicates how much rail pricing and costs had to be slashed just to retain the market share rail already had. The future is hard to predict, but my best guess is that pressure on rail rates will not abate but actually get much worse. Thus the interest in finding developing train-handling, dispatching, and train-control automation. RWM
Txhighballer: I and many like me agree with you 100%. But there is a lack of good engineers, and a lack of people who are willing to be railroaders for the wages that will make railroads competitive with other transportation modes, or, keep the cost of rail transportation low enough to retain shippers who will find alternatives to any transportation mode if the price of transportation rises $0.0001 a ton-mile. Rail rates have fallen dramatically since 1980 but rail market share has scarcely budged, which indicates how much rail pricing and costs had to be slashed just to retain the market share rail already had. The future is hard to predict, but my best guess is that pressure on rail rates will not abate but actually get much worse. Thus the interest in finding developing train-handling, dispatching, and train-control automation.
Too many people today have jobs and not careers...and it is not all thier fault as companies feel that anybody can be hired to do a given job at any time for any pay and be glad they have a job; if you don't like it, leave because there are ten people in line who want a paycheck. If you do choose a career there is no guarantee, no matter how dedicated and sincere you are, that you will be able to hold onto the job, or the employer for that matter, as budget cuts, consolidations, mergers, and big mania cuts so many off at the start. There is no loyalty or respect from the ranks because there is no loyalty or respect from management. If you're out of work and somebody's hiring, go get it even if it isn't what you're trained to do or want to do, because that's all thats left in this town or that. It is hard for employers to find good, hard working, dedicated employees today because those prospective employees know they are being offered empty promises of any kind of future...just hope they can hang on until they qualify for unemployment benefits before the promise fizzles out. Employers don't get dedicated, loyal, qualified employees seeking careers if they merely merely jobs instead of real career opportunities. I see kids coming into my business everyday starry eyed and optimistic only to find they were promised things unatainable in positions they are totally not qualified to do; they last but months a flee to another business. Even those "qualified" run when they are expected to perform well beyond their experience or understanding of the trade.
I was with two dedicated railroaders the other day who love thier work but hate their jobs....pay is good but the hours aren't. They have stuck things out because of seniority and pay, but realize they don't have the private lives they or their families would really like. If we were in better economic times, many of these railroaders would jump to better job opportunities; they are dedicated to a paycheck, but not to a career
RIDEWITHMEHENRY is the name for our almost monthly day of riding trains and transit in either the NYCity or Philadelphia areas including all commuter lines, Amtrak, subways, light rail and trolleys, bus and ferries when warranted. No fees, just let us know you want to join the ride and pay your fares. Ask to be on our email list or find us on FB as RIDEWITHMEHENRY (all caps) to get descriptions of each outing.
Deggesty It is sad that there is so little dedication to their work on the part of so many people. There have always been, of course, people who thought of their "jobs" simply as sources of income and took no pleasure in their work, but it seems that such people now form a greater proportion of the work force. At my graduate school, when the president's secretary retired, at least two, if not three, people had to be hired to handled all the work that she had taken care of. Johnny
It is sad that there is so little dedication to their work on the part of so many people. There have always been, of course, people who thought of their "jobs" simply as sources of income and took no pleasure in their work, but it seems that such people now form a greater proportion of the work force.
At my graduate school, when the president's secretary retired, at least two, if not three, people had to be hired to handled all the work that she had taken care of.
In your Grad school example, I would be willing to bet that the President's secretary had been in that position long term. Being in the position long term she had come to grips with the various timings of all the routine occurrences that affected the Presidents office and would anticipate the needs for certain things to occur at particular times through the year and already have 95% of all the needs handled when the time came. Those hired to replace the secretary have yet to learn the timing and the needs that are coming through the door....as a consequence they are having to think their way through the occurrence 100% in real time while performing the actions. A persons efficiency decreases when, for every step of the way, he has to think about 'what is next and how do I do that'. You can act or you can think...but you can't do both at the most effective level together.
To revert to RWM's assessment of Dispatcher's abilities. In today's Dispatching Offices you have about 10/15% of dispatchers that began their railroad career's as Telegraph Operators in the various towers that existed 20-30 years ago; jobs in which they had a first hand view to the Dispatching profession and it's interaction with trains and the crews that operate them. The rest of the dispatchers have come through the various railroads dispatcher training programs, where prior railroad experience was not a requirement in acceptance to the program. Additionally, as most of those accepted to such programs are under 30, they are members of the video game age and relate the tools of the Computer Aided Dispatching systems more to the video games they know than to the cold hard steel of the trains that they have have very little if any experience with. Some of those accepted to the dispatcher train programs do have prior railroad experience, some from various clerical positions and some from Train & Engine service. Those from T&E service, when on their trains, found it very easy to dispatch their own train....once in a position of having to dispatch 20-30 or more trains on their territories their views of dispatching changed from what it was when they were in the field.
