? Biggest pain in railroading?

[mbkcs]

 

henry6

I think Paul, the answer is "D" all the above.  All situations can happen on any given railroad on any given division on any given day.  Theoretically there is the "marketed" train: up to so much tonnage on a given schedule and a consitant daily power assignement.  Then there is the merchandise mixed, which could be under marketing or not but more likely is composed of what ever shows up each day; hopefully this can be predicted 12 to 24 hours in advance and enough power is made available or because the reverse move may need the power, a decsion is made.  Units that go bad enroute or are delayed or are otherwise sidelined or red tagged at a given terminal can of course change everything in one minute.  Trainmasters, Road Foreman of Engines,Yardmasters, Superintendents, dispatachers, chief dispatchers, Master Mechanics (or whoever is charged with maintaining and assigning a locomotive fleet) all have to sometime or somehow confer and concur about the next 24hours every hour.

I do remember there was lots of discussion between the Chief Dispatcher, the power guy and the yard masters and it was constant. I also know that what made a dispatcher successful was the ability to think 24 hours ahead. My husband, then my fiance, would go in early just so he could get a grasp of what his segment had been doing, was going to do as soon as he got on the desk, and what the trains in his section needed to do by end of the next dispatcher's shift. I was really amazed by his ability to grasp all that. Of course, I still find him amazing.

I wasn't aware of the formulas used to calculate the amount of power needed. Perhaps if I would have grasped all this better back then, I would have lasted more than two months on the desk. I do know that if I had continued to remain on the desk, my piece of the railroad was going to grind to a halt. It really is a lot more complicated than just getting trains from point A to point B.

Thanks all, this is getting very interesting and enjoyable. 

And to get back to original posting, what I found a pain to contend with was the service laws. While they appear to protect the rest of the crews, (dispatchers included,) it wasn't uncommon to find some of that rest spent traveling between your hogged out train and your hotel, which naturally cut into your sleep. 

tina

[henry6]

I think Paul, the answer is "D" all the above.  All situations can happen on any given railroad on any given division on any given day.  Theoretically there is the "marketed" train: up to so much tonnage on a given schedule and a consitant daily power assignement.  Then there is the merchandise mixed, which could be under marketing or not but more likely is composed of what ever shows up each day; hopefully this can be predicted 12 to 24 hours in advance and enough power is made available or because the reverse move may need the power, a decsion is made.  Units that go bad enroute or are delayed or are otherwise sidelined or red tagged at a given terminal can of course change everything in one minute.  Trainmasters, Road Foreman of Engines,Yardmasters, Superintendents, dispatachers, chief dispatchers, Master Mechanics (or whoever is charged with maintaining and assigning a locomotive fleet) all have to sometime or somehow confer and concur about the next 24hours every hour.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

Now this is getting beyond griping, and so is becoming a little more interesting -

Which comes first - the chicken or the egg - I mean, the 'power assignment' or the train make-up and tonnage ?

To illustrate - Suppose the service level for a certain manifest / general freight train is determined to justify assigning about 2.0 HP/ Gross Trailing Ton so that it can get over the division in an appropriate time.  [For context, that would be good for about 58 MPH on a straight and level track, 22.6 MPH on a 1.0 per cent grade that is compensated for curvature, and 12.7 MPH on a similar 2.0 per cent grade - based on Al Krug's ''Train Forces Calculator'' at - http://www.alkrug.vcn.com/rrfacts/RRForcesCalc.html ]. 

Suppose further that this train typically runs at about 6,000 gross tons trailing, but that can vary by plus-or-minus as much as 2,000 tons on any day, depending on the traffic available, the day of the week, the economy, etc.  So this train would typically need 12,000 HP = 4 SD40's or equivalent - but that could vary with the tonnage by 4,000 HP, or from 8,000 to 16,000 HP - note too that 'fractions of units' would now be likely required to get to the exact power level.

Now, does the Power Desk just say, ''Here's your 4 SD40s, put whatever you want behind them, but I've given you enough for normal train'', or does he consult with the YardMaster [or whomever] first to see what that day's train is going to look like for tonnage ?  And how can the YM know that figure fairly closely very far in advance, before the all the connecting and local trains have come in and their 'new' cars have been entered and weighed, until the train is actually made up and ready to go ?  Or does the YM just add cars - giving due regard to those with priority, such as those with 'fence posts' [inside joke for Johnny Deggesty] - until he reaches the magic figure of 6,000 tons or so, then that's it ? 

Or instead, does the YM call the Power Desk a few hours in advance and say, ''AL-PI looks like it'll be about 7,000 tons today, so I'll need an extra unit if you can'', and then the Power Desk guy has to scramble to fill that unexpected need ?

I'm sure you get the picture of what I'm trying to ask here.  Any corrections and insights will be appreciated.

- Paul North.

[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?

 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.

 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.)

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?

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. 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts to the posting.

tina

[Bob-Fryml]

The biggest pains, eh?

TRAINMEN & ENGINEERS:  Accurate train lineups.  For employees working in pool freight service where crews work first-in/first-out, it is often difficult to figure out when an employee is going to work.  Example:  at 2100 a guy learns his board standing and train lineup either by telephone or by home computer.  The figures suggest that he stands for an 0800 call the next morning.  At 2230 it's lights-out.  Ninety minutes later the phone rings with a call to go to work.  That kind of unpredictability is completely inexcusable!

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.  

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.     

[henry6]

The answer is probably right up the middle: balancing your two sections!

[Boyd]

Whats the biggest pain to deal with in railroading today? I'd like to split this into 2 sections.

#1 on the operating trains, mechanical, electrical, maintanance etc,,, basically blue collar side. 

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