Pennies squashed on rail and other news

[sooblue]

There is a stretch of track located in Mpls. Mn
that has had so many pennies squashed on it that the rail is copper coated for 1 mile.

The earliest date of the pennies is 1910.
for 300 feet the color goes from copper to tin as durring WWII tin was used instead of copper.

BNSF refusses to replace that stretch of track claiming that it is a landmark and brings in extra revenue as shippers want it known that their product has traveled the copper mile.

BNSF is studying how to upgrade said mile as the rail is getting rather thin in spots. They are trying to transfer the pennies to new rail.

The UP on the other hand is begining to finaly scrape the auto paint off the front of it's lead engines after years of continuous grade crossing hits.
Says UP: "after 1500 hits per year the paint gets a little thick and begins to slow the engines down some"

It's thought that 2 new jobs will be added to UPs staff just for paint scraping.
Names have circulated for days. The top two names and by far the leading experts in UPs opinion are
-------- and ----. UP has been looking for them for some time now. The last clue they had as to their where abouts was that they had waders on and they were carrying shovels.
Others say they were spotted trying to peal off pennies from the copper mile in Mpls. MN.

Will UP find M&M?
Will the paint scraping really start?
will BNSF replace the copper Mile?
Only time will tell

[edblysard]

Well done.
Yhe Unihead Ed

[JoeKoh]

when they aren't scraping paint off the locomotive they car crush whats left of the vehicles invovled in train collisions.won't be a lot left.
stay safe
joe

[dknelson]

Squashed bugs on the windshields of Santa Fe's Alco PAs could accumulate to as much as a foot thick. Some crews would scrape this off and keep it as a souvenir. There is currently an E-Bay auction for such a scraping the current bidding has hit $27.
Dave Nelson

[bfsfabs]

Always good to hear from the Arts & Entertainment editor from time to time. Great story. I don't beleive a word of it but, good story. Insightful up to the minute reporting.

Lowell

[Anonymous]

i was a machinist at the UP roseville service track and the only thing worse than grade crossing damage, was when they would hit a cow. LOTS OF PIECES AND PARTS. ROUGH ON THE NOSE TOO!

[Anonymous]

HEY ED
what RR do you work for?
Marty

[Mookie]

Since we are talking $ - here's my 2 cents -
Heard years ago that a pig would derail an engine, since they are round and roll rather than splatter. Assume they could do that to a modern diesel, but not for sure. Anyone care to comment?

Jen

[edblysard]

The Port Terminal Railroad Assocation, in Houston Texas.
Founded in 1924, to the serve the City docks and the Houston ship Channel industries.
Currently we have 450 customers on both sides of the channel, our member lines are BNSF, UP, and KSC.
We fall into the class 3 catagory, a switching and terminal railroad.
Type PTRA into your search enging to see so photos.
Stay Frosty,
Ed

[edblysard]

Winged pigs, or just plain ones?
Ed

[Mookie]

you know... I forgot to ask! Well, duh me, I will have to check into that and get back to you!

Jen

[Anonymous]

i did a 2 year trick at UP's roseville loco shop and service track. i did everything from changing TM's & turbo's to hostling, assembling and outbound departure testing.
marty

[Anonymous]

i never heard that before. that could be rather tough to explain to the dispatcher. would you have to take a pee test after that one?
marty

[Mookie]

hee hee - we have some old hoggers on here who will hopefully, back me up. If not, well I get to pick who administers the test! And while we are in here - where is Roseville?

Jen

[Anonymous]

Roseville is about 15 miles east of Sacramento Ca.on the old SP mainline over the Sierra Nevada mountains. where are you located?
marty

[JoeKoh]

thanks ed i'll check it out.Now that we have warmer weather and no rain my honeydo listcan get done.
stay safe
joe

[Anonymous]

Marty, sorry to interupt, you being a ex S.P. man perhaps you can answer a question for me. It had been rumoured, that the reason for the U.P. and S.P. melt down after the merge was that the last year before the merge S.P. was repairing there engines with bailing wire and duct tape is this true? I do not work for the railroad, My sister is going for her doctorate in bussiness and is writing a paper on that mess.
TIM ARGUBRIGHT

[sooblue]

The Tom thumb maybe.*lol*

[Mookie]

Lincoln Nebraska - I have a friend that is originally from Nebraska - she has lived all over California. Finally landed in La Quinta. But has been in Oakley, San Diego (my favorite) Riverside, La Quinta twice, Corona and Mira Loma.
She hated Oakley - too cold - and she is native Nebraskan!