Dispatching is a learning experience. There is an old saying - Good Judgement comes from experience; Experience comes from bad judgement. The biggest thing that a good dispatcher brings to the job is vision. Vision to see his territory as it is this instant, and how it will be in another 2 hours, another 4 hours, another 8 hours, another 16 hours - knowing from experience what trains will be entering his territory and what if any station work they are scheduled to perform, what their relative priority is in relation to the trains that are already on his territory, all the while keeping in mind the Hours of Service situation for each train on the territory, all of which is easy so long as there are no engine failures, no undesired emergency brake applications, no defect detector activations that require on the ground train inspections, no trains flagging passing trains for on ground inspections account a defect that has been observed. It is a great profession with each and every day a learning experience, the same old thing is never the same.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
I have not yet drawn that conclusion from my years in railroading. I think that all we are seeing is the outcome of expanding job opportunity. Fifty years ago, a railway job was a very good job compared to all the other possible jobs a young man might take, in terms of pay, job security, job satisfaction, and amount of manual labor. Today, railway jobs are not competing with hoeing beet tops under the 100-degree sun, or mind-numbing factory assembly jobs in brutal heat, noise, and danger. They are competing against all sorts of nice jobs in an office building, in businesses or services that do not operate around the clock, do not have far-flung operations, do not ever go outdoors for anything, and have equal or better job satisfaction, security, chance for advancement, and pay. Fifty years ago railways could take the very best people because the best people had few other good options, and the rest of the job pool ended up in manual labor on a farm or factory.
I have a dozen 20- and 30-somethings working for me today in my little part of the railway, and with one exception, they are all people who are smarter, harder-working, and more dedicated than I was at that age. But we also pay them competitively with the software firms, the insurance firms, the pharmaeutical firms, the engineering firms, too, with starting salaries out of college of $50,000 and plenty of opportunity to advance to $130,000 in today's dollars. I really do not think we can hire the cream of the crop -- which is what railways used to be able to choose for their trainmen, dispatchers, operators, and clerks -- for $30,000 a year, work them 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, wherever on the system we need them, and tell them that if they work hard and don't complain and become expert in their craft, we might be able to advance them to $50,000 by the time they are retirement age. Our choice is either we double our salaries for train service, track forces, shop forces, dispatchers, and clerks, or accept that we won't get the best like we used to. But if we double our salaries, while we will get a better class of employee, it won't result in doubling our productivity, which means we'll then go bankrupt and liquidate the business, because the customers sure won't take a massive increase in rates. And that is why automation has been steadily making inroads in railways for the last 100 years.
Railway Man A very good dispatcher reaches back to level 20 or so. The software usually blows up when it tries to think about level 4.
[RWM quotation from another post]Speaking as a former dispatcher, I have looked with equivalent interest and dread at the efforts to automate dispatching. My experience is that about 1 in 10 dispatchers are outstanding, another 1 in 10 are good enough most days, 6 are mediocre, 1 is bad, and another 1 is wretched. Mediocre is not good enough any more as the need for reliability, efficiency, and cost reduction becomes more intense every day. I seriously doubt it is possible to create a dispatching automation tool that is any better than the mediocre dispatcher, and frankly I think it will be somewhat worse than that. But given that the trend I see in dispatching offices is towards greater and greater difficulty in finding and retaining dispatchers (the good ones soon get promoted or find a better-paying job in another industry), the quality is slowly sinking and I doubt there's any way to reverse it.
NP Red Back to fuel economy. Could or does a computer system have a display on the console that shows the recomended speed at this location, at this time for the best fuel economy? That seems like a good idea. Some computer system can look at the traffic, grade etc. and just make a suggestion rather than any type of direct control over the train. The engineer would then have some data the represents the "big picture".
Back to fuel economy. Could or does a computer system have a display on the console that shows the recomended speed at this location, at this time for the best fuel economy? That seems like a good idea. Some computer system can look at the traffic, grade etc. and just make a suggestion rather than any type of direct control over the train. The engineer would then have some data the represents the "big picture".
Could or does a computer system also make suggestions to the dispatcher like which trains should go into or out of which sidings in order to be fuel efficient.
Would something like this help schedule MOW better?
In theory it's possible to design a dispatching automation system that accounts for maintenance-of-way, balancing productivity cost of maintenance against productivity cost of trains versus service commitments and financial incentives of trains versus capacity of the railway versus cost penalty of slow orders versus 1,000 other things. Very hard to do, because there are billions of possible combinations that have to be calculated, and it all rests on top of a mountain of assumptions most of which are in turn based on assumptions that are all entangled with each other. I am fairly confident I will not see it in my lifetime.
Back to fuel economy. Could or does a computer system have a display on the console that shows the recomended speed at this location, at this time for the best fuel economy? That seems like a good idea. Some computer system can look at the traffic, grade etc. and just make a suggestion rather than any type of direct control over the train. The engineer would then have some data the represents the "big picture". Could or does a computer system also make suggestions to the dispatcher like which trains should go into or out of which sidings in order to be fuel efficient. Would something like this help schedule MOW better?
There must be some very interesting concepts on why man works so hard to find machines to do all the work. It is easy to understand the mechanical parts of digging, pickingup, etc. But the more cerebral work has to have some kind of philosophical if not spiritual take. Is it because man is lazy? unsure of himself? unsure of fellow men? likes gadgets? wants to shun resposniblity? is just too cheap to hire fellow man? needs to be "in control" but with "hands off"? something else? Is it really a pursuit for safety and economy or is there something sinsiter about letting microchips run the world?
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.