OMAHA, Neb. — Canadian National veteran Jim Vena hasn’t yet finished his second week as Union Pacific’s new chief operating officer and he already sees some low-hanging fruit that’s ready for harvest. Expect to see UP begin r...
http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2019/01/24-up-execs-pleased-with-precision-scheduled-railroading-progress
Brian Schmidt, Editor, Classic Trains magazine
Made my yearly trek to Topeka today. Passed the East end of the UP yard at Kansas City, KS - it was devoid of cars. Several track appeared to have locomotives on them - about 15 in total. West end of the yard appeared to be reasonably filled with autoracks.
I don't know what operational functions UP performs at KC, but the East End of the yard not having cars is ominous!
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
BaltACD Made my yearly trek to Topeka today. Passed the East end of the UP yard at Kansas City, KS - it was devoid of cars. Several track appeared to have locomotives on them - about 15 in total. West end of the yard appeared to be reasonably filled with autoracks. I don't know what operational functions UP performs at KC, but the East End of the yard not having cars is ominous!
It depends which yard you saw, the UP has a few there. Des Moines is going to close soon as a classification point, at least six yard jobs to be removed. (And I believe most car and locomotive people, too.) The class work is going to be moved to Neff in Kansas City. I wonder if part of the reason is to keep Neff's numbers high so they don't think to cut it, too.
So far, many in the field are looking favorable to PSR. They are saying it stands for Pickup - Setout - Recrew. That's because with so many trains having to do intermediate work that there is usually a back up of trains waiting work those yards. To make things work better in most of these yards, they eliminated the switchman helpers. (I recently was on a 270 car train, with 150 cars for my home terminal yard. We were intially held out 25 miles with 4 hours left to work because the yard wasn't ready. After about 3 hours, we were told to pull up to just within the switching limits of the yard, where we could change out with our outbound crew without penalty. Our outbound crew that was on duty 5 minutes after we were dead on HOS.)
Eventually, once they've gotten rid of all but the "appropriate business" and can run the same number of trains each way, they'll be able to cut more crew positions. Then those lower in seniority may change their outlook on PSR.
The number on the retention/reserve board is growing, more job cuts are coming, and they're still hiring for our area. I think now though, there is no hiring bonus.
Jeff
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