Jen

[dknelson]

The real problem with the SP/UP "merger" is that SP was spending all its money on keeping its engines beautifully painted and sparkling clean.
Dave Nelson

[Anonymous]

Hi Tim, I never got to work for the SP but the locos were more mechanically sound than the UP's.I think the meltdown was caused by the UP top brass wouldn't listen to the old SP ways of thinking. It was their way!. hence the meltdown.
marty

[Anonymous]

Gee! thats funny,when i was working there the locos were sound and the paint was crap. I wouldn't shoot your mouth off unless you worked in one of the SP shops!!!!!!!!

[edblysard]

Hi Tim,
Ed, not Marty here.
Lucky me, I live in Houston, where a lot of that mess started.
What you had was two different managment cultures and styles, and two business systems almost dimetrictly opposed.
This is from old head SP guys who came to work for the PTRA when they left SP.
One of the biggest things is that SP didnt micro manage their trains, they had established a way of running trains that left a lot to be desired.
Pretty much, the SP crews were handed their paper work and work orders, and told, "See ya when we see ya".
This was done mostly because the management had never been out where the crews worked, and trusted them to do what they do wothout supervision. Which, human nature being what it is, meant most crews went out and sat as long as they could, milking the payroll for as much overtime as possible. I watched a switch crew that works a group of industries along Hempstead hwy move the same boxcar from siding to siding, in and out of stub tracks for industries, for two months. This boxcar was never unloaded, ever.
One day, I just couldnt stand it, so I took the reporting number to work, had a yardmaster run it. The boxcar was on the 999 list, a lost car, and had been for months. I asked the crew next time I saw them why they didnt take it back to the yard, or at least find out where it was supposed to go. Their response?
"Why, it aint on our work orders, so why mess with it?"
I asked them if they didnt get a lost car report with their daily work orders, they said "yeah, but we dont pay no mind to that."
Did SP management care about the lost car? Most likely not, it was just one of a thousand.
Did the crew care?. No, because they were getting paid wether they did their work correctly or not.
Now add in almost complete deffered maintainance on all of the SP track that wasnt main line rail, and you can see why the customer base for SP was dwindling.
Englewood yard is a hump and classification yard, with a intermodel yard included. Back then, it was the turf of a few old heads, who pretty much ran it the way they wanted to.
SP management knew from experience to not mess with these guys, if Englewood didnt work, nothing in east Texas would work, so they pretty much left it alone. If 1600 cars got humped, great, if 160 cars got humped, thats great too.
So along come UP, with cash in hand. SP didnt have enough capital to even repair their tracks to FRA exempt status, so most of SP trackage in and around Houston had a 10mph or less speed limit. You cant do business at 10mph, period.
UP thinks they have the answer, so they can or buy out as many old head SP guys as they can, and in come the whiz kids to fix everything.
Surpirse, the whiz kids had no idea what they were getting into, and the guys who did know where all the major problems were, had just got fired.
In less that a week, englewood was deadlocked. Nothing moved in or out. The Hardy street tracks UP had just built, Houstons version of the northeast corridor, had become the Hardy street parking lot. There were literaly miles and miles of dead trains strung out from Houston all the way to Lufkin. Every single sideing had a train parked in it. Crews would cab out to a train, sit in the locomotive for 12 hours, cab back in, and never move the train an inch.
Now, UP did engage in a more strict form of management of their crews and trains, they crossed the Tees, and dotted the Eyes, so when they took over, they were handed a railroad which ran on the "good ole boy" system. They also had a major problem with their computers trying to read the data from the SP computers. Vastly different computer systems, and they lost or never found so much data that, in the end, they had to resort to clerks handwritting train sheets and physicaly walking trains, writting down reporting marks, and then looking up what cars when where and on what train and when. All of this on a system that did yard and depart 40 and 50 trains a day, they were lucky if they got 3 trains a day out of Englewood, and nothing could come in, they had no idea where it went.
In the end, they pretty much scrapped everything from the SP system, and started over, with clerks going out in cabs, and finding trains in sidings, writting down all the information, and returning to the yard to enter it into the UP computer system.
Several shippers filed lawsuits over all of this, they are still working on some of the claims, but when they finally found all the trains, and figured out where the cars went to, it started to smooth out.
To maybe help summarize this, at UP, there are clearly defined areas of responsibility, if you need this, you contact this group, for yard information, you contact that group, for car tracking, you call customer service, so forth and so on.
At SP, if you needed something, you better know they guy running the yard, he "owns" it, if you didnt know him, you couldnt get a thing done.
It was the "good ole boy" system to the N'th degree, and as long as everybody was a good ole boy, it worked. If you neede to find your cars, you had to call Mr.**** at the SP building downtown, who was buddies with the yardmaster at Englewood, who knew the crew who knew where they had stashed the shippers cars in the first place. When the new guys showed up, and canned the good ole boys, a lot of good ole information dissapeared along with them.
As for the bailing wire and duct tape, well, SP didnt care and couldnt afford to keep up appearences, but the Hardy street car shop had a locomotive maintainance crew who could fix, or built just about anything you needed, from fabrication of just about any part on any locomotive down to rewireing a locomotive. They wouldnt paint em, but they made sure they ran just fine.
Hope this helps you out.
Stay Frosty,
Ed

