? Biggest pain in railroading?

[oltmannd]

BaltACD

The biggest problem of introducing 'revolutionary' technology in the North American rail industry is that whatever is introduced, unless operated only in trains of like technology, must operate with the existing rail fleet....in most cases, with innovations such as ECP, it only takes one unequipped car to stymie the technology, while the same was the case when the Janney Coupler and the Westinghouse Air Brake came on the scene the trains being handled and the amount of equipment owned by each company was much smaller than it is today.

The ability to design a innovation and have it work, even when intermixed with existing unequipped equipment will be critical to having the innovation accepted.  The cost to retrofit existing equipment to new technology is a significant hurdle to the acceptance of new technology....that and competing new technologies in the same field must be built to standards that will permit interoperability; a tall wall for the egos behind new technologies to climb.  A wall that will have to be scaled if ECP is to be the standard for braking in the future.

It was like pulling teeth to get the private car owner to spring for the $70 a car it took to install AEI. Just wait for the battle over ECP!

[henry6]

Oltmand...the further I get away from Knieling the more I view him as you do:  his mission was to get railroads and shippers to stop thinking the same old same old and find better, more economical, more efficient ways of doing what they had been doing for over a hundred years at that poing.

So, BaltACD, it follows that your statement about "...introducing 'revolutinary' technology" has great meaning both then and now.  One of the first problems is that railroads are private businesses and corporations who must weigh carefully the cost of anything and everything that comes along before jumping aboard.  Although we cherish private enterprise so dearly in this country it can often get bogged down in tradition and status quo on the basis of economics and the current and near future bottom line which can lead to oblivion. I agree that a wholesale reinventing of the wheel is certainly out of sight, so ways have to be found to intergrate something new and slowly abosrb it into the system.  Labor and governement have often been instrumental in giving a push in the face of a market place that resists.  And thankfully under deregulation, or at least with the demise of the ICC system, some marketing and planning could be done instead of the long and reactionary process applying for tariffs.  

[BaltACD]

The biggest problem of introducing 'revolutionary' technology in the North American rail industry is that whatever is introduced, unless operated only in trains of like technology, must operate with the existing rail fleet....in most cases, with innovations such as ECP, it only takes one unequipped car to stymie the technology, while the same was the case when the Janney Coupler and the Westinghouse Air Brake came on the scene the trains being handled and the amount of equipment owned by each company was much smaller than it is today.

The ability to design a innovation and have it work, even when intermixed with existing unequipped equipment will be critical to having the innovation accepted.  The cost to retrofit existing equipment to new technology is a significant hurdle to the acceptance of new technology....that and competing new technologies in the same field must be built to standards that will permit interoperability; a tall wall for the egos behind new technologies to climb.  A wall that will have to be scaled if ECP is to be the standard for braking in the future.

[oltmannd]

I'm not pulling your leg. Although I think Kneiling was really more about rattling cages to wake people up than serious about transformation. He just wanted somebody, anybody, to think about doing something different. At the point in time he was writing, the status quo was a sinking ship and it didn't seem like anybody realized it or cared. So, he would toss out one radical idea after another, sometimes just restating the same idea in a different manner, trying to get just a little traction. The existing technology, for all the problems, is amazingly reliable. Maybe not so amazing if you consider it's been honed for over 100 years, though. It is really going to take some doing to get anything new up to that level of reliability. You've noted that there have been some attempts. I'd add Iron Highway, the trough train, and the conveyor train to that list. All have had some real teething pains. Some fatally so. The industry has been messing around with ECP for about 15 years now and it's still just in the trial phase. I think that ECP has to become a full time - prime time reality for unit and intermodal trains before anybody will have the time and energy to rethinking the rest of the car fleet. Interestingly, I think we spend so much time worrying about how to keep the carload traffic efficient, we sometimes lose sight of the reality that intermodal is going to swamp the car load traffic in another 20 year or so. The car load traffic will be the niche and intermodal will be the base load.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

Last night in thinking about this thread, I recalled a refrain from a song or poem from like 20 or 30 years ago that seems to sum up the myriad of possible aggravations, as follows [sung or chanted to a steady, thumping beat, at about a waltz '3-count' tempo] -

''Headaches, heartaches, and all kinds of pain,

Are in the life of a railroad train.''  [and train people]

Ohhhh, yeahhhh.

