Kevin C. SmithNow, if I can ever re-find the item they wrote about draying freight through the streets of Chicago because it was faster than interchange...
One thing that is always overlooked about Chicago - there is a sizable amount of freight - from both coasts - that terminates in the industries/manufacturers in Chicago in addition to the freight that passes through Chicago when being interchanged to connecting carriers.
Even though we are down to 6 Class 1's serving Chicago - their routes radiate among many points of the compass from Chicago - just because you send 10 trailers to interchange with a carrier in Chicago doesn't mean the a 'all rail' interchange is the most cost/time effective way to maximize the transportation value for either the carriers or the customers.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Kevin C. Smith"Some experienced operating men...are convinced that a much larger proportion of the freight movement than is customary, can be handled on schedule time, to the great benefit of the service in many ways..."
You need to remember to put this in the context of post-1880s railroading, where much of the freight was run as William H. Vanderbilt wanted: slowly and as cheaply as expedience could make it. This was the era when the real 'manifest' traffic was handled via the various express lines, and the best service was the best, ah, greased. (With 'schedule' guarantees and on-time oversight probably done by the express companies, not the railroad itself)
What the quote expresses is a different realization: that the fluidity of the railroad as a whole can be enhanced -- without expensive four-tracking expedients to get 'around' the issue -- by having freight traffic given schedules to block them into an overall 'expected' model -- see the note about reducing the issuance of explicit train orders for station-by-station 'control' of line occupancy?
Note that this 'schedule time' need not be fast ... just known. (And that the engines and maintenance, and crew calling, etc. equally needed to be 'well-regulated') It is interesting to consider how much of this amounts to a kind of 'paperwork reduction notice' where perhaps the 'overhead' involved with all the orders and dispatchers then keeping all the creeping stuff corralled was, indeed, the principal 'benefit' at the time.
Extensions to this would later be found significant: the lesson on the D&H about replacing one-speed drag utilization with faster manifest service and quicker engine turn being one; the performance of the SSW single-track main during wartime being another. One of the insights Harrison had was that (much as Sam Walton was finding in a different field) with reasonable data-processing equipment, it began to be possible to assign timings, and then track all the timings together, to extend knowledgeable and reasonably-precise scheduling practices to many other aspects of day-to-day running of railroad operations. Doing things 'on that level' at the turn of the 20th Century could probably be approximated for a while ... with a full cohort of trained, intelligent, and self-motivated people all perfectly kept 'networked' by telegraph and probably telephone ... but that wouldn't last in the practical world of 19th-Century-carryover railroading-as-usual. And those that tried would probably be rate-undercut by more expedient lines...
Saw this report in Railway Age about a meeting of the American Society of Railway Superintendents that brought to my mind the debates/comments surrounding the concept of PSR over the last few years:"Some experineced operating men...are convinced that a much larger proportion of the frieght movement than is customary, can be handled on schedule time, to the great benefit of the service in many ways. On one of the trunk lines, or rather on certain divisions of this trunk line, the issue of train orders to freights has been reduced to an astonishingly small number. This applies on only to through fast freights but to many [others] as well.”As reported in the issue for November 1st, 1901.Now, if I can ever re-find the item they wrote about draying freight through the streets of Chicago because it was faster than interchange...
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.