[Anonymous]

Ed, you have been very helpful. She has sat down and interviewed some high offical's at the Union Pacific. They kept on steering her toward the maintainace problems with the motive power as being a major source of the meltdown. Yet when she interviewed lower managment she recieved a complete different story. The story low end managment told was very simular to yours. (She was nervous and wanted it confirmed one more time before she submitted her paper)
THANK YOU
TIM A

[Anonymous]

Sir, I made the comment about the bailing wire and duct tape. I hope I have not upset you. That was a comment that was mentioned to my sister in a interview with a U.P. offical. She has found out that was not so. Sounds like U.P. was looking to steer her away from there managment problem.
PLEASE FORGIVE ME
TIMOTHY ARGUBRIGHT
BUFFALO GROVE ILL.

[edblysard]

Your welcome Tim,
Tell her to keep in mind that there is three distinct cultures at any railroad, the upper managment, who often are imported from other types of business, and therefore have no hands on knowledge of how or why things are really done in the field.
Then there is the middle management, the yardmasters, trainmasters, foreman of road power. Get the distinct military flavor there, we even have a "General" yardmaster, and thats how he is referred to, as the General, and a assistant "General" yardmaster.
And the "master" after each title, it sets them apart from us common labors, they are the masters, and most do lord their title and turf over others at each opertunity. These are the people who have come up from the ranks, and have some knowledge of what really works, and what dosent. They are also the insulation between labor and upper management. If it dosnt come out of their mouth, the President or CEO cant, or wont, ever hear it. Which is exactly how middle management wants it, this allows them to keep their turf, or increase their power base, without upper management or labor really knowing about it.
Then there is the T&E employees and the labor or work force. Engineers, MOW workers, switchmen, conductors, you get the point.
For the most part, we are the ones who do the actual work, and have the hands on knowledge to make the railroad function.
We can make a yardmaster or trainmaster look really good, or really really bad, without even trying.
Then there are rulebook sharks, who can use the GCOR to make sure their train barely leaves the terminal before the crew dies on the hours of service law, and there are guys who do a once over of their train, and if everything is upright and on the tracks, you best get out of their way, their going to knock fire to get the job done.
Top brass never know about any of this, unless something goes wrong, and then the old saw, "the person nearest the accident is at fault" applies, reguardless of what really happened.
Upper management is so insulated from the field, most have no real idea where the tracks really go.
Your are dealing with a traditional, hidebound and stratified culture, which resist change, even when the change is for everyones benefit.
Which is why you should watch the new guy at CSX, he is trying to alter a culture that over a century old, and giving some of middle managements authority and decision making power to labor, which must really upset the "masters" there.
Should be a fun show to watch.
Stay Frosty,
Ed

[JoeKoh]

Hi ed
thats why the meltdown at Csx happened during the takeover of Conrail.Csx guys didn't want to listen to conrail employees and the meltdown happened.It was kinda strange that labor day weekend to see 7 engines in the yard here in Defiance.The crews weren't real happy either being shipped from plcae to place.Things have improved and i'll keep watching from here as much as possible.
stay safe
joe and matt

[fuzzybroken]

That whole "our computer can't read what's on your computer" seems to be prevalent in railroad hand-overs. Same thing happened when WC started up, but I think that was a disgruntled SOO employee who disrupted that.

And we still miss the WC here in Milwaukeeland... [:(]

-Mark
http://www.geocities.com/fuzzybroken

[Anonymous]

About the copper mile. I told someone about hearing about it on here. They don't believe it. They say it's impossible. I want to prove them wrong. Anybody have a picture of it?[:D]

[locomutt]

QUOTE: Originally posted by edblysard

The Port Terminal Railroad Assocation, in Houston Texas.
Founded in 1924, to the serve the City docks and the Houston ship Channel industries.
Currently we have 450 customers on both sides of the channel, our member lines are BNSF, UP, and KSC.
We fall into the class 3 catagory, a switching and terminal railroad.
Type PTRA into your search enging to see so photos.
Stay Frosty,
Ed

I spent a week in Houston,one day,I think I spent most
of my time on the Beltway? It did rain that day.