- PDN.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

As I'm reading Don's post immediately above, 2 questions came to mind.  Then I reached and read his last sentence - The problem then becomes how to get from "now" to "then" and just how painful it would be to get a new set of technology "fully grown". - and so I was left with just 1 question, as follows:   

Don, have you been either smoking the 'weed' of John Kneiling - or are you just pulling my leg ?

If neither of the above, then we're back to the 1st question: Should we - and how do we - start implementing such a system ?

John advocated essentially superimposing it on top of the existing system - sharing just the gauge, signals, and crews, with absolutely no compatibility between the equipment sets.  That would be similar to the RoadRailer operations, and actually most intermodal container operations, esp. the double-stacks.  They have mostly their own equipment - drawbar-connected well cars and spine cars are a complete break with traditional equipment design philosophies, and embody a lot of the kinds of improvements that you suggest, esp. freedom from a lot of the air brake hose troubles at the drawbar connections.

So OK - Where do we sign up to get started with this ?

- Paul North.

[oltmannd]

The problem isn't any one of the problems in isolation, it's that all the current technology grew up together. If you try to solve the air hose problem with an integrated coupler, you run afoul of draft strength, coupler alignment for hump yard operation, accommodation of cushion gear, etc. If you want to solve the air brake system using the brake pipe for control signal problem, you run afoul of compatibility and conversion strategy issues. I think the answer may lie in rethinking the whole system. If you are going to do ECP, you get an electronic trainline "for free". You can use it for all sorts of things, but one would be doing distributed power along the train's length. With distributed power, your train has no size limits (other than siding length and terminal considerations) and buff and draft requirements are much lower. With lower buff and draft to contend with, freight cars can be made lighter, reducing car ownership costs and fuel consumption. A lower cost car means it could be replaced more frequently with newer and better designs. (e.g. too many box car roofs are merely "sunscreen") Distributed power means the power stays with the tonnage, so en route block swaps come with their own HP. It might even allow, smaller, simpler, cabless locomotives built of more "disposable" technology. ECP will eventually result in much shorter dwells for en route pick up and set out and much quicker doubling in and out of places. Just couple, apply and release and go. Of course, hump yards would have to go away, replaced by either intermodal conversion, "logistics parks" or flat switching. The problem then becomes how to get from "now" to "then" and just how painful it would be to get a new set of technology "fully grown".

[BaltACD]

blue streak 1

Paul_D_North_Jr

I wasn't sure if in this context 'train line' was understood broadly enough to include everything from one 'gladhand' to the other, or if instead it is a little narrower to be comprised of the rigid 'brake pipe' [only] portion of that system.

 

Paul_D_North_Jr

and that was the general point of your 1st list of 'PITA's' a few posts back, if I understood it correctly - would that then indicate that car trains lines and air brakes need more/ better maintenance than they're now getting - more so than the apparently reliable locomotives ? 

PDN: The only experience I've had is two hoses leaking. Both times it was because the hose was too low and dragged on grade crossings (?), gradually opening a hole in the hose,  and finally the locomotives could not hold the air. Trains stopped in front of my home. Drove to the front with car number, brought the conductor back with a new hose which they tied up to a proper height and took conductors back to locomotive, and off the trains went. One hose I got was almost new and maintenance evidently not good as conductor told me same car had another incident 100 miles north of Atlanta.

As railcars have gotten longer over the years the problems of keeping the air hose coupled have magnified from the time of the 40 foot box car being the standard of railroading.  Since the ends of the cars slew a distance over the centerline of the track when the cars go around curves this slewing has to be taken into consideration when the cars are coupled to any and all other kinds of equipment that the railroads handle, additionally many cars have end of car cushioning devices which allow the coupler to travel 12 to 18 inches when the slack changes in the operation of a train or when the car is coupled to another car.  As a consequence the design of the air hose mounting bracket system is critical to the operation of long cars, as critical as that system is, it is also the most easily damaged when there are by-passed couplers, which are not a unusual occurence during switching.

Add the two instances together and you have the cause of the most common air hose parting on trains.  Air hose bracket damaged in some way during switching, doesn't move as the designers intended and thereby comes undone under the right conditions of curvature and slack movement.

If the rail sysetem was only populated by 40 foot box cars and 80 ton hoppers the incidence of parted air hoses would decline dramatically, however, so would the ton miles and profitability of the carriers.

[blue streak 1]

Paul_D_North_Jr

I wasn't sure if in this context 'train line' was understood broadly enough to include everything from one 'gladhand' to the other, or if instead it is a little narrower to be comprised of the rigid 'brake pipe' [only] portion of that system.

 

Paul_D_North_Jr

and that was the general point of your 1st list of 'PITA's' a few posts back, if I understood it correctly - would that then indicate that car trains lines and air brakes need more/ better maintenance than they're now getting - more so than the apparently reliable locomotives ? 

PDN: The only experience I've had is two hoses leaking. Both times it was because the hose was too low and dragged on grade crossings (?), gradually opening a hole in the hose,  and finally the locomotives could not hold the air. Trains stopped in front of my home. Drove to the front with car number, brought the conductor back with a new hose which they tied up to a proper height and took conductors back to locomotive, and off the trains went. One hose I got was almost new and maintenance evidently not good as conductor told me same car had another incident 100 miles north of Atlanta.

[bobwilcox]

 #2 on the white collar side of operating the business.

Getting a few thousand people to pull in the same direction.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

Right you are, Jay.  Unfortunately, I had to 'log off' before I'd finished formulating and completing my thoughts on this here, as follows - and this venue isn't too kind to 'footnoting' things in quite the way I'd like to or intended [see EDIT above now].  Nevertheless - 

Said another way [= acknowledging that I haven't done the best job with my 1st attempt above    ], the technology needs to be viewed from a 'holistic' or systems perspective.  Focusing on the conceded economics of just the air brake hose misses also taking into account the associated collateral costs that are imposed elsewhere in the cars and the actual operations - such as comparatively frequent disconnects and failures, and 'opportunity cost' of other benefits that are being precluded and passed by because this system can't accommodate them.

On the other hand, that there hasn't been such a movement to a better system effectively says that either -

- The railroads view the present air brake hose technology as optimum, or at least as at an acceptable compromise; or,

- They're not thrilled with it either, but the costs and complexities of any transition to something better are so daunting as to essentially lock them into the present technology, absent a rational method to transition to the next generation - really, the same 'backwards compatibility' problem of computer software, but here in the context of railroad hardware instead.

The glacially slow - but now partially underway - implementation of ECB = Electronically Controlled Brakes by BNSF and NS illustrates most of these points.

- Paul North.

[JayPotter]

Paul_D_North_Jr

To be intellectually objective and honest about this, those potential savings - 'economic outputs' ought to be taken into account as well. 

Perhaps other freight railroads would take a different view; but CSXT would not be receptive to technology that reduces the amount of force that couplers can withstand, regardless of how intellectually objective and honest the advocates of that technology might be.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

Railway Man

[snip]   What's relevant to me is whether it does the job economically. And I don't think anyone is even close to inventing a replacement for the air hose that delivers more economic output for less economic input. 

RWM 

I'm going to try to be a 'devil's advocate' here, though I'm not sure I can pull it off.  Nevertheless, here goes:

No question that the air hose does the job [= 'economic output'] - most of the time - pretty darn well, at what is likely the conclusively lowest possible 'first cost' level and with ongoing direct 'maintenance costs' that are pretty hard to beat [= less 'economic input'].  But is that the critical - or best - question or criteria to evaluate them with ?

Because what that statement appears to ignore is the indirect costs that are also accrued on account of brake hoses as the result of unnecessary train stops due to'break-aways'/ disconnects, shorter trains due to excessive leakage in cold weather, delays in brake application due to the 'lag' time of the decreased pressure wave propagation from front front to rear, poorer train handling and performance due to a sharper pressure gradient from the front of the train to the rear due to the same cause, and the resultant slack 'run-ins', etc.  While these are not direct 'economic inputs', they nevertheless do represent actual costs that are incurred by the conventional air brake hose system technology. 

Conversely, other air brake system connectors - such as the fully automatic Scharfenberg* coupler - could provide some 'value-added' benefits and savings, above and beyond the bare minimum of connecting the air brake pipe between 2 cars.  [For clarity, note that fully automatic couplings are those that make all connections between the rail vehicles (mechanical, air brake and electrical), without human intervention, in contrast to autocouplers which just handle the mechanical aspects.]  To be intellectually objective and honest about this, those potential savings - 'economic outputs' - ought to be taken into account as well. 

[EDITED FOR PLACEMENT]  * I acknowledge that the Scharfenberg coupler does not have the 'draft' or pulling capacity  of the traditional Janney coupler. 

- Paul North. 

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

OK, thanks.  I wasn't sure if in this context 'train line' was understood broadly enough to include everything from one 'gladhand' to the other, or if instead it is a little narrower to be comprised of the rigid 'brake pipe' [only] portion of that system.

Next question, then:  Since those train line failures are 'the largest single cause of train delays'   [spoken in the same tones as your local newscasters when reporting on the heinous crimes of the day    ] - and that was the general point of your 1st list of 'PITA's' a few posts back, if I understood it correctly - would that then indicate that car trains lines and air brakes need more/ better maintenance than they're now getting - more so than the apparently reliable locomotives ? 

Recall that John Kneiling often claimed that one reason that railcars are not reliable - in terms of being able to depend on them to 'complete the mission' [= deliver the cargo without a mechanical failure of some kind] - is that there are so many cars that any reasonable pool of maintenance money is so spread out and diluted among and between them that a high level of maintenance is unlikely and unaffordable.  Any truth to that, do you think ?

- Paul North.

[AgentKid]

Railway Man

And I don't think anyone is even close to inventing a replacement for the air hose that delivers more economic output for less economic input. 

I find that really amazing. In this time of believing that technology can solve almost all problems I am surprised that no one has been working on an improved system. Every winter from 65/66 to 84/85 my father, while he was a train dispatcher, had stories of failures and delays related in some way to air brake failure. The one single anecdote I recall from these winters is once a superintendent, who actually had been a buddy of my Dad's back when they were both Operator's, said in a way off the record comment after a long spell of -30 degree weather, that they couldn't rum trains any longer than they did back in steam days. And they were using SD40-2's by then.

Admittedly any solution would be as difficult to roll out as this ECB system, but I don't think it would cost as much. And it would have to be an all or nothing proposition, you couldn't just do it for high revenue unit trains.

I enjoyed hearing all the items that can still go wrong on today's railroads. It brought back a lot of memories. My Dad didn't experience many delays caused by mudslides working the East End though, Calgary to Swift Current, SK (insert mp3 file of The Who's "I Can See For Miles" here)

AgentKid

 

[oltmannd]

Paul_D_North_Jr

What's a ''car train line failure'' ? [as in oltmannd's post above]

Is it the same as - or different/ more than - an ordinary air hose 'gladhand' coupling becoming separated for some reason ?

Train line = Brake pipe. At least one of the failures required a run around hose - something worse than just needing a new air hose.

[Railway Man]

 Nor on mine.  I don't have a nice breakdown, but signal failures, weather issues (including washouts, downed trees, mudslides), grade-crossing collisions, tripped detectors, and temporary speed reductions are the overwhelming cause of train delay.  Locomotives are really very reliable now.

 RWM

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

What's a ''car train line failure'' ? [as in oltmannd's post above]

Is it the same as - or different/ more than - an ordinary air hose 'gladhand' coupling becoming separated for some reason ?

And if that's what it is, then these statistics would lend some support to the previous post above that this is an area of the railroad technology that could stand some improvement . . . 

- Paul North.

[henry6]

Biggest pain in railroading?  Since professional railroaders have dubbed us "foamers", then perhaps it is us!

[oltmannd]

Bob-Fryml

All of the failures listed by "oltmannd" do happen, but power failures on line of road are by far and away the most frequent.  If, during these times of stored units, the secondary trains were powered up sufficiently to where they could afford to lose a unit due to mechanical failure and still keep moving, the total operation would run a lot smoother. 

Not on my RR.  Here's a recent summary of the "bad things" that caused significant delay that were reported for a day:

3 - car train line failures

2 - kickers

one each of:

yard derailment

hand brake left on - car set out

WILD detector - car set out

TOL

weather/washout/mudslide

broken rail

lading not secured

EOT failure

hot wheel - no defect

locomotive dyn brk failure

locomotive air brake failure.

Only 2 of 16 are locomotive related.  9 of 16 are potentially air brake related. 

[oltmannd]

Railway Man

Why is the age of the technology relevant?  The flanged wheel on the rail is even older.  Agriculture was invented 6,000 years ago, I think.

What's relevant to me is whether it does the job economically. And I don't think anyone is even close to inventing a replacement for the air hose that delivers more economic output for less economic input. 

RWM

That's a good point. It's particularly difficult to apply new technology to a train simply because a failure on any single car can stop the whole train. Each component must be highly reliable in order to have a reasonable level of reliability for the whole system. All of the basic components of railroading have been honed to a high degree of reliability over decades of existence. It is hard for something right out of the box to match the current state of the art.

[Railway Man]

Why is the age of the technology relevant?  The flanged wheel on the rail is even older.  Agriculture was invented 6,000 years ago, I think.

What's relevant to me is whether it does the job economically. And I don't think anyone is even close to inventing a replacement for the air hose that delivers more economic output for less economic input. 

RWM

[AgentKid]

BaltACD

The PIA is the air hose

I commented about this in another thread several months ago. I observed that it didn't deem like a good idea to run 15,000 ton trains with the brakes connected together with cutting edge 19th Century technology. Surprisingly no one jumped in with a complete history of the hose and its' coupling (gladhand). Maybe this time.

 

AgentKid

 

[BaltACD]

Everyone has commented on a number of problem areas of railroading, however, what has been discussed thus far is more about the structural problems of the industry, not the pain in th A..

The PIA is the air hose.....when it bursts, the train stops .... when it comes uncoupled the train stops ....  when the train stops the Dispatcher has to start replaning the railroad, when the train stops the train crew has to get on the ground and find out why the train stopped.  A pain for all concerned.  Routine, but a pain!

[Bob-Fryml]

mbkcs

Bob-Fryml

'The biggest pains, eh?'

TRAIN DISPATCHERS:  Mixing heavy, underpowered, yet more profitable manifest traffic (trains that are moving with minimal horsepower per trailing ton) with overpowered, less profitable prestige traffic like piggybacks and doublestacks.  Throw in a few unit grain, unit ore, and unit coal trains into the mix, plus an Amtrak schedule or two, and the job becomes pretty difficult.  If all trains were limited to 50-mph and powered-up about the same it would cause a supremem service reliability performance that most managements couldn't handle. 

 

Are you saying that dispatchers are difficult to deal with because they make these decisions to combine different manifest and thus reek havoc on the system or that the dispatcher job is difficult to do?

ANSWER:  The train dispatcher's job is difficult to do.  Train dispatchers don't dictate power requirements, they just inherit what various service design departments, terminal managers, and operations control people cobble together.

 When I was a dispatcher, I didn't have say in the amount of power on a train nor did I have say in what made up the consist. I was only responsible for getting a train from point A to point B. Yes, sometimes trains, like Amtrak, took precedence for getting the main, but I was more worried about getting a crew to their destinations before they hogged it.

COMMENT:  Exactly true!

 As far as trains being limited to 50 mph and powered the same, while that sounds reasonable, it can't happen due to track conditions and what would be a very bad practice of limiting how many cars your train is going to pull which translates into profit margins. After all, isn't it that profit margin that drives any business.The more you pull, the more you make. Of course, I am sure it is more like metric ton/mile more than the number of cars per train. (I really need to go back to school and study economics.)

ANSWER:  The profit motive is a wonderful incentive, and I don't deny its validity; but, sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money.  Each time a freight operating with razor thin horsepower per trailing ton ratios (HP/TT) makes it from origin to destination, the railroad wins one.  My point is that when you figure that maybe as many as a third of the freight trains we see are experiencing some kind of power trouble, if that razor thin guy goes "piston-in-prarie," he's going to take maybe three to five trains down the "Hoglaw Toilet" with him.  Now throw in the resultant waste of fuel due to units idling unnecessarily, lost equipment productivity, additional crew overtime, additional crew manning costs, and lost customer goodwill, and you'll begin to understand that the failures to anticipate the what may be the biggest category of on-line breakdowns is inexcusable.

It also seems your point of view is that management, if presented with a perfectly running system wouldn't know what to do with themselves. If there were such a system that could be realistically employed, I am sure management would be very thin as so many of them wouldn't be needed.

I am interested in how how trains are powered. At the power desk where I worked, that person decided not just how much power to put on a train, with terrain and percentage of grades being some of the factors in those decisions, but also how to get power back to where it was needed. I am glad I could just focus on dispatching. What else do the power people have to consider?

ANSWER:  When Company policy dictates that a specific train symbol shall not exceed a certain maximum HP/TT, woe be the manager who violates that policy.  He better have a good reason why he's violating the ancient, sacred, voodoo tenets of the Operating Department because he's putting his career on the line.

Same with the poor "train management guy" working in a warm, far-off bunker who limits train size due to a forecast of severe below zero weather.  A 125-car unit coal train composed of brand new equipment may not experience any air brake problems, but the 125-car mixed merchandise surely will.  There will be microleaks throughout the trainline and it will be difficult to keep the air pumped up.  Set the brakes once while descending a long grade, and the locomotive may never be able to pump enough air to get the brakes to release.  That train stops and so does everyone else behind him.  If the guy orders some train size reductions to 75-cars, the forecasted weather hits, and the trains experience minimum problems, his decision is disdainfully dismissed as being "lucky." 

If, however, the weather suddenly takes a turn for the better and the guy has already sent out those smaller sized trains, he'll be mightily chastised and earn a viscious "verbal cauterization" of his hemorrhoids.

But if he honors the standard playbook, the weather gets bitterly cold, trains freeze up, and hours-of-service relief costs skyrocket, NOBODY but NOBODY in train management will every be blamed for not anticipating the subsequent service failures.

What a way to manage a railroad, huh?  

Do the dispatchers were you work, (worked) chose the power? Did they call the crew? We had to keep track of crews and then go to the crew caller and say, call a crew for this train. But I don't think that was the way it worked at the other railroads.

ANSWER:  Train dispatchers do not choose power.  Some Operations Control type or a far off Power Desk makes that decision.  Train dispatchers do prompt crew callers to call people to work at standard crew change locations or for Hours-of-Service relief.  

Thank you for sharing your thoughts to the posting.

ANSWER:  You're welcome.  And I apologize for my delicate, politically correct, and diplomatically sensitive answers.

[Bob-Fryml]

oltmannd

Bob-Fryml

THE FANTASY:  Class 1 railroads like to brag that they have a 92% locomotive availability, and that very well may be so.  But consider this:  that 92% availability figure suggests that for every three trains out there - one powered by a 3-unit consist, another by a 3-unit consist, and yet another with a 4-unit consist - one of those trains likely has a unit that is about to go "piston-in-prarie."  And if the train with the rock bottom horsepower per trailing ton is the train that loses a unit due to low oil, ground relay, turbocharger seizure, cooling fan failure, fluid pump failures, plugged filters, or a whole host of other maladies the whole railroad is sewn up.  With each class 1 having hundreds of road locomotives in storage due to the recession and diesel fuel being priced at half of what it was last year, there's no excuse for powering any freight train razor thin.     

It ain't just the choo-choos. It's everything the conks out unexpectedly. Signals, track, frt cars, vehicles, employees, computers, et.al. The RR is full of these random disasters and each has a impact on operations but there is nobody who know what the sensitivity of the network is to the frequency and duration of these "disasters". We just cope with them as "business as usual" not knowing how much improvement in reliability would get us on the network performance end. Ho-hum, another TOL, burst air hose, stop for a hot box detector.....

All of the failures listed by "oltmannd" do happen, but power failures on line of road are by far and away the most frequent.  If, during these times of stored units, the secondary trains were powered up sufficiently to where they could afford to lose a unit due to mechanical failure and still keep moving, the total operation would run a lot smoother. 

 

[Awesome!]

Does the policy of getting a locomotove assigments reflect on time performance?

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

'TOL' = 'Track Occupancy Light' = means it's 'ON' when it shouldn't be on the dispatcher's console, which really means that the signal system is either reacting to something similar to a train being there, or is malfunctioning in some other mysterious way.

As others have said - ''Moving the cars sholdn't have to be a big project unto itself''; ''Every day's an adventure''; and of course, ''It's not just a job - it's an adventure''.  Oh, yeah . . .

- PDN.

[oltmannd]

Bob-Fryml

THE FANTASY:  Class 1 railroads like to brag that they have a 92% locomotive availability, and that very well may be so.  But consider this:  that 92% availability figure suggests that for every three trains out there - one powered by a 3-unit consist, another by a 3-unit consist, and yet another with a 4-unit consist - one of those trains likely has a unit that is about to go "piston-in-prarie."  And if the train with the rock bottom horsepower per trailing ton is the train that loses a unit due to low oil, ground relay, turbocharger seizure, cooling fan failure, fluid pump failures, plugged filters, or a whole host of other maladies the whole railroad is sewn up.  With each class 1 having hundreds of road locomotives in storage due to the recession and diesel fuel being priced at half of what it was last year, there's no excuse for powering any freight train razor thin.     

It ain't just the choo-choos. It's everything the conks out unexpectedly. Signals, track, frt cars, vehicles, employees, computers, et.al. The RR is full of these random disasters and each has a impact on operations but there is nobody who know what the sensitivity of the network is to the frequency and duration of these "disasters". We just cope with them as "business as usual" not knowing how much improvement in reliability would get us on the network performance end. Ho-hum, another TOL, burst air hose, stop for a hot box detector.....